Mauritania’s iron ore train holds some of the world’s records for length and tonnage, as it hauls ore from iron-rich hills in the Sahara to the coast for export. The train has also gained interest in recent years from travel bloggers and influencers, who ride atop the train as an ultimate “bucket list” experience.

Mauritanian authorities have cracked down on the dangerous practice, but the exoticisation of the train persists – our photographer was drawn to ride the train himself after watching the Spanish film Sirāt, which references the train and its passengers as a backdrop in the protagonists’ journey. He returned with a photo essay that captures the beauty of ordinary moments, away from the spectacle of social media.

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The 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington DC are usually remembered as an American event. But the political order it produced was global, and Africa was – and became – one of its major theatres.

Osama bin Laden first gained notoriety for the US embassy bombings in East Africa a full three years before 9/11. After the attacks, Somalia became a testing ground for a counterterrorism strategy that ended up being exported elsewhere. In northern Nigeria, attempts to choke terrorism financing disrupted informal financial networks, pushing militant economies towards local crime. And in Libya, Washington rehabilitated Muammar Gaddafi as a counterterrorism partner, then helped to overthrow him alongside a rebellion that included some former Islamist militants he had hunted.

A quarter of a century is long enough for the decisions made in an event’s aftermath to become so embedded we forget where they came from. The surveillance, wars, broken institutions, and new economies of violence examined in these stories have acquired lives of their own.

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In just two weeks, a Facebook page called “Bikini Bottom Residents Complain” amassed almost two million members by inviting Egyptians to reimagine their everyday frustrations using cartoons and AI-generated images in the style of the Nickelodeon character SpongeBob SquarePants. They took aim at power cuts, poor public services, unaffordable housing, and even tensions over migration.

Then the page was shut down.

It is unclear whether its teenage administrators shut it down themselves or authorities intervened. But it fits a familiar pattern. Four years ago, authorities arrested organisers of a joke Batman “event” circulating on Facebook. Last year, dozens of online content creators were swept up in a mass crackdown. What made the Bikini Bottom page unusual was not the severity of its criticism, but its reach. Nobody necessarily intended to build a political forum. Yet, in a country with an increasingly restricted public sphere, the act of millions of people talking freely turned it into one.

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Zambia’s civic space has been slowly narrowing. In May, the country’s parliament pushed through a legislative blitz that saw 77 bills passed in record time. Many of those new laws expanded state power and gave state authorities more space to control public gatherings, track personal data, and constrict free speech. It all came to a head two weeks ago when the country went to the polls as President Hakainde Hichilema sought a second term.

Barely 24 hours later, state security forces raided the residence of Hakainde’s challenger for the top job. By the end of that raid, one opposition leader was dead and more were arrested or fled into hiding. This week, on the last day that a presidential petition challenging his victory could be filed, the courts were closed, with a cordon of soldiers to stop entry. These scenes are unprecedented in Zambia – and people are worried.

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African farmers are often criticised for growing crops the way their ancestors did. Critics say they must embrace (a very specific version of) modernity. That includes focusing on cash crops, buying hybrid seeds, and using commercial fertiliser.

For the past 20 years, the Nairobi-based Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa has been at the forefront of pushing that model. The organisation, which was launched by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations and later rebranded as Agra, pledged to double yields and incomes for 20-million smallholder households and halve food insecurity by 2020. It has had a profound impact on how countries approach farming.

In Kenya and Malawi, The Continent found farmers stuck in a debt trap, often without better yields. Next week, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa – a coalition representing tens of millions of small-scale food producers – is releasing a report on Agra’s impact. The Continent obtained an exclusive preview.

It makes for grim reading.

Agra failed its own internal evaluation and then dropped its original goals – with a PR firm going as far as trying to scrub them from Wikipedia. But the African Union is still enshrining its philosophy in its next 10-year plan for how farmers produce food.

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The islands of São Tomé and Príncipe were one of the earliest places where Europeans assembled the defining elements of the tropical plantation complex: enslaved African labour, monoculture of a single cash crop, industrial processing, racial hierarchy and export of those agricultural commodities abroad. That model was expanded and reshaped in the Americas on a far larger scale.

Now, six former agricultural estates in São Tomé and Príncipe – known as roças – have been recognised as World Heritage sites. The Santomean government hopes that this new status will bring tourism revenue, jobs and opportunities to the islands, as the country grapples with high unemployment, youth emigration and widespread poverty. However, the granting of Unesco status leaves critical questions unanswered: who owns these refurbished structures, governs the stories they tell, or reaps the rewards of their new economic life?

The challenge facing the islands is how to safeguard this cultural heritage without romanticising or sanitising the brutal history behind it in a quest to avoid offending tourists.

