THIS VALENTINE’S DAY, it wasn’t just couples publicly declaring their eternal love. At the Munich Security Council, the United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that, despite his president’s moves on Greenland, the love affair between Europe and the US was stronger than ever.

Rubio’s speech received a standing ovation. Across Western media, headlines hailed his speech as a conciliatory overture – a sign of progress or rapprochement after the strident speech US Vice-President JD Vance made at the same conference last year. But if you paid attention, Rubio’s speech was a horrific misreading of the past, a romanticisation of colonisation, and a chilling declaration of imminent violence for everyone who is not part of his narrow conception of “civilisation”.

Rubio’s priorities for this shared Western future include securing supply chains for vital minerals and fighting the “climate cult”, while decrying the welfare state as an obstacle to rather than sign of progress. He echoed the racist “replacement theory” to insist that migration is a threat to Western societies. Yet arguably the politics of immigration enforcement in the US this year demonstrates that as a son of Cuban migrants he is not part of the “we” that he wants to defend.

This “what” is chilling enough: the “how” should alarm us all. Rubio explicitly invited Europe to join the US in reviving and defending the Western civilisation that with “missionaries, pilgrims, soldiers, and explorers pouring from its shores across oceans [to] settle new continents”, built “vast empires extending out across the globe”.

He congratulated the administration he serves for bypassing the United Nations to bomb Iran without domestic congressional oversight. He hailed the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a successful international intervention. He casually referred to people as “barbarians”. It’s clear Rubio’s position is that Europe’s survival rests on joining the US to carve up the rest of the world. He wielded the myth of Western cultural superiority as a justification for militarisation of the continent, citing Dante, Shakespeare, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones as examples of “the way of life” that Western armies must fight for.

Yet even his beloved Beatles have admitted to borrowing heavily from African-American musicians. Rolling Stones frontmen Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have said they were influenced by the gospel music of African-American artists like Mavis Staples. But in the myth of Western civilisation Rubio advances, Western culture emerges spontaneously from ingenuity and grit, transcends the Atlantic, and must be insulated from contamination by outsiders.

Rubio’s was not a diplomatic speech recognising the birth of a new world order. This was racist, violent sentiment that admitted moral defeat and invited other countries to join in conquest. We should be worried about the speech and everyone who applauded it. They should be worried for themselves, too. Aimé Césaire wrote that “a civilisation that draws within itself atrophies” and that “a nation which colonises [and] justifies colonisation …is already a sick civilisation … morally diseased and progressing from one consequence to another”. The “another” here is its own annihilation.

For Africans, this speech was a warning that could not have come at a worse time. As in Berlin in 1885, the carving knives are being sharpened and our continent is on the menu. Yet, too many countries are saddled with morally bankrupt, selfish, and short-termist leaders, many of whom have already rolled over and accepted their 30 pieces of silver in exchange for a photo-op.

We are in desperate need of an African foreign policy and diplomacy that articulates, organises, and advances the defence of African people. The intent to devour us has been declared – and people who claim to be our allies are applauding it.

Nanjala Nyabola is a Kenyan writer and political analyst

CHRISTINE MUNGAI

MARCO RUBIO, JD Vance, and Donald Trump are wrong about the way the West was made, says African-American author and historian Howard French. “These world events took place on the back of the African continent and the millions of Africans who were enlisted in this vast construction project through enslavement,” French told The Continent.

“Rubio speaks of the need for the West to be unapologetic about this past. What he doesn’t understand is the fact that [just] because he never learned [history] does not mean it will go away.” But our diplomats in Addis won’t be the people who school US leaders on African contributions to “Western civilisation”. They are too busy holding meetings.

As conflicts spiralled in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Sahel in 2025, killing thousands of people and displacing millions, the African Union’s peace and security council convened 69 times. That is an average of more than one meeting a week. That did little to halt the wars. A new report by Amani Africa, a governance thinktank based in Addis Ababa, paints the council as irrelevant within Africa and crowded out by external actors.

Sudan was discussed six times in 2025. The council condemned the existence of parallel governments and renewed calls for ceasefires. Yet, the war entered its third year, mass massacres were committed in El Fasher, and Sudan is now effectively partitioned between rival forces.

A presidential committee created specifically to mediate between the warring parties in Sudan never even held its first meeting. Meanwhile, the real negotiations are dominated by “the Quad” – the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates – with the AU as a bystander.

“We have to ask whether the raison d’être that brought the African Union into existence is actually completely being wiped out,” Solomon Dersso, director of Amani Africa, told The Continent. “The AU is being marginalised, side-stepped, and displaced. And the result is basically African countries being picked up [by external interests], literally, one by one.”

The pattern repeats. The 2025 review paints an institution caught in a ritualistic loop: convene, deliberate, condemn, communiqué, repeat. In the DRC, the council demanded that the March 23 Movement (M23) rebels withdraw from the eastern part of the country. Instead, they captured more territory. Like in Sudan’s case, external parties came to dominate: the US brokered the Washington Accord between the DRC and Rwanda and Qatar facilitated the Doha Framework between Kinshasa and the M23. The AU wasn’t even at the table.

The report describes the AU’s role in Libya, as “marginal, if not totally irrelevant”. In South Sudan, no external actors crowded out the AU. Juba simply ignored the council’s six demands to release vice-president Riek Machar. The fighting in Jonglei state, which is related to the Machar political standoff, is moving closer to a return to full civil war.

The AU says it has a “zero tolerance” policy on coups. Yet, military takeovers in Gabon, Madagascar, and Guinea- Bissau went largely unchecked. The message to soldiers seems to be: seize power, wait a bit, run for office, and all will be forgiven. The AU does have a peacekeeping mission in Somalia. But in 2025, amid aid cuts, its troops went unpaid.

Trade not diplomacy?

If Africa’s dignity in global affairs won’t be forcefully stated by effective diplomats, will it be negotiated with commercial leverage? A working paper recently published by ODI Global challenges the oft-repeated claim that Africa has that lever because it holds nearly a third of global reserves for critical minerals.

The paper’s author, Bright Simons, calls the figure “a comforting hallucination that has fostered a dangerous complacency”. The reality, when “stripped of rhetorical gloss”, is that Africa doesn’t have enough industrial minerals like iron, copper, bauxite, and zinc. Africa’s share of global reserves and production of these ranges between 2% and 5%, according to Simons. What it has are valuable minerals, like cobalt, which industries use in small quantities. These attract commodity investors – and frequently, speculators – because of their steep unit costs.

The interests of investment bankers making a wager and of politicians like Trump and Rubio sometimes intersect, but not always. Leverage in markets doesn’t necessarily mean geopolitical influence. What Africa does have is its people. That cuts both ways. The continent’s population is increasing at three times the rate of the global average, accounting for nearly half of the world’s total annual increase. By 2070, Africa will surpass Asia as the most populous continent. With industrialisation and jobs, that could reproduce the “Asian economic miracle”.

