AFRICA

[kmaherali]

More than 60 percent of French speakers now live in Africa. Despite growing resentment at France, Africans are contributing to the evolution and spread of the French language.

French, by most estimates the world’s fifth most spoken language, is changing — perhaps not in the gilded hallways of the institution in Paris that publishes its official dictionary, but on a rooftop in Abidjan, the largest city in Ivory Coast.

There one afternoon, a 19-year-old rapper who goes by the stage name “Marla” rehearsed her upcoming show, surrounded by friends and empty soda bottles. Her words were mostly French, but the Ivorian slang and English words that she mixed in made a new language.

To speak only French, “c’est zogo” — “it’s uncool,” said Marla, whose real name is Mariam Dosso, combining a French word with Ivorian slang. But playing with words and languages, she said, is “choco,” an abbreviation for chocolate meaning “sweet” or “stylish.”

A growing number of words and expressions from Africa are now infusing the French language, spurred by booming populations of young people in West and Central Africa.

More than 60 percent of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80 percent of children studying in French are in Africa. There are as many French speakers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as in Paris.

Through social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, they are literally spreading the word, reshaping the French language from African countries, like Ivory Coast, that were once colonized by France.

“We’ve tried to rap in pure French, but nobody was listening to us,” said Jean Patrick Niambé, known as Dofy, a 24-year-old Ivorian hip-hop artist listening to Marla on the rooftop. “So we create words from our own realities, and then they spread.”

Walking down the streets of Paris or its suburbs, you can hear people use the word “enjailler” to mean “having fun.” But the word originally came from Abidjan to describe how adrenaline-seeking young Ivorians in the 1980s jumped on and off buses racing through the streets.

ImageA young woman in striped T-shirt and pants rapping as five young men listen closely to her on a rooftop surrounded by a low cinder block wall.

A young rapper who goes by the stage name Marla (left), practices her act with other rappers on a rooftop in Abidjan.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

Image
A man in headphones and a denim jacket, sits on a stool in a recording studio, speaking and pointing his finger.

Jean Patrick Niambé, known as Dofy, recording in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

The youth population in Africa is surging while the rest of the world grays. Demographers predict that by 2060, up to 85 percent of French speakers will live on the African continent. That’s nearly the inverse of the 1960s, when 90 percent of French speakers lived in European and other Western countries.

“French flourishes every day in Africa,” said Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a renowned Senegalese professor of philosophy and French at Columbia University. “This creolized French finds its way in the books we read, the sketches we watch on television, the songs we listen to.”

Speaking French in Africa

African countries where French is spoken by more than 10 percent of the population.

Map shows the African continent, highlighting countries where French is spoken by more than 10 percent of the population.

Tunisia

Morocco

Algeria

Mauritania

Mali

Niger

Senegal

Chad

Djibouti

Burkina

Faso

Gambia

Guinea

Benin

Ivory

Coast

Guinea-

Bissau

Central African Republic

Cameroon

Togo

Equatorial Guinea

Dem. Rep.

of Congo

Gabon

Rep. of Congo

FORMER FRENCH COLONY

OR PROTECTORATE

Madagascar

Note: Not all African islands are shown.Source: Organisation Internationale de la FrancophonieBy The New York Times
Nearly half of the countries in Africa were at one time French colonies or protectorates, and most of them use French as their official language.

But France has faced growing resentment in recent years in many of these countries for both its colonial legacy and continuing influence. Some countries have evicted French ambassadors and troops, while others target the French language itself. Some West African novelists write in local languages as an act of artistic resistance. The ruling junta in Mali has stripped French of its official status, and a similar move is underway in Burkina Faso.

Image
Youth on scooters take a joyride on a sandy beach as waves crash in the background.

Youth on Yoff Beach in Dakar, Senegal, once a French colony. The youth population in Africa is surging, and by 2060, demographers say, 85 percent of French speakers will live on the continent.Credit...Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times

Image
A group of students holding guitars look at a person sitting in the center.

Music students rehearse in a classroom in the Ecole Nationale des Arts et Culture in Dakar, Senegal.Credit...Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times

The backlash has not gone unnoticed in France, where the evolution of French provokes debate, if not angst, among some intellectuals. President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a 2019 speech: “France must take pride in being essentially one country among others that learns, speaks, writes in French.”

The language laboratory

In the sprawling Adjamé market in Abidjan, there are thousands of small stalls selling electronics, clothes, counterfeit medicine and food. The market is a perfect laboratory in which to study Nouchi, a slang once crafted by petty criminals, but which has taken over the country in under four decades.

Some former members of Abidjan’s gangs, who helped invent Nouchi, now work as guards patrolling the market’s alleys, where “jassa men” — young hustlers — sell goods to make ends meet. It is here that new expressions are born and die every day.

Germain-Arsène Kadi, a professor of literature at the Alassane Ouattara University in Ivory Coast, walked deep into the market one morning carrying with him the Nouchi dictionary he wrote.

Image
A view from up high of a busy street lined with buildings two to four stories high, with sidewalks full of pedestrians.

The Adjamé neighborhood in Abidjan where the Ivorian French known as “Nouchi” was created and developed.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

Image
A man in blue jeans and sunglasses stands in front of an outdoor market stall, looking down at a book he’s holding.

Germain-Arsène Kadi, a professor of comparative literature who has written a dictionary of Nouchi, at a street bookstore in the Adjamé market where he still goes to discover new words.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

At a maquis, a street restaurant with plastic tables and chairs, the owner gathered a few jassa men in their corner, or “soï,” to throw out their favorite words while they drank Vody, a mix of vodka and energy drink.

“They’re going to hit you,” the owner said in French, which alarmed me until they explained that the French verb for “hit,” frapper, had the opposite meaning there: Those jassa men would treat us well — which they did, throwing out dozens of words and expressions unknown to me in a few minutes.

Mr. Kadi frantically scribbled down new words on a notepad, saying repeatedly, “One more for the dictionary.”

It’s nearly impossible to know which word crafted on the streets of Abidjan might spread, travel or even survive.

“Go,” meaning “girlfriend” in Ivory Coast, was entered into the well-known French dictionary Le Robert this year.

In Abidjan this year, people began to call a boyfriend “mon pain” — French for “my bread.” Improvisations soon proliferated: “pain choco” is a cute boyfriend. A sugary bread, a sweet one. A bread just out of the oven is a hot partner.

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Two rappers speak into their microphones on a stage, under spotlights and beams of light that cast pink and green colors.

Marla, the rapper who practiced on a rooftop with friends, performs onstage at the Get Together festival with other rappers in Abidjan, in February.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

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A crowd of people attending a concert hold cellphones to capture a performance.

A crowd listens to Marla and her “Collectif Rap Group” at the festival in Abidjan.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

At a church in Abidjan earlier this year, the congregation burst out laughing, several worshipers told me, when the priest preached that people should share their bread with their brethren.

The expression has spread like a meme on social media, reaching neighboring Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of Congo, thousands of miles away. It hasn’t reached France yet. But Ivorians like to joke about which expressions French people will pick up, often years, if not decades, later.

“If French becomes more mixed, then visions of the world it carries will change,” said Josué Guébo, an Ivorian poet and philosopher. “And if Africa influences French from a linguistic point of view, it will likely influence it from an ideological one.”

Painful past, uncertain future

Le Magnific — the stage name for Jacques Silvère Bah — is one of Ivory Coast’s most famous standup comedians, renowned for his plays on words and imitations of West African accents.

But as a young boy learning French in school, he was forbidden to speak Wobé, his own language, he said. His French was initially so poor, he was reduced to communicating with gestures on the playground.

“We had to learn fast, and in a painful way,” said the 45-year-old Mr. Silvère one afternoon, before he took the stage at a standup comedy festival in Abidjan.

Across French-speaking West and Central African countries, French is seldom used at home and is rarely the first language, instead restricted to school, work, business or administration.

According to a survey released last year by the French Organization of the Francophonie, the primary organization for promoting French language and culture, 77 percent of respondents in Africa described French as the “language of the colonizer.” About 57 percent said it was an imposed language.

Sometimes the methods of imposing it were brutal, scholars say. At school in many French colonies, children speaking in their mother tongue were beaten or forced to wear an object around their necks known as a “symbol” — often a smelly object or an animal bone.

Still, many African countries adopted French as their official language when they gained independence, in part to cement their national identities. Some even kept the “symbol” in place at school.

Image
A man in blue standing alone onstage speaking, in front of a large crowd in a dark auditorium.

The standup comedian known as Le Magnific performs during the closing ceremony of a comedy festival in Ivory Coast called “Abidjan Capital of Laughter.” Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

Image
Four people standing talking to each other at night, with a bright spotlight in the background.

Mohamed Mustapha, known as Mamane, the organizer of the standup comedy show in Abidjan. “What makes our humor Pan-African is the French language,” he said.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

At the festival, Le Magnific and other standup comedians threw jibes in French and ridiculed one another’s accents, drawing laughter from the audience. It mattered little if a few words were lost in translation.

“What makes our humor Pan-African is the French language,” said the festival’s organizer, Mohamed Mustapha, known across West Africa by his stage name, Mamane. A standup comedian from Niger, Mamane has a daily comedy program listened to by millions around the world on Radio France Internationale.