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The images of tens of thousands of people getting into Ceuta flashed around the world. They gave ammunition to anti-immigrant voices, notably the American and Italian presidents. The Spanish state quickly forced almost all the people back home, saying its track record keeping migrants out of Fortress Europe was, in fact, stellar. But broad narratives don’t need anchoring in reality. So, last weekend, Ceuta provided a canvas for geopolitics, local politics and algorithms to smash together. Absent from those narratives were the voices of the people, nearly 70 of whom died, crossing into the Spanish enclave.

The Moroccans The Continent spoke to talked about misleading messages, and the legitimate reasons for them to leave home – like a government spending big on an upcoming football world cup but not its people. Various factions seized on that, in a region where Spain, Morocco and Algeria have had a complicated relationship for a long time. And each of those has complicated relationships with the EU, US and Israel.

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You don’t have to go far on a social platform to see a video of how nice life seems in Rwanda. Its capital, Kigali, has hosted a carousel of global sporting events. It wants to host the Formula One. These narratives crowd out the other side of Paul Kagame’s country – a nation involved in a war in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, so bad that sanctions are in place. And that’s the point: Rwanda puts a lot of work into its soft power.

This is an open secret with few details, but this week The Continent has the receipts for an $85,000 influence campaign. In our three-part cover package we also look at how a crackdown on journalists has opened up the space for these campaigns inside Rwanda, and how they’re aimed at decision makers in Brussels and New York. In the Great Lakes, it’s a battle over which version of the war the world believes – or even gets to see.

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Togo’s President Faure Gnassingbé has been in office for 21 years. Before him, his father ruled for 38, making the Gnassingbé family one of Africa's longest-serving political dynasties. Last year, constitutional changes created a new office that could allow Faure to remain in power indefinitely.

The reforms sparked protests. The state’s response was extraordinarily violent. But the crackdown did not end there. Several survivors give recurring accounts of torture inside military detention, alongside lasting psychological trauma and continued intimidation after their release.

The Continent’s investigation found that what has mostly been reported as a constitutional and administrative manoeuvre carried a profound human cost, borne by those who challenged it.

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For years, Muhoozi Kainerugaba was treated as a curiosity: an impulsive general whose social media outbursts often seemed too theatrical to take seriously. That’s no longer enough to explain his antics. After nearly 40 years in power, his father, President Yoweri Museveni, has outlived many of the constitutional guardrails that were meant to regulate the transfer of power.

What remains is a system organised around personalities rather than institutions. Something is clearly underway, but Muhoozi is neither a shoo-in nor merely an eccentric heir apparent.

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Across the continent, governments have long relied on police and soldiers to maintain control. Increasingly, they are outsourcing that role to actors who work in the shadows. In Kenya, they are known as goons: young men who disrupt rallies and intimidate protesters for cash. In Togo, they are les miliciens: civilians accused of working alongside security forces during political crises.

In Egypt, the baltagiya break up demonstrations and influence elections. Their names differ, but they all allow the powerful to use intimidation and violence while maintaining plausible deniability. Our cover story, examines how these forces are recruited, financed and deployed. Alongside reporting from Kenya, Togo, and Egypt, contributors from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria, and Uganda trace parallel systems of outsourced political coercion across the continent today.

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Deep breaths: We’re going on a publication break for three weeks to touch grass. While we’re away, the next edition of The Atlas – our new international publication – will be delivered to subscribers of The Continent via your usual channels on 30 June. The Continent will be back on 18 July for you to read and share.

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Sport is supposed to transcend politics but this year’s Fifa Football World Cup has become a showcase for just the opposite: the arbitrary exercise of political power. Players, referees, journalists, and supporters travelling to the United States have faced visa denials, invasive searches, travel restrictions, and threats of immigration raids.

Before it all, Fifa president Gianni Infantino bent over backwards to stay in US President Donald Trump's good graces.

If the goal was to shield the tournament from the harsh edges of Trump's administration, it has clearly failed. The US was eager to host the World Cup in 2026, the year of the 250th anniversary of American independence. But its messy start is hardly the stuff of grand national celebration or showcase. One good thing did happen this week: Omar Artan, the Somali referee denied entry in the US, returned to Mogadishu to a real hero’s welcome – and our journalist was there for it.

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The conventional explanation for South Africa’s recurring waves of xenophobic violence is now familiar: a stagnant economy, high unemployment, and migrants cast as convenient scapegoats. But that’s not the whole story.

Researchers have found that violent protests in South Africa — including xenophobic ones — are closely tied to factional, internal battles within the African National Congress.

During Jacob Zuma’s state capture years, when competing factions were accommodated with preferential access to jobs, contracts, and state resources, violent demonstrations were relatively rare.