Without that economic transformation, this demographic dividend becomes a vulnerability. So far, the external actors already treat Africa’s population boom as both a labour pool and security threat. Europe, for example, funds migration control to keep young Africans out, while simultaneously fueling a massive brain drain of African doctors, nurses, carers, and teachers to care for its own ageing population.

Africa is going to dominate the supply of new workers and consumers over the coming decades. The West will have no choice but to come knocking, says French. “[Perhaps] most dramatically, the world will come to rely on Africa’s supply of brains, of innovators, of inventors, of scientists, creatives, and thinkers.” Is that how Africa secures dignity and due recognition in global affairs? That depends, “on how well the continent prepares itself for this situation, how well states invest in their own populations, and crucially, how deeply African nations co-ordinate their efforts and work together”, French told The Continent.

That is exactly what makes the AU’s paralysis so concerning. Dersso at Amani Africa is calling for a “state of emergency” at Africa’s top governance organ to force leaders to respond collectively to conflicts across the continent.

Christine Mungai is the news editor of The Continent.

SIMON ALLISON

A STANDING OVATION. At the Munich Security Council on Sunday, Marco Rubio, US President Donald Trump’s chief diplomat, delivered a speech to foreign ministers, defence chiefs, and foreign policy experts. In it, he extended an invitation to Europe to “renew the greatest civilisation in human history” – a Western, Christian society that shares “culture, language, ancestry”; is “unapologetic in our heritage”; and will together “rebuke and deter the forces of civilisational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike”.

This kind of language is familiar to anyone who has studied the histories of empire, genocide, and white supremacy. Every single person in that audience in Munich understood exactly what Rubio was communicating.

And they gave him a standing ovation. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa – the leader of a political party forged in the struggle against white supremacy – was not in Munich. But he got the message loud and clear. “What we should be avoiding is a new form of colonialism,” he told The Africa Report, in response to Rubio’s speech.

Recognising the problem is one thing. Stopping it is something else altogether. This time around, would-be empire builders have new, extraordinarily powerful technological tools at their disposal – and the leaders of the world’s largest tech companies have fully endorsed that vision of the future.

US Big Tech magnates have lined up for photo shoots with Trump, the leader of the US administration whose vision Rubio was selling to Europe. They have lined his pockets with tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions. Some may even share his racist ideology. Elon Musk, for example, gave what appeared to be a Nazi salute at a Trump rally last year. Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, together with his online encyclopedia Grokipedia, routinely promotes white supremacists and their ideas.

These are the people in charge of the AI revolution, which has been slow to deliver on its utopian promises – but fast to facilitate genocide and repression. Nowhere was AI’s utility to the violence of modern power projects more evident than in Gaza. Here, Israel relied heavily on AI tools to conduct one of the deadliest military campaigns in history, with civilians accounting for 83% of the dead, according to The Guardian. These tools are supported by the world’s largest companies, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

The world is being convulsed by two simultaneous revolutions – geopolitical and technological. Gaza, and Rubio’s reception in Munich on Saturday, make one thing clear: these revolutions aren’t ushering in a global utopia – they are entrenching and exacerbating existing inequalities and racial hierarchies. And the avenues for resistance are narrowing, fast.

Simon Allison is The Continent’s International Editor

SHAIMAA EL-YOUSSEF IN CARO

BASSEM NATHAN is a day labourer from the village of Tanouf in Minya Governorate, southern Egypt. He was looking for a way to protect his earnings from the country’s soaring inflation when he met a self-styled “investment specialist”. The man convinced Nathan and 300 other villagers to take out bank loans and hand over the cash for what was supposed to be a high-yield investment project.

The maths was seductive. Inflation in Egypt had consistently held at more than 10% for years, hitting a peak of 38% in September 2023. The investment project would generate a monthly profit of 10,000 Egyptian pounds ($213) for a 200,000 pound (about $4,200) investment. That’s a 60% annual return, far outstripping even the worst inflation recorded so far. Half of the profits would cover the bank-loan repayment, leaving the rest as passive income for investors such as Nathan.

The track record looked solid too. The scheme had paid its investors consistent monthly returns for four years when Nathan joined. Then the “specialist” reportedly persuaded people to repeatedly double their bank loans and investments. The scheme unravelled when he suddenly declared bankruptcy in 2025.

Alarmed villagers gathered at their local church to report the matter to the priest and tallied their collective losses for the first time: 32-million pounds ($682,300) had been collected between them. They filed a police report. Nathan still faces a lawsuit from the bank for defaulting on the debt he took to invest in the scheme.

The track record looked solid. The scheme had paid its investors consistent monthly returns for four years.

The scams are widespread. In 6th of October City near Cairo, Esraa Gama lost 200,000 Egyptian pounds of her inheritance to a scam that was purportedly investing in a veiled-clothing business. In Mansoura, northern Egypt, Sarah El-Metwally and her sisters sold land to invest 200,000 pounds in what was to be a pharmaceutical business, only to later discover their “investment” was empty warehouses with no drugs. “We are three girls who cannot farm the land,” she says. “We thought this investment would cover our basic needs.”

These ordeals hint at a resurgence of al-mustarih – a local term for predatory investment scammers. They frequently weaponise religious belief to build trust, by denouncing ordinary bank interest as riba (usury, which goes against Islamic principles). They position themselves as a halal alternative for people looking for passive income.

Al-mustarih pyramid schemes first emerged in Egypt in the 1980s. The scammers don’t invest in any productive assets or business. If they invest in anything at all, it is in speculative assets. The most notorious was created by Ahmed Al-Rayan, who attracted more than 200,000 depositors, with assets reaching 6-billion pounds by the mid-1980s. Schemes like his offered a 30% return, when banks were offering just 7%. Al-Rayan was using previous deposits to pay new investors. He was jailed in 1989. New banking rules implemented after his case forced more than 100 investment companies to regularise.

Now, with the country in a deepening economic crisis, these schemes are resurging. The latest data, from 2020, put the poverty rate in Egypt at 29.7%, but World Bank estimates suggest it may have surged past 32% after record inflation and the devaluation of the Egyptian pound. Even with the despair of growing poverty, the scams’ appeal perplexes professional bankers. Sahar El-Damaty, a former deputy chairperson of Banque Misr, points out that official bank interest rates can reach up to 30% on long-term investments, especially on high-yielding certificates of deposit. She also says that Egyptian banks have strong safety records, “yet the shadow economy remains a reckless adventure with zero regulatory safeguards”.