“It’s about survival, if we want to resist against Nollywood,” he said, referring to Nigeria’s film industry, “and English-produced content.”

Today, more than a third of Ivorians speak French, according to the International Organization of the Francophonie. In Tunisia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the world’s largest French-speaking country — it is more than half.

But in many Francophone countries, governments struggle to hire enough French-speaking teachers.

“African children are still learning in French in extremely difficult conditions,” said Francine Quéméner, a program specialist in charge of language policies at the International Organization of the Francophonie. “They must learn to count, write, read in a language they don’t fully grasp, with teachers who themselves don’t always feel secure speaking French.”

Still, Ms. Quéméner said French had long escaped France’s control.

“French is an African language and belongs to Africans,” she said. “The decentralization of the French language is a reality.”

France notices

At the Hip Hop Académie, a youth program founded by the rapper Grödash in a Paris suburb, teens and children scribbled lyrics on notepads, following instructions to mix French and foreign languages.

Coumba Soumaré Camara, aged 9, tried out a few words from the mother tongues of her Mauritanian and Senegalese parents. She ended her couplet with “t’es magna” — you’re mean — combining French syntax and an expression from Mauritania.

Hip-hop, now dominating the French music industry, is injecting new words, phrases and concepts from Africa into France’s suburbs and cities.

Image
A music student holds out a cell phone while sitting at a table with a laptop and recording equipment.
Students at the Hip Hop Académie, a youth program founded by a rapper, in Les Ulis, a suburb of Paris.Credit...Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times

Image
Two dancers in front, and one just behind them, synchronized and in motion, stepping wide and about to clap, in front of a brightly colored wall with large graffiti letters.

Dancing at the Hip Hop Académie.Credit...Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times

One of the world’s most famous French-speaking pop singers is Aya Nakamura, originally from Mali. Many of the most streamed hip-hop artists are of Moroccan, Algerian, Congolese or Ivorian origins.

“Countless artists have democratized French music with African slang,” said Elvis Adidiema, a Congolese music executive with Sony Music Entertainment. “The French public, from all backgrounds, has become accustomed to those sounds.”

But some in France are slow to embrace change. Members of the French Academy, the 17th-century institution that publishes an official dictionary of the French language, have been working on the same edition for the past 40 years.

On a recent evening Dany Laferrière, a Haitian-Canadian novelist and the only Black member of the academy, walked the gilded corridors of the Academy’s building, on the left bank of the Seine River. He and his fellow academicians were reviewing whether to add to the dictionary the word “yeah,” which appeared in French in the 1960s.

Mr. Laferrière acknowledged that the Academy might need to modernize by incorporating entire dictionaries from Belgian, Senegalese, or Ivorian French.

“French is about to make a big leap, and she’s wondering how it’s going to go,” Mr. Laferrière said of the French language. “But she’s excited about where she’s headed.”

He paused, stared at the Seine through the window, and corrected himself.

“They, not she. They are now multiple versions of French that speak for themselves. And that is the greatest proof of its vitality.”

Image
Standing in a grand hall, with a stained-glass window behind him, a man looks toward the ceiling.

Dany Laferrière, a Haitian-Canadian writer and the only Black member of the French Academy, in the academy’s halls in Paris. He said there are now “now multiple versions of French that speak for themselves.”Credit...Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/worl ... guage.html

[kmaherali]

This year’s Africa Cup of Nations, like several previous editions, played out in Chinese-built arenas. It will end with familiar questions about their legacy

The Alassane Ouattara Stadium on the outskirts of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, struggled to fill its 60,000 Chinese-built seats in the early stages of the tournament.

The Alassane Ouattara stadium rises like a piece of sculpture from the dusty brown earth north of Ivory Coast’s largest city, its undulating roof and white columns towering over the empty landscape like a spaceship that has dropped onto a uninhabited planet.

On Sunday, the three-and-a-half-year-old stadium will host its signature moment, when the national soccer teams of Ivory Coast and Nigeria compete in the final of Africa’s biggest sporting event, in front of tens of thousands of fans chanting and cheering in a stadium financed and built by China.

While that is nothing new for the tournament, the Africa Cup of Nations, the arena is just the latest example of the contradictions that emerge from Chinese projects built on Chinese terms, and on African soil.

Stadiums have been a cornerstone of China’s diplomatic reach into Africa since the 1970s, but their number has increased since the early 2000s, part of a larger Chinese strategy to build infrastructure — from highways to railroads, ports to presidential palaces and even the headquarters of the African Union — in exchange for diplomatic clout or access to natural resources.

Through that trillion-dollar program, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, China has become a central partner to the developing countries that benefit from expensive projects they might not otherwise be able to afford. But Chinese construction has sometimes been accompanied by charges of local corruption, and critics have questioned the value of the big-budget projects, noting they deliver dubious long-term economic benefits but very real debts that governments can struggle to repay.

“China doesn’t ask why you need a stadium,” said Itamar Dubinsky, a researcher at the African Studies Program at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. “It just finances and builds it.”

ImageA stadium surrounded by empty roads.

The walk to the Ouattara stadium can take up to an hour because the road to it is not open yet. Critics say Chinese-built stadiums are rarely delivered with the infrastructure to support them.

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A soccer player kicks the ball while opposing team members react.

South African players during their match against Morocco.

Image
A man holds a flag above his head while standing in a crowd of fans, watching a match.

Guinea fans in Abidjan. The Cup of Nations is Africa’s biggest sporting event.

Over the past two decades, Chinese companies have built or renovated dozens of stadiums across Africa, including, in the past 15 years, nearly half of those that have hosted matches in the Africa Cup of Nations. That total includes three of the six used for this year’s tournament, whose showpiece is the 60,000-seat Ouattara stadium, designed and built by two Chinese state-owned companies.

Its exterior of white columns and curving arches — inset with panels tinted green and orange, the national colors of Ivory Coast — is a stylistic improvement from earlier projects on the continent, which critics have derided as drab concrete monoliths.

But three years after the stadium hosted its first game, the new road leading to it still hasn’t opened, forcing fans to walk for up to an hour to reach or leave the arena, and the sports city around it has yet to materialize. That, critics say, is another regular feature of the projects. Chinese-built stadiums are rarely delivered with the infrastructure to support them, or the know-how to maintain them.

Map locates the southern city of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, as well as the town of San Pedro to the west.

MALI

BURKINA

FASO

GUINEA

IVORY COAST

GHANA

Abidjan

LIBERIA

San Pedro

Gulf of Guinea

100 MILES

By The New York Times
Yet for countless fans who watched games over the past month, what mattered lay elsewhere. Ivory Coast, bouncing back from civil war and boasting one of West Africa’s largest economies and a dynamic middle class, has showcased its ability to host a major tournament in state-of-the-art facilities.

“One can only be impressed,” one fan, Halima Duret, said as she scanned the stands on a recent evening. An interior designer living in Abidjan, Ms. Duret was attending a soccer game for the first time, and it was a special one. Her home country’s team, Guinea, had reached the quarterfinals. “What a beauty,” she added.

The partnership between China and Ivory Coast, a major producer of rubber and cocoa, is emblematic of the way China has eagerly pursued ties with resource-rich African countries.

As Chinese and Ivorian workers were building the stadium in Ebimpé, on the outskirts of Abidjan, President Alassane Ouattara visited his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing in 2018 to strengthen the countries’ relations. Since then, Ivory Coast has increased its exports of rubber and crude oil to China, which has become Ivory Coast’s largest trading partner. China is also financing the expansion of Abidjan’s port, one of its largest Belt and Road Initiative projects in West Africa.

Image
A market vendor wearing a green-and-white curly wig blows into a long, plastic horn. Soccer clothing hangs from his stall while people walk by.

A vendor selling Ivory Coast paraphernalia at a market in Abidjan. The host nation will play Nigeria in Sunday’s final.

Image
A man walks across a bridge in Abidjan.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative has built bridges, railroads and ports in Africa.

Image
A soccer fan hoists a flag overhead and dances in the street while others watch.

Ivorians celebrating their victory over Mali in the quarterfinals of the Cup of Nations.

When China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, visited Ivory Coast during the Africa Cup of Nations last month, he thanked Mr. Ouattara for his country’s support to China’s “vital interests,” including on Taiwan. Mr. Ouattara vowed to deepen the bilateral relationship and said the countries shared a similar vision of the world order.

While stadiums might not be the biggest infrastructure projects, or the most worthwhile, they are popular, at least at first, experts on China-Africa relations said.

“A stadium is one of the most eye-catching signs of China’s ability to contribute to the development of African countries,” said Filomène Ebi, an Ivorian Sinologist and associate researcher at the National Taiwan University. “Most people in Ivory Coast know that China built the Ouattara stadium,” she said.

As mass consumption of sports booms in Africa, other countries have joined the game. A Turkish construction company built Senegal’s new national soccer stadium, which will host the Youth Olympic Games in 2026. And “Visit Saudi Arabia” is the main sponsor of a new pan-African soccer league.


Playing Soccer in $1.50 Sandals That Even Gucci Wants to Copy
In Ivory Coast, lêkê are the preferred footwear for amateur games and almost everything else.
Feb. 7, 2024

Western companies and governments are also playing: The French oil company Total Energies is the Africa Cup of Nations’ main sponsor, and the N.B.A. is a main backer of the Basketball Africa League.