In times of less blatant elite accommodation, factions often mobilise violent protests to negotiate for power. In that sense, migrants might be on the banners – but protest leaders and their backers are often seeking positions and influence within the ANC and state structures, more than they want change in immigration policy.

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African countries lose about $90-billion a year to illicit financial flows. These are “mostly linked to trade misinvoicing in extractive commodities, half of them in gold”, according to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. Cameroon’s gold sector is a sharp example of this. The country’s official records report gold exports of just 22.3kg in 2023 – equivalent to one suitcase – but import data from other countries shows more than 15 tonnes of gold originating from Cameroon. The leading importer of Cameroon’s gold is – no surprises here – the United Arab Emirates.

The Continent travelled to Zamboï in Cameroon’s Eastern Region to investigate the conditions for – and impact of – the illicit gold mining and trafficking that left Cameroon with the short end of the stick.

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The current Ebola outbreak reported in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is the 17th since the disease was first identified 50 years ago. More than half of those outbreaks have been reported in the past five years alone, as extractive industries concentrate large mobile populations in biodiversity hotspots where diseases easily spill from animals to people. Recent aid cuts weakened disease surveillance that might have detected the outbreak earlier.

But the earlier aid-driven responses also created distortions that left many affected communities sceptical of epidemic responders who seemed to profit from the “Ebola business”. Increasingly successful containment efforts have made outbreaks less deadly and transmission chains shorter. Ironically, in some cases this means scientists can’t collect meaningful data in clinical trials for vaccines.

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Introducing The Atlas

The Continent has teamed up with Coda Story to test-drive a brand new global newspaper. Download the pilot edition, sign up and help us make it travel! We live in the same world, let’s read from the same page.

Emmanuel Macron has visited Africa more than any French president in history. According to a former advisor, he returns from his trips “reinvigorated” by what he once called “this battered continent”. This week he was back again, charging through Nairobi for the “Africa Forward” summit in fine Macron form: energetic, ambitious, and occasionally one diplomatic incident away from an apology.

The frenetic diplomacy masks a deeper unease. France’s influence has shrunk dramatically and former colonies in West and Central Africa increasingly showing Paris the door. For The Continent, six analysts assess Macron’s latest performance for African relevance.

Perhaps he could start closer to home. In legally France, geographically Africa Mayotte, thousands of young asylum seekers are still waiting for la République to notice them.

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As strongmen at the helm of superpower nations trample international norms, they promise a “new world order.” So far, however, most people have felt only the rupture, not the order. In an op-ed written exclusively for The Continent, Graça Machel argues that Africans must step into the void created by this recklessness. Centuries of ‘might makes right’ cost Africa a lot but also taught Africans the value of justice – and gave us the moral authority to lead its pursuit.

At the very least, says Kenyan public intellectual Nanjala Nyabola in this week’s Coffee with The Continent interview, we should use this interregnum between the old and new worlds to define what true freedom looks like — and how to pursue it.

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Mali has been at war since 2012. Malians have learned to forge ahead regardless. On Saturday, after co-ordinated attacks on urban centres down the country’s length – from Kidal in the far north to Kita and Bamako, the country’s power seats in the south – revellers still showed up for the Grand Ball of Bamako where Youssou N’Dour was set to perform.

But this time was different, as the people whose ball was cut short by a curfew announcement soon realised. The show has stopped for many others as insurgents keep residents and suppliers stranded outside Bamako with a blockade on most roads in. The show goes on for interim president Assimi Goïta, but he is fighting for his political life.

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As the stream of memes from Iranian-government accounts shows, modern geopolitics is contested as much with narrative as it is with bombs. Before memes were a thing, the Iranian government fought its narrative war the old-fashioned way: tightly controlling what information became public knowledge in the first place. As a result, independent Iranian journalists can face long prison sentences, or even the death penalty, for working with outlets outside the country.

In an essay for The Continent, one Iranian journalist writes – under a pseudonym – to explain why that doesn’t stop them.

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In South African politics, Gayton McKenzie is the master of spectacle: raiding migrant-owned businesses; running up and down the border in an attempt to “catch” illegal immigrants. He is a larger-than-life character who, to his political and financial advantage, leans into his criminal past and blends populism, ethnic chauvinism, and a striking disregard for the rule of law.

If this reminds you of a certain Orange Someone, you’re not wrong. If America and Europe have taught us anything in recent years, it’s that it is wise to take these characters seriously. They can reshape what’s acceptable in public life – slowly at first, and then suddenly. Each chaotic McKenzie episode seems absurd and ignoble. But together, they are a stress-test of South Africa’s constitutional democracy.

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