West Africa Archive

I carry a plastic chair over to sit with Pastor Samuel Tewogbola outside his house in the southern Nigerian town of Igarra. The family goat wanders past us, nosing the earth. It’s November 2014, and I am doing preliminary research for a future book. Tewogbola is a fire-and-brimstone preacher—43 years in a hard-line Pentecostal church. When I arrived with my friend Esther, his daughter, he made us all kneel in his doorway while he intoned thanks to Jesus for our safe journey. We’re philosophizing, talking about what makes up good human character, and about money—how money is used to buy […]

On the morning of Oct. 30, 2014, throngs of protesters overwhelmed security forces in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, and burned the National Assembly building, physically preventing deputies from voting to further extend President Blaise Compaore’s tenure. That “popular insurrection,” as almost everyone in Burkina Faso now calls it, continued into the next day, driving the authoritarian president out of the country after 27 years in power. Just over five months later, on April 7, under an interim government and with the assembly building still out of use, a new set of parliamentary deputies, including many former protesters, met in temporary […]

The United Nations is an organization that is willing to learn from failure. This is fortunate, because it fails quite a lot. The U.N. has absorbed the lessons of previous catastrophes, such as the Balkan wars and the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, and now deploys peacekeepers far more professionally than in that nightmarish era. In the near future, it will face a reckoning over more recent failures, as its efforts to bring peace to countries destabilized by the Arab revolutions—most notably in Syria but also in Libya, Yemen and Mali—have veered off course, costing thousands of lives in the […]

Clashes between the opposition and security forces continued for a second day in Guinea’s capital. In an email interview, Mohamed Saliou Camara, a professor of history and international relations at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, discussed domestic politics in Guinea. WPR: What have been the major issues of contention between the government and the opposition during Guinea’s political transition back to democracy, and where do they stand in the run-up to this year’s presidential election? Mohamed Saliou Camara: Two of the major issues of contention between President Alpha Conde’s government and the opposition are national dialogue and political inclusion. Guinea returned to […]

After a six-week election delay in February, Nigerians went to the polls last weekend. To the surprise of many, they voted out an incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan, who faced growing criticism for failing to address corruption, poverty and the threat of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram. Jonathan was defeated by 72-year-old Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general who led a successful military coup in 1983 and, more recently, was runner-up in the previous three presidential elections. Buhari’s decisive victory, which relied on substantial support from northern and southwestern Nigeria, was the first electoral defeat of an incumbent president in Nigerian […]