But no country has poured more effort into embedding itself into Africa’s sports scene than China, and countries hosting the Cup of Nations have been favored recipients. All of the stadiums built for recent editions of the tournament in Angola and Gabon were built by Chinese companies. And in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, a Chinese company is renovating the stadium where President William Ruto was inaugurated, and which will host soccer games for the 2027 edition of the cup.

Most stadiums are donations from China, or financed through soft loans from Chinese banks. “A soccer stadium is a small price to pay for potentially much larger benefits,” said Simon Chadwick, a professor of sport and geopolitical economy at the Skema Business School in Paris.

But many African governments have let stadiums that were initially a point of pride fall into disrepair. A Chinese-built stadium in the capital of Gabon, Libreville, has been mostly abandoned since it hosted the final of the Cup of Nations in 2017. The Chinese-built national stadium of the Central African Republic, one of the world’s poorest countries, cannot even host the games of its own national team.

Image
Three soccer players kick around a ball on a dirt field.

A dusty field on the outskirts of San Pedro, Ivory Coast. Large stadiums are popular, but critics say they are not what the country needs most.

Image
A man sits alone in a row of mostly empty, green stadium seats.

Local government officials have handed out free tickets to try to fill the stands at the Chinese-built Laurent Pokou Stadium in San Pedro, Ivory Coast.

Image
A soccer player bounces a ball on his knee in a stadium as two people wearing purple shirts that read “ball kid” on the back look on.

The local club slated to take over the Pokou stadium after the cup said it would struggle to fill it.

Even Ivory Coast’s shiny stadium has imperfections: Its grass field doesn’t extend far enough beyond the playing surface, so organizers have had to patch its perimeter with artificial turf to keep players in cleats from slipping on the adjacent running track.

The future of the smaller stadiums built across Ivory Coast also appears uncertain.

Government officials said local teams would use the infrastructure once the tournament was over, but in the resort town of San Pedro, home to a new 20,000-seat stadium built by a Chinese company, the city’s main soccer club said the facility was too big for its needs.

“At best we might manage to fill it at 30 percent,” said Abdelkarim Bouaziz, an executive at F.C. San Pedro, which plays in Ivory Coast’s top league. “But we won’t be able to pay for its maintenance.”

Ivory Coast invested more than $1 billion in the organization of the tournament, but it has also struggled to fill its stadiums’ shiny seats, raising questions about whether it made sense to construct such large venues for a monthlong event.

During the opening game, which featured the host nation, the Ouattara stadium was about two-thirds full. In San Pedro, the town hall was recently awash with unsold tickets, which the mayor, Nakaridja Cissé, said she was distributing free in an effort to invite residents into the new arena.

Ivorian officials say they have a post-tournament strategy for the new or renovated infrastructure. Ousmane Gbané, the head of the National Office for Sports, said local clubs like F.C. San Pedro would finally leave Abidjan, where they have trained and played for years, and use the new facilities. International hotel chains, Mr. Gbané said, had expressed interest in managing the residences built for the tournament’s teams.

“We’ve learned from the mistakes of others,” Mr. Gbané said. In only a few weeks, he said confidently, “the infrastructure we built for Afcon will have a new life.”

Image
A stadium lit up at night as cars drive past.

The Chinese-built Laurent Pokou Stadium in San Pedro.

Abdi Latif Dahir, Tariq Panja and Loucoumane Coulibaly contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/10/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

The waterborne disease has killed more than 4,000 people in seven countries over the past two years. Experts blame severe storms, a lack of vaccines, and poor water and sewer systems.


In Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, patients were treated in a makeshift cholera treatment center set up inside the National Heroes Stadium, usually used for sports.Credit...Namukolo Siyumbwa/Reuters

Sandra Mwayera wailed as her older brother slouched next to her in the back seat of a car — he had died from cholera as he waited for treatment among dozens of others outside a hospital in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.

“My brother! My brother! Why have you abandoned me?” she pleaded. “Come back, please. Come back!”

In neighboring Zambia, inside the 60,000-seat National Heroes Stadium in the capital, Lusaka, rows of gray cots lined rooms at a makeshift treatment center where 24-year-old Memory Musonda had died. Her family said they were not informed until four days later — the government buried her, and they have yet to locate her grave.

Ms. Musonda’s uncle, Stanley Mwamba Kafula, said the family was “disturbed” and “heartbroken.”

Active outbreaks of cholera, a waterborne bacterial disease, are now raging in five countries in central and southern Africa, ranging from as far north as the Democratic Republic of Congo, and down to Mozambique.

The epidemic has spread over the past two years, infecting more than 220,000 and killing more than 4,000 people in seven countries. This is the deadliest regional outbreak in terms of cases and deaths to hit Africa in at least a decade, said Dr. Patrick Otim, who oversees the cholera response for the World Health Organization in Africa. Public health workers in Africa say it is rare to see so many cases in so many countries at the same time.

Image
People fill up buckets and bottles with water out of three spigots in front of a wooden fence.

People filling up bottles and buckets with safe drinking water in Harare, Zimbabwe. The surest way to prevent cholera is to keep water sources for drinking and washing separate from sewage, public health experts say.Credit...Jekesai Njikizana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Cholera cases in Africa had actually been on a downward slide and hit a low in 2020, he said. But then came an uptick in West Africa in 2021, followed by the current outbreak in the southern part of the continent.

Two countries — Zambia and Malawi — have reported their largest cholera outbreaks ever, while Zimbabwe has seen its second-highest number of cases on record. Of the 19 countries in the African Union that have reported deaths and cases over the past year, nearly three quarters of the cases have come from southern Africa, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The cholera situation in southern Africa — particularly in Zimbabwe and Zambia — is dire,” said Dr. Mounia Amrani, the southern Africa medical team leader for Doctors Without Borders.

The devastation is linked to increasingly ferocious storms, a shortage of vaccines, and poor water and sewer infrastructure, public health experts said.

Representatives from 15 nations in the Southern African Development Community have agreed to a collective mobilization that includes investing in vaccine production and distribution, collaborating on surveillance for the illness across borders and developing reliable water and sanitation systems.

Image
A child lies across a man’s lap as a health care worker treats him with an IV.

A health care worker tending to a patient at a temporary cholera treatment center in Lilongwe, Malawi. The country has reported its largest cholera outbreak ever.Credit...Fredrik Lerneryd/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Zambia has been hit the hardest by the disease and is experiencing its deadliest outbreak on record. Since October, more than 650 people have died and more than 18,500 have been infected, though cases and deaths have slowed since they peaked in January. Five deaths were reported in the 24 hours leading up to Monday, compared with the more than 15 fatalities that were recorded daily last month. Schools reopened on Monday after a delay of about a month.

Still, there are worrying signs. The outbreak was initially confined to the capital of Lusaka but has since spread to nine other provinces. The death rate of 3.5 percent is far higher than the 1 percent rate that health experts say is typical. Dr. Otim said about half of the deaths in Zambia occurred at home rather than at health centers, an indication that people either denied or were unaware they had cholera.

Doctors Without Borders has deployed 50 health workers to Zambia and 30 to Zimbabwe to help manage the outbreaks.

Even as public health and government officials race to battle the outbreaks, the Africa C.D.C. warns of the potential for a difficult situation ahead: Above-normal rainfall is projected across much of the region through this month, the type of weather that floods communities, destroys infrastructure and increases the risk of cholera transmission.

People typically are infected with cholera when they ingest water that has been contaminated by human waste. The surest way to prevent the disease is to keep water sources for drinking and washing separate from sewage, public health experts say.

Many communities across southern Africa are plagued by poor water and sewer infrastructure. Residents often rely on shallow pit latrines as toilets, and, without piped water, use streams or lakes for drinking and washing. This presents a significant risk of cross contamination, especially when there are heavy rains and floods.

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A person wearing full protective gear disinfects areas of an outdoor cholera clinic.

A cholera health clinic run by Doctors Without Borders in Munigi, Democratic Republic of Congo. The organization is helping countries across the region treat suffering patients.Credit...Arlette Bashizi/Reuters

One of the main commitments made by leaders of the Southern African Development Community was to invest more in developing resilient water and sewer systems.

“If we don’t address the water, hygiene and sanitation issues, we will not stop the cholera outbreak,” Dr. Otim of the W.H.O. said.

Vaccination is also a major issue. A surge in cholera outbreaks globally in 2021 and 2022 depleted the stockpile of vaccines, Dr. Otim said, and there is only one manufacturer that produces the cholera vaccine at a global level. Last year, about 37 million doses were produced, even though the demand was about 60 million, he said.

Dr. Amrani said that cholera had received less attention than other diseases from the pharmaceutical industry, also contributing to the vaccine shortage.

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A health worker administers the cholera vaccine to a woman through her mouth.

A health worker administering a cholera vaccine in Kuwadzana, Zimbabwe, last month. Last year, about 37 million doses of the vaccine were produced, even though the demand was about 60 million.Credit...Nyasha Mukapiko/EPA, via Shutterstock

While longer-term solutions such as creating better water infrastructure and increasing vaccine production may take time, organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the W.H.O. are helping countries across the region tend to the immediate problem of treating suffering patients. They are providing hydration treatments, medical workers and supplies.

