Lily Kuo

When Nelly Tuikong, originally from western Kenya, was studying nursing in the United States, she had trouble finding makeup. Drug store brands carried at most two shades for darker skinned women like herself. Buying from the higher-end brands at department stores was also hit-and-miss. Even finding an eyebrow pencil was difficult. “The darkest brown pencil would be the color of my skin, which was too light for my eyebrows,” she says.

Eight years ago I watched the movie 2012, named after the year the Mayan calendar supposedly ends. In the film an American geologist learns that a solar flare is heating the core of the earth and causing its tectonic plates to shift drastically. Before long, mass earthquakes and tsunamis are annihilating mankind. Los Angeles slips into the Pacific Ocean. The White House gets wiped out by a giant wave, with the president still inside. Soon, most of the earth is submerged in water.

Africa witnessed major changes in 2017, whether at the geopolitical, socio-economic, or digital levels. With global economic recovery strengthening, Africa’s growth outlook will look more stable after a few tough years. And with a young and tech-savvy population, major changes will be afoot when it comes to innovation in 2018.

A total ban on sales of ivory will go into effect this weekend in China, the world’s largest importer of ivory whose trade is responsible for the deaths of as many as 30,000 elephants in Africa a year.

Juba, South Sudan

The traditional human origin story maintains that modern humans, or homo sapiens, evolved in Africa and then migrated in a single wave to the Asian continent about 60,000 years ago. It’s better known as the “Out of Africa” model. Today, researchers are revising that narrative.

In a YouTube tutorial called, “How to Get More Likes on Social Media,” a young white woman scrolls through her social media feed. In one image, a friend poses with a giraffe with a caption that says, “Life is an adventure.” In another, a man flexes while small African children hang off of him. Underneath the photo he’s written, “Real heroes don’t wear capes.” Soon, the woman is having her own adventure in an unnamed African country, posing with sick children. She concludes, “Suffering will get you twice the likes.”

The promise of Chinese manufacturing moving to Africa increasingly seems like a real possibility. Chinese car factories assemble in South Africa. Mainland footwear companies have expanded into Ethiopia. Chinese entrepreneurs have opened textile plants in Rwanda and other operations across the continent.

Juba, South Sudan

The self-declared state of Somaliland has elected a former air force pilot and rebel commander as its third president since breaking away from Somalia in 1991. Somaliland’s election commission declared Musa Bihi Abdi of the ruling Kulmiye party the presidential winner, with a little more than 55% of the vote.

Juba, South Sudan

When general Constantino Guveya Chiwenga, head of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF), was on his way to China in early November, his vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa was being unceremoniously dismissed from the government and the ruling ZANU-PF party.

One of the most common complaints about large often state-owned Chinese companies operating in Africa is that they bring in their own labor from China, hiring locals only for the lowest paid work. It’s a claim that raises larger questions about how much Chinese companies, criticized for everything from environmental degradation to operating and living in their own enclaves, contribute to the economies of the African countries in which they operate.

Election officials in Kenya have said less than 35% of voters came out to cast their ballot in Thursday’s (Oct. 26) repeat presidential election.

Nairobi, Kenya

Peter Ndung’u, a Nairobi-based photographer, was heading home from downtown Nairobi on the evening of Oct. 11 when the rains started. That day Kenya’s election officials said they would continue with the country’s election rerun, a do-over of August’s presidential vote annulled by the country’s high court.

A decade ago, a New York Times columnist coined the term “rogue aid” to describe China’s financial assistance in the developing world: nontransparent, nondemocratic, and above all self-interested. Since then, the label has stuck.

For more than half a century, Chief Solomon Osagie Alonge, a self-taught photographer from Benin City, documented a country and society in flux. Starting in the 1930s as the official photographer for the Royal Court of Benin, the ancient kingdom of what is known today as southern Nigeria, he snapped photos of the royal wives, visiting dignitaries and celebrities, annual festivals, and court ceremonies.

Google’s homepage logo today in Nigeria, Canada, and parts of Europe celebrates what would be the 272nd birthday of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave turned abolitionist whose memoir defined a literary genre and fueled a movement that ultimately ended slavery in the United Kingdom.

On exhibit at the Hubei Provincial Museum is a photo series meant to celebrate the harmony between man and nature, as captured by a photographer and businessman during his travels to Africa over the past decade. The exhibition, “This is Africa,” includes the typical shots of elephants, cheetahs, and sunsets over the savanna, but makes one crucial miscalculation. A section titled, “One’s heart makes one’s appearance” features portraits of African children and adults next to animals.

York, United Kingdom

African countries are distancing themselves from an old partner.

The world’s fastest growing ivory market is tiny land-locked Laos, one of the poorest countries in Asia. According to a new report from the Kenya-based nonprofit Save the Elephants, efforts in China, the world’s largest ivory consumer, to stop the illicit ivory trade have only pushed the industry to new markets.

In Not African Enough, a collection of photography and essays on Kenyan fashion, one designer bemoans what she calls the “vicious cycle of wax print.” The bright, intricately patterned fabrics that have come to define African textiles are not from East Africa, nor really from Africa at all. Yet, almost every one of the 14 designers featured in the book describes feeling pressured to incorporate wax print into their work.