The secret might lie in the scammers’ approach to “customer” recruitment. They often adopt religious personas to lure victims. That modus operandi is so effective that faith in the schemes persists even after they unravel. “The tragedy is that victims often don’t blame themselves. Instead, they sometimes claim the government is to blame for shutting these companies down,” says lawyer Essam El-Islambouli.

This story was published in collaboration with Egab.

NANJALA NYABOLA IN BUJUMBURA

BUJUMBURA, the smallest of East Africa’s economic capitals, unfurls from Lake Tanganyika’s shores into the nearby hills. Its centre is only a few kilometres from the hippo-populated waters of the freshwater lake. It’s a simple town, where, in some restaurants, ordering mukeke – a fish endemic to Lake Tanganyika – results in an hour-long wait as the kitchen staff first send someone down to the market to pick one up to cook.

Burundi’s politics and economy have been in a quiet slide since the 2020 Covid pandemic which, by some accounts, claimed the life of former president Pierre Nkurunziza. At the time of his death, Nkurunziza was an authoritarian. In the run-up to his unconstitutional third term, which began in 2015, his administration killed and arrested dissidents and passed draconian laws to constrain civic space. One notable Nkurunziza-era law was a ban on jogging in the city. The regime argued that jogging was creating opportunities for dissenters to gather and plot against Nkurunziza’s rule.

On the heels of that political crisis, Burundi, a landlocked country, was also heavily affected by the Covid pandemic, which dramatically cut imports and increased their costs. As in other countries dependent on imports, the strengthening dollar added inflationary pressure.

In May 2023, on the advice of International Monetary Fund, the Burundian government devalued the local franc. It has lost 47% of its value against the dollar since 2016, fuelling black-market currency exchanges. Fuel imports are severely constrained and petrol-station queues are common. Indeed, my nominally four-star hotel was able to run the generator and, therefore, pump water into the rooms for only 30 minutes. Friction with Rwanda led to a border closure that disrupted trade further and discouraged tourism to two national parks near Bujumbura. They are some of the larger tourist attractions in Burundi.

The regime argued that jogging was creating opportunities for dissenters to gather and plot against Nkurunziza’s rule.

But perhaps the most significant pressure on Bujumbura today is the war in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. Uvira in South Kivu province, which has been battered by the March 23 Movement rebel group, is a mere 42-minute drive from the town centre. Burundi is backing the DRC government in Kinshasa in that conflict: together they accuse Rwanda of orchestrating paramilitary activity to destabilise the region and facilitate illegal mining.

Every time I raised my camera to take a photograph, a baby-faced soldier with a rifle draped across one shoulder unexpectedly emerged, demanding that I move on.

The spectre of that war haunts the streets of Bujumbura. Soldiers in various shades of fatigues lurk on every corner, suspicious of everyone who lingers a little too long. I left Bujumbura with no photographs of any landmarks in the centre of town. Every time I raised my camera to take a photograph, a baby- faced soldier with a rifle draped across one shoulder unexpectedly emerged, demanding that I move on.

The people who govern Burundi undoubtedly inherited a complex set of conditions. But their own repeated defaulting to authoritarianism unnecessarily compounds the situation. The government responded to 2025 protests against the exclusion of the opposition in parliamentary elections with bullets and teargas. Fighting your own people, while trying to survive as a tiny country in one of the world’s toughest geopolitical neighbourhoods, is borrowing trouble.

JEFFERY MOYO IN HARARE

ZIMBABWE’S CABINET has approved draft legislation that would extend presidential terms from five to seven years. That would mean President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s term lasts until 2030, rather than 2028 under current laws.

The draft law also proposes the president be elected by a parliamentary vote, instead of directly by the electorate, as is currently the case. Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi said public consultations would be held before the proposal goes before parliament for debate. Both chambers are dominated by the ruling Zanu-PF party.

The move has alarmed observers, who see it as a power grab by Mnangagwa, who has been consolidating his position since taking over in a 2017 coup. “This is an abuse of power,” Professor Lovemore Madhuku from the University of Zimbabwe’s Law School told The Continent. He noted the president received only a five-year mandate in the last election. “This proposal would simply extend the president’s stay in office without any input from the electorate.”

Rashweat Mukundu, a media researcher at International Media Support, called the move “a classic [from the] rule book of authoritarianism, where the constitution is manipulated to suit personal political interests”. Back in 2008, Zimbabweans overwhelmingly supported a new constitution that set presidential term limits at two five-year terms.

“In substance, these proposals cumulatively centralise power rather than distribute it. Zimbabwe does not need constitutional engineering to extend power. It needs constitutional fidelity to protect it,” said Jameson Timba, a Zimbabwean opposition politician.

Legal challenges to the move are expected. But the recent death of one of Mnangagwa’s biggest critics within Zanu-PF – Blessed Geza, also known as “Bombshell” – is likely to leave the field wide open for the proposal to sail through.

ROBERT AMALEMBA IN KAKAMEGA

KENYA’S FOREIGN Minister Musalia Mudavadi plans to visit Moscow after the deaths of Kenyans who had been enticed to Russia with promises of well-paying jobs. They were reportedly sent to the frontlines of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The ministry estimated 200 Kenyans had been lured to Russia by November 2025, Mudavadi’s press secretary, Jacob Ng’etich, told The Continent. Josephine Omwoma is struggling to come to terms with the death of her son, Erastus Mundia, 38, who left Kenya in October 2025 after being promised a sales job in Russia.

The family last spoke to Mundia on 20 November. After repeated calls, they contacted the agent who had facilitated it all, who claimed Mundia might be in an area without network coverage. Then a friend called with devastating news: Mundia had died in uniform.

“It crushed my heart. I cannot sleep…All I want is closure,” Omwoma told The Continent from her home in Lugari, Kakamega. “I want the government to bring his body – and those of others who died there – back to Kenya for burial.”

The family has made several trips to the ministry of foreign affairs seeking to repatriate his body. Last week, Ukraine reported the death of two Kenyans – Ombwori Denis Bagaka and Wahome Simon Gititu – who reportedly died after being recruited to fight for Russia from Qatar.

A list published by French investigative outlet All Eyes on Wagner includes 10 more Kenyans among 317 Africans who reportedly died fighting for Russia in the Ukraine war. That list doesn’t include the three men named in this story, suggesting casualties could be higher.

Lydia Namubiru

The M23 rebel group, which seized parts of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in early 2025, barred journalists from a disaster site this week. Landslides killed hundreds of people in the Rubaya mining area last week. Yet, “no reporter is allowed to go there”, a local journalist told The Continent.

This obstruction is the latest in a documented pattern of censorship.

In a report released last week, 20 journalists working in areas controlled by the AFC-M23 group told the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) about violence, threats, detention, and censorship under the rebels.