At a treatment facility set up at a school in a dense suburb of Harare, nurses wearing latex gloves tended to patients splayed on cots. There were groans and cries, and some patients propped themselves uncomfortably on benches, waiting to be treated.

“I’m dying! Please, I’m dying!” one woman at the school shrieked as nurses tried to put intravenous tubes into her hands to give her fluid for hydration. “What shall my children do? Who shall take care of them?”

On a recent morning inside the Sally Mugabe Central Hospital in Harare, where Ms. Mwayera’s brother had died outside in the car, a nurse delivered bad news to members of another family waiting in a hallway. Jethro Nguweni, 52, had lost his battle with cholera.

“What shall I do?” his wife, Melia Nguweni, sobbed, removing her head scarf and throwing it down. “My husband is gone. He has left me.”

Image
A woman carrying a giant bundle on her head walks down a flooded, muddy street between houses.

A flooded street in Lusaka, Zambia, last month. There is an especially high risk of water contamination when there are heavy rains and floods.Credit...Namukolo Siyumbwa/Reuters

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

OLD WORLD
YOUNG AFRICA

The Father, the Son and the Fight Over Their King



A student’s vow to overthrow one of Africa’s last ruling monarchs faces a roadblock: his own father, a soldier sworn to protect the throne.

The riot police appeared out of nowhere, charging furiously toward the young protesters trying to oust King Mswati III, who has ruled over the nation of Eswatini for 38 years. The pop of gunfire ricocheted through the streets, and the demonstrators started running for their lives.

Manqoba Motsa, a college student, and his fellow Communists quickly slipped into disguise, pulling plain T-shirts over their red hammer-and-sickle regalia. They ducked down a sloped street and raced away, thinking that, somehow, they had escaped.

Then Mr. Motsa’s phone rang: A close friend at the protest had been shot. They found him splayed on a bed in the emergency room, a bloody bandage around his torso, a tube in his arm.

“We can’t stop fighting,” the wounded protester, Mhlonishwa Mtsetfwa, told the dozen red-clad Communist Party members surrounding his hospital bed. “We’ll do this until our last breath.”

Across much of Africa, that anger is palpable in restless young activists, like Mr. Motsa, who are pushing, protesting and at times risking their lives to remove long-reigning leaders they view as barriers to the continent’s true potential.

While the world grays and nations worry about collapsing without enough workers to support their aging populations, Africa — the youngest continent, with a median age of 19 — sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. It boasts ample young people to power economic growth and global influence.

But to the frustration of its youthful population, Africa also has some of the world’s longest-serving leaders, who often place their own personal gain and political longevity above the welfare of their nations, experts on the continent’s politics say.

At least 18 heads of state in Africa have held power for more than two decades in the post-colonial era, and many have left legacies of poverty, unemployment, unrest and a wealthy ruling elite far removed from the everyday struggles of their people.


ImageTwo men, one in a red shirt with a yellow hammer and sickle, put up on a pole a matching flag with a hammer and sickle.

“We can’t stop fighting,” said Mhlonishwa Mtsetfwa, in hammer-and-sickle shirt. He and other members of the Communist Party of Swaziland placed a flag outside the courthouse in Nhlangano, Eswatini, in May.

Image
A young man in a baseball cap holds an animated argument with an older, bearded man, outside on a street.

An anti-monarchy activist, Manqoba Motsa, arguing with Sibusiso B. Dlamini, the secretary general of the African United Democratic Party, who says the monarchy and democracy can coexist.

Age is a huge political dividing line. The 10 countries with the biggest differences in the world between the leader’s age and the median age of the population are all in Africa, according to data from the Pew Research Center. The widest gap is in Cameroon, where President Paul Biya, who took office in 1982, is 91. The median age there is under 18 — a difference of more than 70 years.

Many African youths feel their governments are rotten to the core, and are demanding something far beyond tinkering with traditional politics.

“Any African leader today is very aware that young people can come out and cause trouble, serious trouble,” said Alcinda Honwana, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics from Mozambique, where young people accusing the governing party of rigging elections flooded the streets last October.

The Arab Spring in 2011, when young people helped to overthrow leaders in Egypt and Tunisia, set the stage for other youth uprisings in Africa, Dr. Honwana said.

That same year, rappers in Senegal formed a youth movement known as “Fed Up,” which helped oust the president in elections. His successor, Macky Sall, has not fared much better with the country’s youths: They led fierce street demonstrations last year demanding that he not pursue a third term. He eventually said he would not run, but then recently postponed the elections by 10 months, prompting more protests.

Musicians in Burkina Faso started a similar movement that fueled enormous demonstrations in 2014 and forced out the longtime president. And in Sudan, young demonstrators also helped to lead the charge to oust President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in 2019 — and they stayed on the streets to protest the regime that replaced him, with hundreds killed and thousands more wounded in crackdowns by the military.

In few places have the youth uprisings been as surprising as in Eswatini, a kingdom of 1.2 million people that shed its colonial name, Swaziland, in 2018 on the order of the king.

The map locates Eswatini in southern Africa. It is bordered by the country of South Africa to the north, west, south, and southeast.

BOTSWANA

ESWATINI

Mbabane

Johannesburg

Matsapha

LESOTHO

SOUTH AFRICA

Indian

Ocean

Cape Town

200 MILES

By The New York Times
King Mswati, 55, the last ruling monarch in sub-Saharan Africa, took the throne as a slender, baby-faced teenager in 1986 — making him one of the world’s longest serving leaders. His place in the nation’s culture is so revered that, traditionally, people hoping to address him in one of his palaces approach by crawling.

But the king presides over a country where youth unemployment is a suffocating 58 percent. Many of the nation’s children are orphaned, mostly because their parents have died of AIDS.

Yet, to many young people, the king seems to almost flaunt his indifference. Critics said he showed up at a traditional ceremony wearing a watch that sells for 13 times the annual income of most of his subjects.

Image
The king and a group of men carry wooden staffs and wear leopard skin loincloths over cloth skirts. They are greeting a large group of young women.
King Mswati III greeted young women at a traditional reed dance ceremony in October in Nhlangano, Eswatini. He has been criticized for wearing expensive watches and jewelry while many of his subjects live in poverty.

Image
Barefoot women holding tall reeds line up in a dirt field. A woman in a blue uniform stands in front of them.

Women gathered at the gates of the royal residence for the reed dance ceremony. Many in Eswatini revere their monarch and believe he has special powers.

Thousands of citizens, most of them young, erupted in furious protests at his stifling reign in 2021, lighting up the skies with the flames of ransacked businesses, many connected to the king. Soldiers and the police responded with bullets, killing dozens.

The king’s father, King Sobhuza II, banned political parties from elections in 1973 and gave himself absolute power. A Constitution adopted in 2005 put some checks on the king, but political parties are still banned from elections, though individuals can run on their own. All laws must get the king’s approval, lawmakers cannot override his decisions, he appoints the prime minister and he can dissolve Parliament at his pleasure.

Mr. Motsa, a 28-year-old college senior struggling to scrounge enough tuition money to graduate, regrouped with activists last year for the 50th anniversary of King Sobhuza’s decree, vowing to cause enough chaos to press an admittedly ambitious demand: They wanted a democracy.

Short of that, they hoped people would at least boycott last year’s national elections, arguing that voting merely gave the appearance of credibility to a bogus system.

“There will never be a situation that will come that will make us give up the fight,” Mr. Motsa said.

Even his own family cannot seem to stop him, a sign of how wide the generational chasm can be.

Mr. Motsa’s uncle says his activism will get him killed. His mother fears it will get the rest of them killed, too. And they are aghast at his treasonous demands to abolish the monarchy.

After all, his aunt is one of the king’s many wives, and his father is a soldier in the king’s army, sworn to protect the throne against all threats — including his son.

Now, the government is hunting him down.

This month, the police pulled a Communist Party leader into an interrogation room and told her that Mr. Motsa had better watch his back.

He was wanted, they warned. For terrorism.

‘On Your Way to Death’

Mr. Motsa recounted the day he said his father threatened to kill him.

Dozens had gathered to bury Mr. Motsa’s grandmother on a bushy slope near the family homestead. The local chief’s representative was supposed to speak, but Mr. Motsa, who showed up at the funeral with his Communist allies, shot down the idea, calling the envoy a symbol of a tyrannical regime.

As the mourners stood by the grave, Mr. Motsa said his father was enraged at the gall, demanding of his son, “Who are you?” and threatening to kill him.

“It won’t be easy,” Mr. Motsa recalled responding. “I am also a soldier. I am a member of the people’s army.”

His father, Samuel Mahlatsini Motsa, 55, said he never made any threats, adding that his son and the other Communist Party members at the funeral were drunk.

Father and son barely talk anymore, their relationship icy, their differences symbolic of a national rift made violently clear during the unrest more than two years ago: While many demand radical change, others ardently embrace tradition and the monarchy.

Image
Manqoba Motsa, in a baseball cap, near a gravesite in a rural area rimmed by hills.

Manqoba Motsa near his grandmother’s grave in Matsapha, where, during her funeral, he said that he and his father had a bitter argument.

Image
A man in a red polo shirt that says “50” stands in the doorway of a home.

