Africa Update Vol. 38
Welcome to the latest edition of Africa Update! This month we’ve got Sierra Leone’s first Chief Heat Officer, legal protections for Indigenous Pygmy Peoples in the DRC, progress on Tanzanian railroads, the 61 most anticipated African books of 2023, and more.
West Africa: Here’s why historical West African empires shifted their centres of power from the inland savannah to the coast over time. Sierra Leone has just hired its first Chief Heat Officer to deal with the risks of climate change in Freetown. In Ghana, a proposed anti-LGBTQI bill has led to an increase in harassment and extortion of queer Ghanaians. This is a really chilling read about the Nigerian military’s practice of forcing young women and girls who were kidnapped by insurgents to have abortions after they were rescued.
Central Africa: This is an interesting long read about why Uganda shifted its oil export pipeline partnership from Kenya to Tanzania. Direct criticism of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni remains risky, but limited calls for his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba to take power offer “a relatively safe way…to discuss a world beyond Museveni.” The DRC has recently passed a law supporting affirmative action and stronger land rights for Indigenous Pygmy Peoples.
East Africa: The long rains are likely to fail again across the Horn of Africa for the third year in a row, leading to an increase in severe malnutrition for vulnerable children. Kenya is being criticised for not doing enough to safeguard its citizens working in the Gulf, but then again it doesn’t do much to promote safe labour environments domestically either. Activists in Kenya are fighting for the return of land which was grabbed for tea farms by British colonists, during a period of brutal colonial rule. Here’s a good overview of how shifts in national Ethiopian politics are driving the Tigray conflict.
Southern Africa: In Cape Town, activists are responding to the housing crisis by occupying abandoned public buildings for residential use. Here are seven short articles debunking common myths about universal basic income in South Africa. Meet Regina Twala, a prominent independence activist from South Africa and Eswatini whose intellectual legacy was largely erased by European authors and publishers.
Politics + economics: This is an insightful piece about the intertwined practices of land dispossession and forced labour across Africa. You’ve probably already seen me recommending Ken Opalo’s Substack on African development, but it’s the most consistently insightful newsletter on this topic that I’ve seen. Here are five trends that will shape urban Africa in 2023. The African Climate Mobility Model has a great interactive website mapping the ways in which climate change will likely push people to migrate over the coming decades.
Transport: Lagos has just opened 27 km of an elevated rail system downtown, which I think about in total envy every time I pass Nairobi’s white elephant of a 27 km downtown expressway system. Another $280 million that could have gone towards functional public transit in Kenya is instead going to a bailout of the perpetually broke Kenya Airways. Tanzania has just signed a deal with a Chinese firm to build the final section of its standard gauge railway linking the coast to the borders with the DRC and Burundi.
Health: Just over 25% of all African citizens have been fully vaccinated against covid. If you want to know how many people die in traffic accidents in Kenya each year, the answer depends on whether you ask the police or the WHO. Here’s how colonial labour practices shifted Kikuyu cuisine in Kenya away from more nutritious local grains and towards maize, which led to malnutrition. Niger has made huge progress in stopping post-partum haemorrhage, the leading cause of maternal deaths, with cheap medical interventions.
Art + culture: Here are the best African books of 2022, and 61 highly anticipated African books for 2023. The newly-opened Dikan Center in Accra is the continent’s largest photography library, with over 30,000 books. The Horniman Museum in London has recently transferred six Benin bronzes back to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments.
Cheers,
Rachel