In one case, a journalist details being beaten at an M23 checkpoint in Bukavu, the capital of North Kivu province, which the rebels seized in February 2025. “A soldier started slapping me for no reason and hurt me,” Cikala Mihigo told CPJ. The journalist was returning from a reporting assignment during which he interviewed family members of Congolese soldiers who fought against the M23 takeover. At the checkpoint, the soldiers had tried to search his bag, which he refused to let them do.

Many journalists, faced with rising censorship, have been forced to flee the rebel-controlled areas as a result. “CPJ has seen a surge in journalists’ requests for emergency support, reflecting an increasingly difficult media environment over the past 12 months,” the watchdog body said.

The New Humanitarian reported earlier that the rebels were going to great lengths to control the narrative on their capture of parts of the DRC, including by dictating what local media broadcasts. “As soon as the rebels entered, we changed our programming schedules,” a journalist from Lubero told the New Humanitarian in October. “News programmes, talk shows, and programmes dealing with security are no longer broadcast.”

Josef Skrdlik and Oliver Dunn in Conakry

The United States hosted more than 50 countries for a critical minerals summit on Thursday. The conference appears to have been prompted by an increasing realisation that the US lacks control over supply chains for metals that power its technology, defence, and energy industries.

“One day we woke up and we realised we had outsourced our economic security and our very future,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who hosted the summit.

The US proposed establishing a new trading bloc, guaranteeing minimum prices for critical minerals. According to Vice-President JD Vance, minimum prices would unlock private investment in mining and refining projects, as “sustained price weakness makes financing impossible”.

However, by the summit’s end, the US seemed even further from the control it desires – at least within the borders of Guinea, one of the seven African countries invited.

US designs on Guinea’s metals are encapsulated in the so-called Liberty Corridor, an infrastructure system aiming to connect a rich iron deposit in the country’s southeast to a deepwater port in Liberia. It remains nowhere near realisation. Ivanhoe Atlantic, the company developing the deposit, is yet to receive a mining permit from Guinean authorities.

On Thursday Ivanhoe Atlantic chief executive Brownyn Barnes resigned, an indicator that permission to proceed in Guinea might be severely delayed – or even denied.

One of the project’s major problems is its apparent incompatibility with preserving the adjacent Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve. This Unesco World Heritage Site is home to endangered chimpanzees and dozens of endemic species.

Mahmoud Abdelrahman in Cairo

Atef Tawfiq was haunted by a single question: Are today’s Egyptians truly descendants of the ancient pharaohs?

The 30-year-old physician from Kafr el-Sheikh governorate had grown up steeped in pride for his country’s 5,000-year-old civilization. But online, he watched as others claimed ownership of that heritage, asserting that modern Egyptians were interlopers with no genetic connection to the pyramid builders.

“When your civilization is being stolen in front of you, you have to respond, but with evidence, not just words,” Tawfiq says.

His answer came in the form of a DNA test. According to the results, he shares 86% genetic similarity to ancient Egyptians and 97% to contemporary Egyptians. “It gave me a sense of pride in my country’s history,” he says.

It’s unclear what Tawfiq’s results actually mean in genetics science, given that human beings also share 98.8% of their DNA with chimpanzees. But he is only one of hundreds of Egyptians who have submitted saliva or blood samples to laboratories in recent years, driven not primarily by medical curiosity but by a desire to reclaim their ancestry in what has become a charged debate over who can rightfully claim pharaonic civilisation.

Martino Khalil, an Egyptian Canadian, understands that “human identity is more complex than a laboratory can settle”. Yet, he felt compelled to take the test too. After living in Canada for nearly two decades, he began to ponder his Egyptian roots and wrote extensively about Egypt and its history between 2019 and 2023. Sceptical commentators on his writing, including those he describes as Afrocentrists, would often question him: “You’re not Egyptian. You don’t look like us. Your skin is lighter, your hair is different. What’s your connection to this history?” In late 2022, he ordered the DNA test kit.

“I did the test out of curiosity and because I wanted material evidence to counter these claims,” Khali says. His results said he was 99.6% Egyptian Coptic and 0.4% North African, specifically with Amazigh origins. He felt reassured but it didn’t really change how he saw himself. “I believe human identity is far broader than genetic lineage,” he says. “We’re not closed bloodlines reduced to numbers.”

From pan-Arabism to genetic nationalism

The surge in genetic testing coincides with rising nationalist fervour in Egypt, where economic crisis, weakening regional influence, and an influx of refugees have converged with government promotion of what some researchers call “neo-pharaonism”.

For decades Cairo led pan-Arabism but Egypt’s regional influence has waned. With that, pharaonic heritage has emerged as an alternative source of national pride.

The shift became visible in April 2021, when President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi presided over the Pharaohs’ Golden Parade, a nationally televised spectacle in which 22 royal mummies were transported through Cairo in gold-trimmed carriages accompanied by martial music and ancient-Egyptian-themed performances.

In the parade’s wake, social-media movements with names like “Kemet” – the ancient Egyptian name for Egypt – and “Egyptian Consciousness” proliferated. These pages, which have attracted hundreds of thousands of followers, celebrate ancient Egyptian civilisation while pushing back against “Afrocentric” ideas that claim that pharaonic Egypt was a black African civilisation.

This online activism has had real-world consequences. In 2022, these groups successfully campaigned to cancel an “Afrocentric” conference planned in Aswan and protested American comedian Kevin Hart’s scheduled Cairo performance. The next year, they mobilised against Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra docudrama series, which cast a Black actress in the title role.

The outcry prompted Egypt’s ministry of tourism and antiquities to issue an official statement declaring that Cleopatra was “fair-skinned with Hellenistic features”.

Beneath this surge in identity politics is a heavier undercurrent that both government and the people could use some distraction from: Egypt’s severe economic crisis. The country owes $150-billion in external debt, its currency is collapsing, and inflation has reached record levels. Present life is increasingly difficult.

The economic crisis also leads longer-settled residents to perceive newcomers as more competition for dwindling opportunities, turbocharging the turn to identity politics. Egypt hosts more than 1-million refugees from Sudan, who have fled the civil war there. Neo-pharaonic social media accounts have increasingly targeted Black refugees, with hashtags calling to “kick refugees out of Egypt”.

‘Citizen science’

Mohamed Abdelhady launched Egy-Origins in 2017 to map the genetic sequence of Egyptians across thousands of years by comparing contemporary DNA samples with results from ancient mummies.

What began as an individual initiative has evolved into a citizen-science project. Abdelhady says some 400 Egyptian volunteers have been tested, with results showing what he describes as 90% genetic similarity to ancient populations.

“There’s a widespread misconception that Egyptians have been genetically altered over 5,000 years due to invasions or migrations and, therefore, modern Egyptians don’t belong to their ancient ancestors,” Abdelhady says. “But with science and genetic analysis, we can refute these claims.”