Mr. Motsa’s father, Samuel Mahlatsini Motsa, is a soldier in the king’s army and is loyal to the king. The family lives in Luve, in central Eswatini, in a modest cinder-block home where the tap has run dry.

As Mr. Motsa recounted the clash at the funeral, he sat across from his father on the floor of his parents’ living room, a shell of his ordinary self. Usually boisterous and blunt, his body stiffened and he spoke softly, barely looking in his father’s direction.

He was once an “obedient” son, his father said.

Mr. Motsa, in fact, almost followed his father’s path. After high school, he took an uncle’s advice and went through a ritual to become a member of the regiments that are duty bound to protect King Mswati. He thought it would help him get a job, perhaps as a police officer or, like his father, a soldier.

Instead, Mr. Motsa found himself in a position all too familiar to young Africans: He could not find work. Data from the African Development Bank Group shows that 15- to 35-year-olds on the continent are vastly underemployed or do not have stable jobs. The effects can be devastating, sometimes forcing them to migrate, turn to crime or even to extremist groups.

In Eswatini, “We have a lot of educated people that are unemployed, and they are frustrated,” said Prince David, a half brother of King Mswati’s. “They are young, educated, unemployed and not knowing what to do.”

Mr. Motsa ultimately found a job in a very different sector of the economy — as a laborer on an illicit marijuana farm, where he earned enough to pay for his first year of university.

He was struck by how many people struggled to buy food, despite working hard, while the king’s lavish life unspooled before them all on social media and in the news: photographs of a smiling royal family standing next to elaborate, multilayered cakes at birthday parties in any of the king’s dozen or so palaces.

Opposition figures publicly accused the king of buying 19 Rolls Royces and 120 BMWs for his large family, while public servants protested for better pay. Headlines recounted the royal family’s multimillion-dollar trip to Las Vegas and the $58 million spent on the royal plane, a decked-out Airbus measuring nearly three-quarters of the length of a football field.

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A line of men dressed in red cloths worn over one shoulder stand outside at an airport looking at a huge airplane at sunset.

Officials waited for the return of King Mswati III at the airport named after him. His royal $58 million Airbus plane is nearly three-quarters the length of a football field.

Image
A framed picture of King Mswati III waving, dressed in academic robes and a mortarboard.

King Mswati is also the chancellor of the University of Eswatini. Students went on strike there last year, and later professors and staff struck, too, over wages and working conditions.

A government spokesman, Alpheous Nxumalo, said the king had fairly inherited his wealth and put profits from businesses controlled by the royal family into scholarships and other programs to alleviate poverty.

“The king is not a cause for poverty, but a solution,” Mr. Nxumalo said.

Mr. Motsa’s opposition to the monarchy stiffened when he started at the University of Eswatini in 2019 and joined the Communist Party.

Even by the standards of the king’s most fervent detractors, the Communist Party is seen as radical. It calls for the total abolition of the monarchy, while most democracy advocates would accept a largely ceremonial role, like in England. Many Communists embrace violence, if necessary, to oust him.

At his family’s rural homestead, Mr. Motsa began describing the king as selfish and out of touch — views that his father, after three decades of protecting the throne, considered untrue.

King Mswati, the elder Mr. Motsa said, had paid his medical bills when he fell ill. He recounted how an aide once urged aggression toward dissidents, yet the king refused. “Why should I?” he recalled the king saying. “They also have babies.”

Political party leaders were “the worst dictators,” the elder Mr. Motsa said.

Now his son was one of them.

“Once you join any political organization,” he said, “you are on your way to death.”

‘True Leaders Die Young’

Loved ones repeatedly told Mr. Motsa that his activism would bring death — and not only for him.

“This will cause people to kill us,” said his mother, Badzelisile Mirriam Motsa, 48, worrying that her son would turn the whole family into a target.

“You get a bullet and die,” warned his uncle Thando Dludlu, 55.

Even Mr. Motsa’s comrades often painted their struggle as a path to an early end.

“We’ve got to commit suicide,” a veteran activist, Mphandlana Shongwe, told Mr. Motsa and dozens of other students before a planned protest at Parliament on the 50th anniversary of King Sobhuza’s decree.

Mr. Shongwe, 63, belonged to the country’s largest political party — the People’s United Democratic Movement, or Pudemo — but the government banned it, calling it a terrorist organization. As a young man, he was arrested and accused of trying to overthrow the government. But this new generation has advantages, he said — namely technology and a country much more openly dissatisfied with the king.

Still, the monarchy would not surrender without a fight, he said, so students needed to step into the line of fire.

“True leaders die young because they are a threat,” he told them.

Image
A group of men, some wearing red shirts with a yellow hammer and sickle, dancing in a group.

Student activists dancing and chanting the day before a protest in front of Parliament, where they were planning to deliver complaints about the lack of funds for higher education.

Image
A man wearing a mustard yellow and black shirt and a black beret stands speaking to a group of people, who are blurred out in the photo.

The first woman elected president of the national student union, Gabisile Ndukuya, sat at the organizers’ table as Mphandlana Shongwe, a veteran of the anti-monarchy movement, told students that they must be ready to face a violent government response.

The message did not faze the activists in the room, many of whom had dodged bullets during the uprising three years ago.

The upheaval had begun with mourning: a memorial service for a law student found dead on the side of the road. Many suspected foul play by the police. After a scuffle between students and officers outside the memorial, the police invaded the service, firing tear gas at the mourners.

Mr. Motsa said he and other activists struck back, throwing stones at a nearby police station. Some protesters tried set it on fire, he said, and gathered tires to burn in the streets. When the police swooped in, local residents blocked the officers, enabling Mr. Motsa to get away.

The rioting across Eswatini’s lush, mountainous landscape peaked in June 2021. Gruesome pictures and videos of young protesters with holes in their bodies circulated online. A top Communist Party official reported being tortured by the police at a roadblock. Mr. Motsa described joining a crowd rioting outside a grocery store and helping carry a young man who had been shot in the stomach by security forces.

The unrest was a release of simmering discontent. Surveys in 2021, shortly before the uprising, found that 69 percent of people polled were unsatisfied with the way democracy worked in their country, according to Afrobarometer, an independent research network.

Beyond the 27 deaths reported by the government — activists argue the actual number was more than 70 — the upheaval caused about $160 million worth of damage, according to King Mswati.

“Something like this is pure evil,” the king said after the unrest. “You cannot say the country must burn to the ground because there is something you want.”

Mr. Nxumalo, the government spokesman, said the king had no problem making changes and pointed to the Constitution, drafted with the king’s blessing nearly two decades ago after citizens raised concerns. What the king would not tolerate, Mr. Nxumalo said, were young activists acting like insurgents.

“No government negotiates with terrorists,” he said.

The fires of the uprising cooled and the ransacked businesses were spruced up, but the anger remained. Mr. Motsa and his fellow student activists wanted to keep up the pressure by handing a petition directly to Parliament last year, bracing for a violent crackdown.

Image
A man in a blue shirt stands holding his cellphone as if he’s filming something, while other young men stand nearby.

Mr. Motsa and fellow student leaders staging a night rally to encourage people in Eswatini to protest the monarchy on the 50th anniversary of the royal decree that banned political parties from competing in elections.

Image
Two people can be seen backlit in an open doorway from outside at night.

Communist Party members use a modest one-room flat in a rugged community on the outskirts of the industrial city of Matsapha as their home base. The police have raided it several times.

“This is the year to determine the democracy we want,” said Gabisile Ndukuya, a Communist Party member and the first woman to be elected president of the national student union.

“We are here, comrades, ready for anything,” she added, thrusting a fist into the air.

When the moment of truth arrived in April, on the anniversary of King Sobhuza’s decree, Mr. Motsa was pacing in a panic.

It was 9:30 a.m. and the students were already 90 minutes late. They had hit the most basic and exasperating snag: They could not get a ride.

It turns out, others wanted to protest the monarchy, too — and the national transportation union’s way of doing that was to go on strike. The bus company the students had hired suddenly bailed out.

Mr. Motsa feverishly made calls to try to salvage the students’ big moment, but the bad news kept coming. Soldiers and police officers were everywhere, searching cars at roadblocks. Bus drivers were too scared to ferry around a group of radicals. The students gave up and went home.

“Where have we failed?” one student asked himself and others. “Just by not having enough buses?”

‘I’m a Problem’

Mr. Motsa’s mother feels sick — physically, emotionally, mentally.

“My hands are not working good because of the depression he caused me,” she said of her son. “I have pain in my heart.”

“I’m a problem in your life,” Mr. Motsa said, visiting home after the failed protest.

“Yes you are,” his mother replied.

Image
A woman in a pink tank top looks at a young man in a black shirt while they stand outside on the grass.

Mr. Motsa’s mother, Badzelisile Mirriam Motsa, said that his activism against the king caused her physical and mental distress. “I have pain in my heart,” she said.

Image
Three people, all wearing black, sitting in a vehicle. A woman in the forward seat is on a phone.

Mr. Motsa, center, uses a taxi to travel to his parents’ rural homestead in central Eswatini. He hardly visits anymore because of tension over his stance against the monarchy.

His mother, a chicken vendor who attends church every Sunday, despises his political activity so much that she would rather he work in the illicit marijuana business, like his older brother does. At least with marijuana he would earn a living.

