Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appears to have the endorsement of one of Africa’s most notorious despots, Zimbabwe’s longtime president Robert Mugabe.
Kenya is building East Africa’s first coal-fired power plant, a move that’s been criticized as backwards, unnecessary, and harmful to the health of the country’s people and environment. Now, the $2 billion project run by Amu Power is also being accused of taking jobs away from local Kenyans.
The furniture that comes out of Ciiru Waweru’s workshop in Nairobi isn’t hand painted or hand carved. The bunk beds, children’s desks, and baby cots made at Waweru’s children’s furniture brand, FunKidz, are more similar to what you would find at Ikea—flat-packable, made with computer-controlled cutting machines and printers.
Not all Obamas are with Hillary Clinton. At the Democratic National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama threw her support behind the party’s presidential nominee in a moving, personal speech. President Obama officially endorsed her in June.
African businesses that don’t focus on helping the poorest are being ignored by investors, according to Agosta Liko, a Kenyan entrepreneur and founder of PesaPal, a payments system for online and mobile money.
A hip hop studio in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, helped jumpstart one of Africa’s most successful democratic transitions. Now it has burned down for the second time in less than a year.
The now infamous memoir, In Congo’s Shadow by Scottish actress Louise Linton, is no longer for sale. According to a statement by the Telegraph yesterday (July 20), which published an excerpt of the book this month, Linton has pulled the book from Amazon where it was self-published earlier this year.
British nonprofit Oxfam is moving its international headquarters from Oxford, where it was founded, to Nairobi, Kenya.
Since its founding last year, one of Quartz Africa’s goals has been to tell some of the many stories of homegrown innovation that is shaping the continent. We chose more than 30 people for their creative vision, entrepreneurship, and problem-solving to honor in Nairobi on July 20 at the Quartz Africa Summit.
When Cyrus Kabiru was growing up, his father’s bicycle was the bane of his existence. He always fell while riding the simple metal roadster almost twice his size. Kabiru was responsible for keeping it clean, a difficult task in a crowded Nairobi slum. He would wheel the bike door to door, helping his father sell mosquito nets, hot water flasks, cups and plates and praying that the next house wouldn’t belong to a schoolmate.
When Madonna visited Kenya last week, she snapped a photo of a murky, trash-filled stream in a slum in Nairobi. “Imagine this is where your water comes from!” she wrote on Instagram, plugging a local NGO that works on water sanitation in Kibera, one of the largest informal settlements in Africa.
A teacher at Nairobi’s Strathmore University surprised students in his business ethics class with an end-of-semester exam question based on a Kendrick Lamar song:
Boris Johnson, former mayor of London, has been appointed foreign secretary of the United Kingdom. An unlikely diplomat, Johnson is known for knocking over a 10-year-old Japanese boy during a touch rugby game, telling the Chinese that the British invented ping pong, or “whiff whaff,” and jokingly comparing the Tory party with “Papau New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.”
While foreign governments move quickly to evacuate their nationals from South Sudan where fighting threatens to plunge the country back into civil war, Kenya is being accused of deserting its citizens.
An uneasy calm has settled over Juba, the capital of South Sudan, after rival government factions called for a ceasefire to fighting that has left at least 270 people dead. Most shops are closed and residents are holed up at home. So far the streets are empty of tanks and soldiers as forces loyal to president Salva Kiir or his rival Riek Machar appear to be heeding their leaders’ orders.
Two Chinese peacekeepers were killed over the weekend, during clashes in South Sudan that threaten to plunge the young country back into civil war. The soldiers were on patrol in an armored vehicle near a refugee camp in Juba on Sunday (July 10), when a shelling attack killed them and injured six others, according to China’s defense ministry.
When fighting broke out between the bodyguards of South Sudan’s president and vice president on July 8 just as the two were meeting to discuss diffusing tensions, neither leader was able to explain why. Two days later, almost 300 people—including soldiers, civilians, and UN peacekeepers—have been killed in the capital of Juba. Both president Salva Kiir and vice president Riek Machar blame each other for instigating the violence.
(This post has been updated.)
When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited East Africa this week, he wooed his hosts with determination. Netanyahu, the first Israeli prime minister to visit Africa in three decades, laid a wreath at Rwanda’s genocide museum and watched lions with Ethiopia’s president Mulatu Teshome.
In the wake of a shooting that left five police officers dead in Dallas, US president Barack Obama has given yet another speech about gun violence in America, his second this week. He called the Dallas shooting, which took place during a Black Lives Matter rally on July 7, a “vicious, calculated, and despicable attack on law enforcement.”
Five Dallas police officers have been killed and several are in critical condition after snipers shot at police manning a Black Lives Matter rally on Thursday (July 7) evening. A total of 11 officers were shot.
As the European Union risks falling apart in the wake of Brexit, regional integration in Africa—once modeled after the EU—is making progress. At the African Union (AU) summit later this month, the AU will introduce a single passport to make travel to all 54 member countries of the union possible. The AU passport is part of an eventual goal of creating a “continent with seamless borders.”
When Louise Linton went to Zambia in 1999, at the age of 18, she found herself hiding from rebel soldiers, protecting an HIV-positive orphan girl, contracting malaria, and having close encounters with “lions, elephants, crocodiles, and snakes,” according to her recently published memoir, In Congo’s Shadow: One girl’s perilous journey to the heart of Africa. It was a gap year that turned into a nightmare, she recalls, as she quickly learned that “Africa is rife with hidden danger.”
The bodies of three Kenyan men— a human rights lawyer, his client, and their driver— were found in a river northeast of Nairobi last week, beaten, bound, and mutilated. Witnesses said one of the men had his eyes gouged out and another had an ear cut off.