But not all scientists are convinced. Dr Yahya Gad, professor of molecular genetics and supervisor of the ancient DNA laboratory at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation, disputes the existence of a single genetic map for ancient Egyptians, given that ancient Egyptian history spans more than 3,000 years. Available mummy samples also show bias. Royal and elite classes were represented more than ordinary people because they enjoyed higher-quality embalming processes, which increased chances of body preservation.

“Egypt has always been a meeting place for cultures and peoples and this mixture is what makes us see natural genetic diversity today in the Egyptian population,” Gad says. “They fall in the middle of the genetic map of modern humanity after mixing with most ancient world peoples, except East Asia.”

He emphasises that some contemporary Egyptians’ resemblance to ancient ones in features or genes is natural and does not grant any individual or group genetic superiority. “Genes are a tool for understanding health and medicine, not a means for ranking between humans.”

Regardless of scientific credibility or lack thereof, Egyptians seeking answers and grounding continue sending blood samples to laboratories for testing. This practice mirrors the actions of their government, which is grappling with its place in the modern world by looking backwards to an ancient past.

This story was published in collaboration with Egab.

Hindiya Al-Ashbi in Benghazi

Four armed assailants stormed the residence of Seif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, Libya’s most controversial political figure, on Tuesday evening. Having turned camera surveillance off at the northwestern Zintan residence, the assailants engaged Muammar Gaddafi’s son in what his political team called direct combat. Seif al-Islam and two of his bodyguards died in the fire fight.

The family chose Bani Walid, a city in the northwest, for his final resting place. His brother, Khamis Gaddafi, was also buried there after he was killed in 2011 during the violent end of their father’s 32-year rule over Libya. Seif al-Islam’s funeral on Friday was anxiously watched for what his demise portents for the country.

For years, Seif al-Islam has loomed as a ghost over Libya’s politics. He had long been groomed as heir to his father, who was killed during the Nato-backed 2011 revolution. After the revolution, Seif-al Islam was captured by a militia and held for six years in Zintan before being released under a blanket amnesty. In 2015, a Tripoli court sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes. He was later pardoned, but the International Criminal Court maintained a warrant for his arrest on murder and persecution charges.

In 2021, Seif al-Islam decided to run for president under the “Green March” movement, positioning himself as the custodian of his father’s ideological legacy. In a country still fractured and unstable, tens of thousands of supporters saw him as a route back to order. In contrast, his opponents – particularly Islamist factions in western Libya – viewed him as a grave threat. Disputes over his candidacy helped to derail elections that ultimately never took place, even after he was disqualified.

Seif al-Islam’s assasination in the run-up to the April presidential and parliamentary elections could disrupt another electoral attempt. “His supporters will not let this event pass without response,” said political analyst Ibrahim Al-Ajel. He predicts they may obstruct the elections by provoking violent acts against candidates and at polling stations.

His supporters have already flooded social media with calls for retaliation against people they describe as aggressors. Videos from Sirte, the birthplace of Gaddafi senior, show dozens of women in the streets, weeping and mourning his death.

The sense of loss among Seif al-Islam’s supporters is tinged with xenophobia. “He was our only hope to restore our homeland’s sovereignty from the Turks, Russians, and Africans who control it and have looted our resources,” said Khadia al-Hassi, a tax official in Benghazi.

But the outlet for those emotions is likely to be internal. “National reconciliation efforts will likely stall,” Al-Ajel said. He predicted that the Gaddafa tribe, of which the Gaddafis were members, will hold the people of Zintan responsible because Seif al-Islam was under their protection. “This doesn’t necessarily mean civil war, but it could mean severe social boycotts and mobilisation,” he said.

Christine Mungai in Nairobi

Clean cooking company Koko Networks sent an abrupt message to customers last weekend announcing it would shut down operations, closing a business that had become one of Kenya’s largest players in the global carbon-credit market.

Behind the closure is a dispute over carbon finance. Before shutting down on 31 January, Koko was generating close to $120-million a year – not from selling clean-energy stoves but from selling carbon credits. It marketed about six-million credits a year, which were supposedly earned from avoiding deforestation when its Kenyan customers replaced firewood with its clean cooking fuel. Each credit was worth about $20 on the international markets. The carbon credits revenue was central to Koko’s model. It subsidised low-cost clean cooking fuel for about 1.5-million households in Kenya.

For an actual forest to remove carbon from the atmosphere that is equivalent to six-million credits, it would have to be so big that it covers half the land area of Rwanda.

Carbon credits are a big deal in Kenya. The country accounts for just more than 20% of Africa’s marketed carbon credits, the largest percentage. President William Ruto has repeatedly promoted carbon trading as a future export earner and a way for local communities to benefit from climate funds. At the United Nations’ big climate meeting in 2022, COP27, he launched the African Carbon Markets Initiative. At the Africa Climate Summit in 2023 he said carbon markets should benefit communities, not intermediaries.

That political push led to tighter rules. New regulations introduced in June 2024 imposed a $4 levy per credit, required 25% of revenues to go to the state, and directed half of the fees to a national climate fund. For Koko, this meant an estimated additional cost of more than $24-million a year. The company argued the changes made its Kenya operations financially unviable.

Koko Networks is incorporated in Mauritius. Sources close to the talks between the company and the Kenya government said the latter was intent on capturing more tax and fee revenue from carbon trading, particularly when companies operating in Kenya are registered abroad.

The government has not publicly explained why talks with Koko collapsed. But sources familiar with the negotiations say last year’s shift in US politics was also a factor. Washington had actively been supporting Kenya’s carbon market, including through USAID-backed initiatives, during the tenure of former ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitman. After a change of administration in the US and Whitman’s departure, those arrangements came up for review.

Zimbabwean pastor Walter Magaya is facing four new rape charges. Magaya was released on bail last month from detention that related to five separate counts of rape, but was rearrested this week and remanded again. He faced similar cases in 2016 and 2019.

Magaya, founder of the Prophetic Healing and Deliverance ministries, is also facing 78 counts of fraud. His nine rape charges underscore what activists describe as a deepening crisis of sexual abuse in the country’s churches.

At another church, the Majestic Holy Church of God, in Cold Comfort, Harare, founder Ngonidzashe Masvinu appeared in court in July 2025, facing multiple counts of rape. The Continent spoke to one of his accusers, former congregant Thandekile Mvundla* who grew up in the church. She says Masvinu exploited her trust and fear.

“He read the Bible for me, then told me I was given to him by the Holy Spirit,” Mvundla said. “He said if I refused, I would be punished by the Holy Spirit.”