The Motsa family might be loyal to King Mswati — and even related to him — but their lives are far from the glossy palaces and luxury motorcades of the monarchy. The family homestead consists of modest cinder block structures with no running water. A tap out front, once used by the whole community, has been mostly dry for years.

Mr. Motsa’s parents live in a square, two-bedroom unit with a corrugated tin roof. Inside, a large calendar with King Mswati in a military suit greets visitors. Next to that hangs a small framed picture of the king flanked by three men, one of them Mr. Motsa’s father, from his more chiseled days.

“The king’s world is given by God,” Mr. Motsa’s mother said. She noted that the heads of state in most countries live much more comfortable lives than their constituents do.

The modern kingdom of Eswatini began around 1750, when the Nkhosi-Dlamini clan arrived in the region and absorbed other clans. The kingdom generally avoided direct battles with other nations. At times, it tried to appease white settlers by working with them to defeat other African kingdoms, according to the national museum, but its people never earned the reputation of warriors like their neighbors, the Zulus.

What made the country special today, many supporters of the king said, was its peacefulness. That is why, to many, the unrest has been so jarring.

“Why would you go to the extent of burning stuff?” said Simiso Mavuso, 20, who also performed the ritual to join the king’s regiments, just as Mr. Motsa had.

“When you want change,” Mr. Mavuso said, “do it in a respectful way.”

Image
A young man stands bent over in the middle of small, domed straw huts.

Simiso Mavuso, 20, standing among the thatched huts where he and others participated in a ritual to join the regiments sworn to protect the king. He believes the monarchy is good for the country.

Image
A round shield made of animal hide lying on the ground, next to a man and his shadow.

A traditional shield used in a ritual by men and boys pledging their loyalty to King Mswati.

Even Mr. Motsa has moments of doubt. Trudging through the green hills near his home village, he came to a clearing. Neat rows of marijuana plants sprung up near a creek — the business enterprise of his older brother.

Marijuana farming looked enticing. The university, facing a multimillion-dollar deficit, was enduring its longest closure yet. First, students went on strike to protest the lack of scholarships. Then, the faculty went on strike to demand higher wages.

Mr. Motsa, a fourth-year student in economics and statistics, said he was $97 in debt and needed another $162 to register for classes.

He scraped by with a few bucks from the occasional odd job, borrowing from friends or asking his parents. He felt he could get by on about $2.50 per day, but it was never guaranteed.

He bent over one of the plants and rubbed a leaf. This single plant could sell for more than $40, his brother’s business partner said.

Mr. Motsa’s eyes lit up.

He can riff endlessly about Marx and Mao and Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He dreams of a world of shared prosperity where everyone gets what they need.

But, sometimes, theory meets real life — and Mr. Motsa has to confront his choices.

“You are creating wealth over here,” he told his brother. “I need to join you.”

‘He Is Still My Son’

About eight police officers surrounded Ms. Ndukuya, the student union leader, in a dark room at police headquarters this month, pelting her with questions and threats of arrest, she said.

They held a printout of the statement she and Mr. Motsa released this year on behalf of the student union, urging students to “violently remove Mswati and his cronies from power.”

Mr. Motsa had better go into exile, she recalled an officer saying.

“Once we catch him, he’ll never be out of jail,” Ms. Ndukuya said the officer warned.

After seven hours of interrogation, she was released, she said. But the message stuck.

“We don’t feel safe,” Ms. Ndukuya said.

Image
Two people stand in a classroom in front of tubs meant to gather ballots for an election.

Despite calls among young activists to boycott Eswatini’s national elections, many citizens turned out to vote anyway.

Image
A person stands outside in front of a brick wall with the words “Mswati Must Fall” spray painted on it.

In the village where Mr. Motsa spent part of his youth, some people openly expressed their displeasure with the king, scrawling graffiti that said, “Mswati Must Fall!!”

A few months earlier, a squad of officers had barged into the concrete room that the Communist Party used as a base, carrying rifles as a helicopter hovered overhead, witnesses said.

Before that, one of the king’s most vocal critics had been shot dead inside his home in front of his children. The government vehemently denied involvement; many, including the European Union ambassador, called the killing an assassination.

Now, Mr. Motsa worries he could be next.

The police say they are seeking him for the burning of an Eswatini flag and an empty police truck on Sept. 30, 2022. Hundreds of students had gathered that day to demand scholarships, but they scattered when tear gas and rubber bullets began to rain down, protest organizers said.

Some took cover at a nearby hospital, where they found a police pickup truck sitting in the parking lot, like a plum waiting to be devoured. Students set upon the vehicle, bashing and torching it, witnesses said.

Since then, the chaos of that day seemed to fade — one of many violent flare-ups between the young rebels and king’s security forces.

Or so the Communists thought.

Last month, the police arrested a party member and charged him with terrorism in connection with the burning of the truck and the flag.

Then, the police went to another party member with a list of people wanted for the vandalism.

Mr. Motsa was one of them.

He went into hiding, trying to figure out his next move in what seemed to be a losing battle against the king.

The government was bearing down, while he and his comrades barely had enough money to pay their cellphone bills, let alone hire buses for protests. Peace had largely returned to the country, despite their best efforts to stoke chaos. Thousands of people had lined up to vote in last year’s elections, ignoring their calls for a boycott.

“If you don’t vote, it’s like you are saying, ‘Yes,’ to what is happening,” one voter, Fanelo Magagula, 23, said as he left a polling station.

Sure, Eswatini was run like a dictatorship and the king sometimes abused his powers, he said, but voting was the only way to do something about it.

The activists also have failed to get other world leaders to back their demands for change.

Last June, the United States gave the king two awards for Eswatini’s progress in treating people with H.I.V. and AIDS.

Then, in September, King Mswati took to the podium before the United Nations General Assembly and declared himself a defender of democracy.

Image
King Mswati speaking into two microphones on a podium featuring the U.N. logo.

In a speech before the United Nations General Assembly in New York last September, King Mswati said that he and his nation are defenders of democracy.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Image
Two young men, one in a white dress shirt and tie, sit at desks in a classroom.

At a private school in the town of Matsapha, students are taught to revere the monarchy.

More than 95 percent of eligible voters in his country had registered, he said, in “a ringing endorsement of the support for the system of government.”

The words did not match the mood back home.

An Afrobarometer survey released in 2022 found that more than 80 percent of respondents said the country was headed in the wrong direction. Approval of the government’s management of the economy had plummeted to 12 percent.

Mr. Motsa takes heart in some shifts, notably the willingness of people in his country to complain openly about the government, which he considers a step toward democracy.

There is hope for his relationship with his family, too. His father occasionally calls him and offers support, like a box of food he gave his son around election time.

“He is still my son,” the elder Mr. Motsa said. “I’m still ready to mold him and show him the right way.”

But that will have to wait.

With the police after him, Mr. Motsa caught a ride to the border and walked into South Africa this month, he said, hoping to continue the struggle in exile.

“We have not left because we fear the regime,” Mr. Motsa said, presenting his predicament as an opportunity — “to organize better, and organize with some anger, some anger necessary for us to gain the freedom we desire.”

Image
A small group of people outside at night are seemingly lit up by only a car’s headlights.

Even as young activists continue to take to the streets to push for democracy and an end to the monarchy, they are short of funds and appear to be fighting a losing battle.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Risking a Society’s Retribution, Growing Numbers of Girls Resist Genital Cutting

Sierra Leone is one of a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have not banned cutting. Now, young women are defying mothers and grandmothers by refusing to undergo the procedure.


When Seio Bangura, 18, told her family she did not want to participate in a ritual ceremony that involved genital cutting, they forced her to leave home and seek refuge with friends.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

KAMAKWIE, Sierra Leone — When Seio Bangura’s final high school exam results arrived not long ago, she learned she had earned grades high enough to get into college. It was a thrilling moment for the daughter of farmers who never finished primary school. But Ms. Bangura is not making plans for university. Instead, she spends most days sitting on a bench, watching others head to class or work.

Ms. Bangura, 18, left home almost five years ago, after her parents gave her a choice: to be initiated in a ceremony centered on genital cutting, or leave. The ceremony allows entrance to bondo, or “the society,” a term for the gender-and-ethnicity-based groups that control much of life here.

“My mom said, ‘If you won’t do bondo, you have to go,’” Ms. Bangura said, her voice low but her chin defiantly raised. The choice cut her off from her family’s financial support and left her unable to pay for further education or to marry.

For more than two decades, there has been a push across the developing world to end female genital cutting, a centuries-old ritual tied up in ideas of sexual purity, obedience and control. Today, Sierra Leone is one of only a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have not banned it. Cutting is still practiced by almost every ethnic group in every region of the country. But the practice is now at the center of intense debate here.

Progressive groups, many supported by international organizations, are pushing to ban cutting, while conservative forces say it is an essential part of the culture that is practiced across tribal and religious lines.

As that battle plays out in the media and in parliament, growing numbers of girls and young women like Ms. Bangura are taking the matter into their own hands. It is an act of defiance almost unimaginable a generation ago: They are refusing to participate in initiation, telling their mothers and grandmothers they will not join bondo.

More than 90 percent of women over 30 in Sierra Leone have undergone genital cutting, compared with just 61 percent of those ages 15 to 19, according to the most recent household survey on the subject, conducted by UNICEF in 2019. The practice is normally carried out on girls at the onset of puberty, although there are areas of the country where it is done on girls who are much younger.

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A “bondo devil,” a key figure in women’s rituals, in Port Loko, Sierra Leone.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Refusing bondo comes at great social cost. Women who have not joined are, by custom if not by law, not permitted to marry; to represent their communities in religious or cultural events; to participate in celebrations or funerals; or to serve as chief or in parliament.

In most cases, the initiation involves excision of the clitoris and labia minora with a razor by a senior society member called a sowei, who has no medical training but is believed to be spiritually powerful. The ceremony is carried out in women-only encampments, which were once rural but are now sometimes in towns, known as the “bondo bush.”

Laws against cutting have had uneven enforcement and mixed results. Some countries, such as Egypt and Ethiopia, have seen rates fall dramatically. But in others, such as Senegal and Somalia, the decline has been negligible. Globally, the number of girls at risk of being cut continues to grow, because countries without laws or enforcement against cutting have large and rapidly growing youth populations.

While Sierra Leone has one of the world’s highest rates of cutting, it is also one of the few places where the practice seems to be showing a sustained decline, as more and more young women resist.

Every morning as she gets ready for school, Isha Kamara and her grandmother, Hawa, debate bondo. Hawa Kamara says it is high time for Ms. Kamara to be initiated. Ms. Kamara, 20, who is in her last year of high school and wants to manage a bank one day, says she’s not interested

All her life, Ms. Kamara, who has lived with her grandmother since she was orphaned as a small child, has heard about the plans for her initiation. But after she read about cutting in a magazine and heard lectures at school — “They told us that anything God put on our bodies belongs there and should stay” — she started saying she would not join the society.

Her grandmother warned she’d have no friends. Ms. Kamara said her friends were also planning to refuse initiation. Her grandmother warned that she would die single and lonely; Ms. Kamara said she expected plenty of people would want to marry a bank manager.

Her grandmother tried bribery and promised new outfits. Ms. Kamara just cocked an eyebrow at that one.

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Isha Kamara, 20, is not interested in the ritual and wants to go to college and manage a bank.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

The nagging is most fierce on the days when the sounds of the traditional drums echo through Port Loko for an initiation. Ms. Kamara has offered to do a no-cutting bondo, a practice being promoted by some feminist groups, but her grandmother has said that is worthless.

Only one counterargument has found any resonance: “It’s a lot of money,” Hawa Kamara said, referring to the cost of the ceremony. A family must pay the sowei who leads the rites, and stage a feast or contribute to a community celebration. “I suppose we could spend it on her studies rather than calling people to come for a feast that will be eaten up quickly,” she said.

While big international organizations such as UNICEF and U.N. Women are driving the push to end cutting, the views of many girls and young women are being influenced by homegrown activism. Radio shows, billboards and traveling drama groups have spread the message that cutting is dangerous, can cause serious difficulties for women in childbirth, undermines their sexual health and violates human rights.

Ms. Bangura, who has been living with the family of her friend Aminata since she left her family home, heard the message that cutting was dangerous from her pastor at church and from a teacher at school. Most of her friends were eager to join bondo, she said, but, like her, some were hesitant, and they discussed it quietly among themselves. This is a significant change from years past. Everything about the society is meant to be secret, and breaking the taboo of discussing what happens there, including the initiation rites, is said to bring the risk of a curse.

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Ms. Bangura, with Kai Samura and her newborn, whom she is staying with in the town of Kamakwie, after being forced from her home village.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

The problem, Ms. Bangura discovered, is that social change does not happen fast, or neatly.

Kai Samura, who owns the house where Ms. Bangura stays now, said she thought Ms. Bangura’s family was overreacting. “If they abandon her because she refuses, it’s unjust,” she said.

Ms. Samura, 39, underwent initiation at age 8, but has told her own daughters they are free to choose, and should wait until they are 18 to decide. (Her husband is a vehement opponent of the practice, but says the affair is a woman’s domain.)

She reckons she and her husband are less rigid about bondo because they live in a town and social controls are more lax, but she understands the village view:

Getting a daughter initiated is crucial for the family’s social status, and for the girl’s own future.

“People don’t hate their kids,” said Chernor Bah, who runs Purposeful, a feminist advocacy organization in Freetown that works to end cutting. “They are making what they perceive as a rational, best-interest decision for the lives of their children.”

A proposed amendment to the Child Right Act, which has been under review by Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Gender and Children Affairs, would codify cutting as a “harmful practice” and make it illegal to perform the procedure on girls under 18. This is far less than the outright ban than many opponents want. But the path to outlawing the procedure is not a clear one. Powerful individuals and institutions continue to champion the practice — some overtly, some discreetly — on the grounds that it is a key part of Sierra Leone’s culture and values. They often bolster the claim with the assertion that the anti-cutting movement is a Western import, an attempt to erode traditional values and a push to promiscuity.

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Haircare in the village of Fonkoye in northern Sierra Leone.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Sierra Leone’s first lady, Fatima Bio, a powerful political figure with a public profile as high as her husband’s, has said publicly that she underwent cutting and that she has seen no evidence that it is harmful, but when confronted by activists she agreed to give the issue further study.

Sierra Leone’s education minister, David Moinina Sengeh, said in an interview that he was “not aware” if education about cutting was part of the national curriculum and that he did not feel the subject should be addressed in schools.

“I don’t control what people do at home,” he said.

His position is emblematic of the contested ground of cutting. Dr. Moinina Sengeh, who holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known as one of the most progressive figures in Sierra Leone’s government. He is credited with ending a ban on pregnant girls attending school. On cutting, however, he will not take a position. The curriculum should not “be making a moral decision on whether something is good or right” and should not say, “Get cut or don’t get cut,” he said.

Politicians seeking votes often volunteer to pay for a mass initiation in a community — even politicians who have publicly opposed cutting, said Naasu Fofanah, a prominent Freetown entrepreneur and deputy chair of the progressive Unity Party. She said that several years ago, when she was advising a former president, Ernest Bai Koroma, on the issue, she successfully convinced most sowei leaders to endorse a ban on cutting children, which, she said, would have been a major step forward. But activists seeking a full ban blocked the move, she said.

Ms. Fofanah herself underwent the cutting at age 15 and remembers the pain and shock of the actual procedure (about which she had no forewarning). But she also said it was, overall, a positive and affirming ritual.

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Girls’ school uniforms hung to dry on a laundry line in the Congo Town area of Freetown.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

“It was a beautiful experience for me,” she said, recalling her grandmother leading dancers in celebration of her transition into womanhood, and being told “that nobody’s ever going to speak down to you. You’ve now become this woman.”

It wasn’t hard to reconcile what had been done to her body, because she knew her mother, her grandmother and her aunts had all been through it as well. “So you endure, and you’re just like, ‘OK, that’s done, let’s get on with it,’” she said.

Still, Ms. Fofanah, who studied bondo initiation for her masters thesis at the University of Westminster in England, did not take her own daughters for initiation and talked a niece out of it, telling her she “didn’t need it” because the family had sufficient resources to open other paths for her. Yet, she felt a blanket ban was ill-conceived.

“If we are saying, when it comes to this practice, women cannot express themselves and say, ‘I am 18 or I’m 21 or I’m 30, it’s my culture, I’m going to’ — where do human rights meet my rights as a woman?” she said. “Are you saying I’m not capable of making an informed decision, of saying I want to go through this practice?”

UNICEF surveys have found that the proportion of women who think that cutting should stop is rising steadily; in the most recent survey it was nearly a third, and the opinion was held across education levels. But even women who said they thought cutting should end often also said they would send their own daughters to bondo; the top reason they gave was “social acceptance.” In a third of couples, women wanted the practice to continue while their husbands said it should be ended.

When Sierra Leone experienced an epidemic of Ebola virus from 2014 to 2016, the government temporarily outlawed the practice, and traditional and faith leaders helped promote the ban. It has since ended, but activists said it made a space for a public conversation about bondo that had never existed before, and likely contributed to a rise in young women resisting.

A number of anti-cutting groups in Sierra Leone have been trying to build support for an alternative process, what they call a “bloodless rite,” that preserves the instruction about the role and responsibility of women but does not include cutting. This approach also has the advantage of preserving an income stream, and social power, for soweis.

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Kadiatu Bangura, with her daughters Adama, left, and Mariama, inherited the role of sowei but was convinced by her eldest daughter, Zeinab, to quit.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Kadiatu Bangura inherited the role of sowei and estimated that she cut more than 100 girls in the town of Port Loko before her daughter Zeinab, who is now 22, asked her to quit. Zeinab heard anti-cutting messages at church and confronted her mother, shocked that this was the core of the role her mother was esteemed for holding.

Kadiatu Bangura said she tried to help her daughter see the whole picture: “The bad side is the cutting — but the good side is there is dancing and celebrating and they drum for you and when you lead, they follow.” There was community and a sense of shared values in the society, and the rites without cutting did not have the same power, she said.