Mvundla said she lived with the abuse for years before telling her parents last January and eventually leaving the church. “I was traumatised. I am still depressed. He [wanted] to beat me if I went against his will.”

Another former congregant, Mavis Chari*, alleges the pastor began abusing her at age 15 and that it went on for six years. “He said I was his wife and, if I refused to sleep with him, I would die mysteriously,” she said.

According to his own biography, Masvinu served a five-year prison sentence from 1996 after being convicted of raping a minor. He did not respond to multiple attempts by The Continent to seek comment on the new allegations.

At another apostolic church, Johanne Masowe eChishanu in Mabvuku, four women known to The Continent say they were separately assaulted during private prayer sessions with their leader, Agrippa Mugadza. One, Linda Chinemo, said she reported the matter to Mabvuku police station. The police say the case is still being investigated and declined to comment further.

Chinemo believes the perceived lack of action has discouraged other women from coming forward. “After I told my husband about it, he left me,” she said.

Pettina Rugango described being called aside by the pastor during an all-night prayer session. “I followed him innocently. [He] said something had to be done to save my life before it was too late. I was in shock and only realised later that I’d been raped,” she said.

Mugadza denies these accusations, telling The Continent the women were attempting to extort him. Church elders said the allegations were aimed at tarnishing the pastor’s image.

Women’s rights advocates and some religious leaders say these cases reflect a broader national problem: congregants who experience abuse are silenced by stigma or fear or retaliation – or that they won’t be believed.

The public profile of alleged perpetrators can also contribute to frustrating justice, said Reverend Elitha Moyo of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Zimbabwe. “When religious leaders, looked up to as moral guides, are implicated in such abuses, it can create an environment of fear and silence.”

Zimbabwe’s minister of women affairs, Monica Mutsvangwa, said: “My mandate is to empower our women and make sure they have access to information to use the laws and policies to criminalise those who trample on their rights.”

Zimbabwe’s laws prescribe a minimum 15-year sentence for rape, but survivors say its reporting mechanisms are intimidating and inconsistent.

“We need to create safe spaces for rape survivors to speak out and seek justice without fear of victimisation,” said activist Bridget Mashayahanya.

Land-rights activist and MP Tšepo Lipholo has sought police protection, saying he fears for his life after receiving what his party describes as persistent death threats sent via text messages.

Lipholo, an MP with the Basotho Covenant Movement (BCM), has been agitating to reclaim what he says are Lesotho’s former territories from neighbouring South Africa. This would include areas in the Free State, Northern Cape, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, and Eastern Cape.

He was arrested in July for what the government called “uttering seditious words”, inciting public violence, and harming the reputation of the royal family. The charges were later escalated to treason. In the weeks before his arrest, Lipholo had declared himself paramount chief of Basutoland – the country’s colonial name, saying the official king had sold the country to South Africa. His proclamations followed an unauthorised trip to the United Nations in New York in January 2025 to agitate for the return of the “lost” territories.

Lipholo was granted bail on medical grounds in early December, days after his story appeared on the cover of The Continent.

Police spokesperson Mpiti Mopeli declined to comment on whether Lipholo had been granted police protection. “We are not at liberty to divulge issues pertaining to Lipholo’s security, because in doing so we might potentially compromise the subject, so those details remain private and confidential,” he told The Continent.

Bolaji Azeez runs a photocopy and printing business in Minna, Niger State. When the national electricity grid collapsed on Tuesday, he had to reprice a bulk order to cover the cost of generator fuel, irritating his client.

“He paid,” Azeez says. “But not without grumbling.”

It was Nigeria’s second national grid collapse in a week. There have been at least five countrywide power outages in the past 12 months. The grid keeps failing because an old, under‑capitalised transmission system is being run with thin generation margins, a fragile gas supply, and weak commercial incentives, so even routine disturbances cascade into countrywide collapses.

The most recent incident affected all major distribution companies in the country’s 36 states, with authorities blaming a “voltage disturbance”.

A recent survey found that the average Nigerian company experienced more than 300 outages a year. The World Bank says Nigeria loses 5% to 7% of GDP a year to its lack of reliable power. At $25‑billion, this is one of the largest structural drags to its economy.

The utilities that generate and transmit electricity in Nigeria were privatised over the past decade. That “did not bring about the outcomes expected”, admits the World Bank, whose economists often recommended privatisation drives.

Homes and businesses are paying the price of the failed experiment as they resort to expensive generator fuel. Nigeria has so many diesel generators it is estimated they can generate eight times more electricity than is available on the national grid

Civilians and aid agencies in three counties in Jonglei State have been ordered to evacuate the region immediately. To “re-establish law and order”, the army is launching a fight to retake towns seized by opposition forces, its spokesperson Lul Ruai Koang told the Associated Press on Monday. The region is seeing renewed fighting between government forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and an armed opposition aligned with former first vice-president Riek Machar. More than 180,000 people have already been displaced in Jonglei State.

The contested areas have been under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-In Opposition. In mid-January, the movement claimed it had captured 23 prisoners of war, including senior government officers, during clashes in Pajut. The government responded by sending more troops to northern Jonglei. The region is seen as an opposition stronghold.

The military buildup has alarmed observers, who warn South Sudan may be sliding back into full-scale war. The actions by both sides breach a 2018 peace deal that ended a five-year civil war which killed some 400,000 people.

The escalation began in December, when opposition forces seized a series of government outposts in central Jonglei. Machar has been under house arrest since March and was charged with treason in September in relation to a separate attack on a military base in Nasir. His allies say these developments are political persecution.

This week, United Nations officials met South Sudan’s humanitarian affairs minister to press for faster aid delivery, warning displacement and civilian needs are rising rapidly as fighting spreads.

East Africa’s first semiconductor manufacturing plant is tucked between rolling tea plantations in central Kenya. It occupies a repurposed lecture hall on the campus of Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri, one of the country’s top technical schools. Inside, mostly young mechatronics engineers move about briskly in lab coats, passing through glass doors, washing their hands, and pulling on hairnets and shoe covers. Beyond the final door lies a cleanroom, where silicon wafers glint under sterile lights.

The plant’s prized innovation is a thin-film lithography machine that engineers have dubbed “Ol Borana”. It was designed in-house and assembled locally from imported parts to ensure local engineers understood every chip component and could repair or rebuild them if global supply chains failed.

The enterprise’s founder is Anthony Githinji, who started Semiconductor Technologies Limited (STL) in 2018 after a 30-year career in the United States semiconductor industry. STL’s lab is tiny compared to the vast manufacturing plants that supply global electronics brands. Yet even here, decisions made in Washington are rippling through the sterile halls.

STL’s dance with US politics began with a positive moment in 2022. The global supply chain for chips was under strain, disrupted by the Covid pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Both factors exposed the world’s deep dependence on East Asian semiconductor hubs. In response, then US president Joe Biden promoted a strategy known as “friend-shoring”: spreading chip production to US-allied locations like Kenya.

At the time, a large share of chips used in cars, weapons systems, and industrial equipment were manufactured in Taiwan, a flashpoint in US-China relations. Washington increasingly viewed this as a national security risk. Friend-shoring, the prevailing theory went, would build redundancy outside China’s orbit.

This marked a breakthrough for STL, Kenya’s only semiconductor manufacturer. In early 2022, the company received a $1.3-million grant from the US Trade and Development Agency.

Compared to STL’s ambitions, the grant was modest. Currently, STL is producing experimental runs. Beyond that, Githinji’s full vision is to produce up to 30,000 wafers a month for government and industrial clients. That requires about $350-million for equipment alone.

But the US government partnership still mattered because it brought access to suppliers, buyers, and discounted raw materials such as silicon wafers. It recognised that Kenya could play a role in an industry dominated by East Asia, Europe, and the US, a vote of confidence that had the potential to sway other investors.

Until that point, Githinji’s team had sustained the work through a mix of self-financing, institutional support, and grants from the Mastercard Foundation.

Githinji struggled to convince investors. Many of them didn’t believe that Kenya had the education system, infrastructure, and workforce needed for competitive chip manufacturing. Then US politics shifted again with Donald Trump’s second presidency, which began a year ago. The new administration in Washington dropped friend-shoring for a more inward-looking approach, prioritising domestic production over external supply chains. Programmes that had positioned Kenya as a strategic partner quietly fell away.

Without the promise of sustained US partnership, STL’s path to the scale Githinji envisioned is narrowing again. The company has sought alternative funding, including £300,000 from the United Kingdom, according to Lorna Muturi, its lead engineer. But attracting customers requires proof of scale – and proving scale requires much more capital than that.

Not the end of the road

Githinji remains convinced Kenya has the fundamentals it needs to play a role in the industry. “Kenya has everything it needs to be a semiconductor powerhouse,” he argues, pointing to the country’s mineral resources.

A 2023 geological survey identified more than 950 mineral deposits countrywide, including copper and aluminum, both essential to electronics manufacturing. Germanium has been identified in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Niobium, a superconducting material, has been found in Mrima Hills, drawing interest from US, Chinese, and Australian investors.

“This surge of geopolitical interest tells us something,” says Dr Nashon Adero, dean of the School of Mines and Engineering at Taita Taveta University. He calls for resource agreements that build local capacity instead of just extracting value.

The fate of Kenya’s chipmaking industry might not be decided only by external demand and partnerships, anyway. “We aren’t just building chips,” Githinji told The Continent. “We’re trying to build resilience in a continent that has depended on others for critical technology.”

Photos on the lab’s walls echo this eye on both internal and external demand: a plaque from US weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, as well as mock-ups of chips for secure communications for Kenya’s county governments.

But vision, experimental labs, and raw minerals do not an industry make – and local market demand is often too low in the early stages. Tshilidzi Marwala, former vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, points to South Africa’s experience with a university-based semiconductor lab. “There was no market beyond the institution itself. Cleanrooms are extremely expensive to maintain,” he said.

A single cleanroom, essential for protecting sensitive microchips from dust, can cost upwards of $2-million. STL operates three.

The Vietnam fix

Kenya is not alone in the fallout from shifting geopolitics on microchips. Vietnam, another US ally, also began building its semiconductor industry with backing from Washington. When US funding slowed, Vietnam’s government stepped in with $500-million in public investment for its first manufacturing plant. Today, Vietnam is widely regarded as an emerging semiconductor hub, having attracted major investment in chip assembly, testing, and advanced packaging. Like STL, its entry into the industry began at the lower end of the value chain.

At STL, wafers still move through cleanrooms etched by machines built far from Silicon Valley. Whether they mark the foundation of a Kenyan semiconductor industry or another casualty of a chaotic geopolitical moment remains to be seen.

Could this be the definitive biography of Nkrumah and analysis of his impact on the world? Howard W. French’s brilliant and thoroughgoing treatment of the life of Francis Nwia Kofi Nkrumah very well might. From the vantage of southern Africa, I knew nothing about how complex Nkrumah’s legacy is in his home country of Ghana.

Nkrumah was once extolled by his party’s newspaper as the “Man of Destiny, Star of Africa, Hope of Millions of downtrodden Blacks, Deliverer of Ghana, Iron Boy, Great Leader of Street Boys, personable and handsome Boy from Nzima”.

French says he is remembered in his home country as someone who became dictatorial in the later years of his rule, suppressing dissent and using lawfare against his opponents. Ghana’s economy also suffered greatly from his ill-conceived attempts to use its major commodity at the time, cocoa, to fund his government’s plans.

For many people on the continent, for whom this will no doubt be a revelation, Nkrumah remains a hero and towering legend (making me reconsider even Robert Mugabe’s continuing lionisation in some African quarters). So it is: one man’s liberator is another’s dictator.

Human memory is lamentably short. That’s why this book is important: it’s an excellent corrective for Nkrumah’s tarnished legacy and a primer on mid-century Africa and colonial crimes you can point your Western friends to.

French lays out an excellent case for why Nkrumah was the most consequential leader of the century. He made Africa matter to the world, French says. But it was his “precipitous drive for African unity” that consumed him – leading, as French argues, to his downfall when he was famously removed from power in a coup in 1966.

Nkrumah spent a decade studying in the United States (a fascinating choice over Britain), which was pivotal to his trajectory. There, he obtained two masters degrees, worked odd jobs, and even became a preacher-for-hire in Black churches.

He met CLR James, who introduced Nkrumah to George Padmore, and it was Padmore who had the biggest impact on Nkrumah’s life, mentoring him in Britain and later moving to Ghana to act as his advisor. Also in Britain, Nkrumah met and first worked with WEB Du Bois to organise the Fifth Pan-African Conference in Manchester.

Nkrumah’s story is only one of self-invention insofar as his life was full of serendipity – and he a man who took full advantage of this. He was a self-mythologiser: he published his autobiography on the very day of Ghana’s independence, giving out copies at the celebrations and so ensuring he had control of the story of his rise to power.

French refers at various points in The Second Emancipation to Nkrumah’s accounts of his life and compares them to the recollections of interlocutors or archival records. Nkrumah did not lie, precisely, but his belief that he was a man of destiny apparently made him always see those events through that lens.

Nkrumah was a true believer in independence for all Africans. But his pan-Africanist ideas built on the work of forerunners such as Du Bois, James Kwegyir Aggrey, Africanus Horton, Martin Delaney, Marcus Garvey, and JE Casely Hayford, with Nkrumah more of an “evangeliser”, according to French.

In pursuit of his perhaps somewhat misguided vision and attempt to create a “United States of Africa”, Nkrumah recruited Guinea under Ahmed Sékou Touré; Mali was onside for a while, then not; his plan for the Democratic Republic of the Congo was doomed from the start.

Incidentally, The Second Emancipation is incredibly illuminating on Patrice Lumumba’s rise and how he sealed his fate with his ambition – or alternatively, how his fate was sealed by the greed of the Belgians colluding with a US made antsy and paranoid by the Cold War.

French’s text shows lineages and links between Africa and its diaspora, particularly across the Atlantic. He illustrates how Nkrumah’s diaspora influences (Padmore and James high on the list) – as well as his later political successes and Ghana’s independence – had an impact on the self-image of Black Americans in the lead-up to the intense years of the US civil-rights movement.

Although Nkrumah’s downfall was due to multiple factors, per French, his fixation with his pan-Africanist vision led him to take his eye off the ball domestically. Perhaps the dreams of his foreign policy were more appealing than the failure of Ghana’s economy.

Here is French’s central argument: Nkrumah’s dream was valid and he deserves much more recognition for what he represented, not least to have his place in the pantheon of great African heroes restored.

He knew Africa’s newly independent nations would struggle unless they united economically against their former colonisers. He told them, too, saying: “Independence must never be considered as an end in itself but as a stage, the very first stage of the people’s revolutionary struggle.”

Instead, they formed the Organisation of African Unity (now the mostly ineffectual African Union) – a body very far from Nkrumah’s confederate dream, that struggles with what Nkrumah, the prophet, foresaw: the scourge of neocolonialism.

Nkrumah fervently believed a new world was possible for Africa and its diaspora. Perhaps he had feet of clay. Perhaps he was a man out of time, someone against whom the winds of the Cold War blew so strongly that he never had a chance. French presents intriguing evidence for both in The Second Emancipation.

The night before Christmas was indeed a silent one in Eruku. As other parts of Nigeria enjoyed Christmas Eve service and Detty December concerts, the town lay under a heavy quiet, broken only by hushed conversation and the occasional moving vehicle. Military checkpoints stood only a few metres apart. Eruku was also literally dark: PHCN, the company behind Nigeria’s erratic power supply, had failed again. Solar-powered bulbs and rechargeable lamps lit up the night in small pockets. With festivities cancelled and fireworks banned, residents huddled indoors, reminiscing about simpler times.

Eruku made international news when a group of armed bandits stormed a livestreamed service on 18 November, killing two people and abducting 38.

The footage became an online poster for the “Christian genocide” narrative floated by United States President Donald Trump earlier that month.

The abducted worshippers were released a few days later after government intervention. The Kwara State government housed them for a week and provided immediate medical assistance, but no psychological or other medical support followed, even though many of them were still traumatised or in pain.

Funlayo Joshua, a trader, said the captors beat her. A month after her government-funded hospital stay, she was still suffering from headaches and dizziness. She fainted shortly after the rescue and remained unconscious for three days.

The attack took place during a seven-day programme by the Christ Apostolic Church to thank God that some of its members had survived another abduction a month earlier. In October, bandits had attacked a bus of people returning to Eruku from a wedding ceremony, 18 of whom were church members. Local hunters responded but the bandits managed to whisk two children away. Both were rescued – one by the army and the second after a clandestine ransom payment of 4-million naira ($2,800).

Grace Ige, a caterer, was a victim of both attacks. The October wedding was her son’s and the two children abducted then were hers too. She borrowed to raise the ransom and remains in debt.

Since the attack, church gatherings have been limited to brief services held under strict military presence. When the Christmas service started at 8am, fewer than 10 people were present in a church that often had more than 160 worshippers. Church leaders now send canvassers to people’s homes, to let them know the service has begun. Even so, they are happy to get a crowd of 50. In the end, about 60 people turned up for the Christmas service. Only four of them had been among the 38 abducted the previous month.

A town of migrants

Geographically, Eruku is in the north of Nigeria – but its people speak Yoruba, a language typically spoken in the south.

Attacks by Boko Haram and other groups have driven some Hausa and Fulani people into the town over the past decade, many from Nigeria’s northeast and some from as far away as Togo.

Well before the livestreamed attack – in which the bandits are seen gathering up worshippers’ handbags – banditry had been hollowing out life in and around Eruku.

Farmers on the outskirts were attacked and forced to abandon their land. Then, the bandits turned toward the town itself. This left many of Eruku’s recent migrants feeling that death and crisis follow them like a bad odour.

Some of them even started heading back home, given what they ran from had followed them.

Nigerians online – particularly in the south – tend to hold a thinly veiled hostility towards Hausa and Fulani people. Most violent attacks occur in the northern states they traditionally called home and some people in the south blame northerners – as groups – for Nigeria’s perennial insecurity.

In Eruku, however, this hostility seems almost non-existent. Elder Agbabiaka, the church secretary, explained that people understand the bandits are a minority, who do not represent a religion or an ethnic group. He said that before the attack on the church, the bandits had been wreaking havoc on farmers in the bush and a lot of the victims were Hausa, Fulani, or Muslim.

Life in Eruku goes on with bated breath. The Nigerian government says normality has been restored, but the residents would not call the heavy presence of soldiers normal. Even with the militarisation of their town, they still cannot venture into their farms. The soldiers patrol the town; the bandits remain in the surrounding forests.

Sudan’s military-led government has returned to Khartoum, after nearly three years of operating from the eastern city of Port Sudan. The officials and other residents are returning to a war-scarred city still littered with deadly ordnance.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group forced the army out of the capital in 2023 when war erupted between the two sides.

Early last year, the tables turned and the army drove the militiamen out, but Khartoum remains dangerous. Shell casings, unexploded munitions, and other remnants of war litter streets, homes, markets, and schools.

In the absence of a state-run clearance effort, much of the work to make the city liveable again has fallen to volunteers.

Abdullah al-Hilu, a social activist, coordinates more than 50 volunteers trying to clear war debris across Khartoum, Omdurman, Bahri, Jebel Aulia, Um Badda, and East Nile. With almost no equipment, they load debris on tractors and handcarts, known locally as karos. “We’ve removed about 6,000 pieces of ordnance that could have killed hundreds of civilians,” says al-Hilu.

Their work earned the backing of Sudan’s national mine-action centre, the body authorised to do such work, which provided training on ordnance collection. Volunteers are also repurposing shell casings into small enterprises, including brick and tile manufacture – creating jobs for residents who lost their incomes in the war.

But the danger persists. “Remnants remain undiscovered,” says al-Hilu. His dream is to get electronic devices that can detect explosives more accurately.

This story was published in collaboration with Egab