Nankali Maksud, who leads work on the subject for UNICEF globally, said that the public conversation about cutting in Sierra Leone, and in other countries where the practice has prominent proponents, had evolved. “As people get more educated they are challenging the blanket ‘F.GM. is bad’ messaging,” she said, using an acronym, often used by opponents of the procedure, for female genital mutilation. “UNICEF has had to regroup. We’re now having to be much more clear: We mean in children. We don’t mean in women. Women should have a right to be able to do what they want to do with their bodies.”

In other countries where cutting is practiced in some communities but not in others, girls can find it easier to leave home, she said. In Kenya, for example, there are shelters and organizations that support girls who resist cutting. Sierra Leone, where the hegemony of bondo is still entrenched, has nothing of the sort.

That leaves young women who resist the ritual, such as Seio Bangura, reliant on charity when they find it. Some turn to commercial sex work as one of the few ways a woman on her own can earn a living. Ms. Bangura sometimes sells nuts and cakes in the market, trying to save enough from the dollar or two she earns every week to pay for college. She goes to church. Mostly, she sits, waiting for Sierra Leone to catch up to her.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/heal ... 778d3e6de3

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Senegal’s new president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, took the oath of office in Tuesday’s ceremony. Close behind him sat the popular opposition leader who had clinched the win.


Newly elected President Bassirou Diomaye Faye takes the oath of office as president during the inauguration ceremony in Dakar, on Tuesday.Credit...Abdou Karim Ndoye/Reuters

Still reeling from a whirlwind campaign, young people in Senegal threw jackets over their worn election T-shirts on Tuesday to attend the inauguration of an opposition politician who went from political prisoner to president in less than three weeks.

Their new leader, Bassirou Diomaye Faye — at 44, Africa’s youngest elected president — took the oath of office promising “systemic change,” and paying homage to the many people killed, injured, and imprisoned in the yearslong lead-up to the West African country’s election.

“I will always keep in mind the heavy sacrifices made so as to never disappoint you,” Mr. Faye said, addressing a vast auditorium in which African heads of state and dignitaries sat at the front. From the back, hundreds of supporters of Mr. Faye and his powerful backer, the opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, shouted for joy.

Hours later, Mr. Faye appointed Mr. Sonko prime minister in the new government, according to a post on the president’s official account on X.

It was the culmination of months of drama, after the former president, Macky Sall, canceled the election with just weeks to go, citing irregularities at the constitutional council — and then, under intense domestic and international pressure, agreed to hold it after all.

Mr. Sall’s handpicked candidate was resoundingly beaten by Mr. Faye, a tax inspector and political rookie who got more than 54 percent of the vote, despite having only 10 days of freedom in which to campaign. He had been jailed on charges of defamation and contempt of court, and was awaiting trial when Mr. Sall announced the adoption of an amnesty law and was released.

“You’re Senegal’s uncontested and dazzling choice,” said the president of the constitutional council, Mamadou Badio Camara, presiding over the inauguration.

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People in campaign t-shirts celebrate in the streets, with women drumming on wooden bowls.

Supporters of Mr. Faye celebrating in Dakar, on Tuesday.Credit...Zohra Bensemra/Reuters

But Mr. Faye was not the only politician that Senegal had effectively endorsed. Mr. Sonko, the man whose support helped get Mr. Faye elected, was sitting in the second row.

“Thank you, Sonko, thank you,” yelled his supporters at key moments in Tuesday’s ceremony.

Mr. Sonko, until now Senegal’s foremost opposition leader, was also in jail until three weeks ago, barred from running for president himself after convictions on charges of defamation and “corruption of youth” in relation to accusations brought by a young massage parlor employee.

When he was released, he immediately went on the campaign trail with Mr. Faye, telling his supporters that a vote for Mr. Faye was a vote for him.

Mr. Faye made no mention in his speech of Mr. Sonko, who cut a low profile in a black hat and tunic. But Mr. Sonko was a constant presence. He hobnobbed with the African presidents who waited for the ceremony to begin in an antechamber of a conference center in Diamniadio, a new city still under construction and a pet project of Mr. Sall.

Then, in the hangar-like room where Mr. Faye would take his oath, Mr. Sonko took his place in the second row, just behind the two first ladies — wives of the polygamous new president. And Mr. Sonko got the biggest cheers of the day, every time his face appeared on the large screens at the front of the auditorium.

Much cheering also rang out for the military president of Guinea, and the representatives of Mali and Burkina Faso, three West African countries whose governments were overthrown in coups in recent years and are now ruled by juntas. The rhetoric of those juntas — focused on sovereignty from France, the former colonial power perceived by many West Africans as continuing to meddle in their affairs — mirrors that of Mr. Sonko and Mr. Faye.

“The youth of Senegal is connecting with the youth of those countries, over these issues of sovereignty,” the president’s uncle, also named Diomaye Faye, said in an interview on Tuesday.

Mr. Faye and Mr. Sonko have pledged to drop or change the terms of the CFA, the regional currency backed by France, and renegotiate Senegal’s contracts with foreign-owned companies to extract newly discovered oil and gas.

In his speech, Mr. Faye stressed that Senegal would remain open to relations with other countries that are “respectful of our sovereignty, consistent with our people’s aspirations, and in a mutually winning partnership.”

After the swearing-in, a motorcade carried him to the presidential palace. Last week, Mr. Sall had welcomed him and Mr. Sonko, his former archrivals, in a stiff but determinedly friendly meeting — official photographs of which were later given to the media.

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Mr. Faye, Senegal’s new president, in African dress, walking alongside Mr. Sall, the former president, dressed in a suit. The men are not smiling.

A photograph released by the Senegalese presidency showing Mr. Faye, Ousmane Sonko, and President Macky Sall at the Presidential Palace in Dakar last week.Credit...Senegalese Presidency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On Tuesday, Mr. Sall, a two-term president who had served for 12 years, welcomed Mr. Faye once more, who arrived this time with a presidential guard.

After sitting chatting for a while and handing over the important documents, Mr. Sall climbed into a Toyota, pulling out of the palace gates and leaving for good.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3

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Thirty Years After a Genocide in Rwanda, Painful Memories Run Deep

The Central African country is marking the anniversary of a monthslong rampage by militiamen that killed some 800,000 people.


President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and his wife, Jeannette Kagame, lighting a remembrance flame on Sunday in Kigali as part of commemorations of the 30th anniversary of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.Credit...Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Abdi Latif Dahir
By Abdi Latif Dahir
Abdi Latif Dahir interviewed a dozen genocide survivors in Rwanda and attended commemoration events of the 1994 massacres being held in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.

April 7, 2024
When the marauding militiamen arrived at her door on that morning in April 1994, Florence Mukantaganda knew there was nowhere to run.

It was only three days into the devastating 100-day genocide in Rwanda, when militiamen rampaged through the streets and people’s homes in a bloodshed that forever upended life in the Central African nation. As the men entered her home, Ms. Mukantaganda said her husband, a preacher, prayed for her and their two small children and furtively told her where he had hidden some money in case she survived.

He then said his final words to her before he was hacked to death with a hoe.

“He told me, ‘When they come for you, you have to be strong, you have to die strong,’” Ms. Mukantaganda, 53, recalled on a recent morning at her home in Kabuga, a small town about 10 miles east of Kigali, the Rwandan capital. “There was nothing we could do but wait for our time to die.”

The agony of those harrowing days loomed large for many on Sunday as Rwanda marked the 30th anniversary of the genocide in which extremists from the country’s ethnic Hutu majority killed some 800,000 people — most of them ethnic Tutsis — using machetes, clubs and guns.

“Our journey has been long and tough,” President Paul Kagame said on Sunday at a ceremony at an indoor arena. “Rwanda was completely humbled by the magnitude of our loss, and the lessons we learned are engraved in blood.”

Representatives from regional and global institutions like the African Union, the European Union and the United Nations were present at the ceremony, as well as ministerial delegations and current and former leaders from some 60 nations.

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The clothing of victims displayed outside some houses.

Victims’ clothing recovered from mass graves hanging on clotheslines in 2019 in Kabuga, where Florence Mukantaganda lives outside Kigali.Credit...Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Those included Bill Clinton, who was president of the United States at the time of the genocide and has acknowledged America’s failure to swiftly stop the bloodshed. President Emmanuel Macron of France, who did not attend the event but has in recent years talked of France’s role in the genocide, released a video urging for the continued study of the past. His statement stopped short of going as far as his office had promised last week, when it said that he aimed to say France and its allies had lacked the will to halt the slaughter.

The daylong event in Kigali included the lighting of a remembrance flame, a night vigil and a wreath-laying ceremony at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which is the final resting place for the remains of over 250,000 victims of the slaughter.

For many, the event was a reminder of the horror that began after a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down. While those responsible for the crash were never identified, the Hutu-led government blamed it on Tutsi rebels and immediately began a campaign of systematic killing. The rebels, led by Mr. Kagame, said the Hutu extremists downed the plane as a pretext for genocide.

In interviews with a dozen survivors across Rwanda in the two days preceding the commemoration on Sunday, many spoke about the paroxysm of violence that gripped this lush, landlocked nation. They spoke about the horrors they endured for over three months as their towns and villages became giant killing fields. Many remembered how they fled their homes and hid in bushes and forests, churches and mosques, in coffins and closets, only to be found and forced to flee again.

One man, Hussein Twagiramungu, spoke about hearing his mother calling out his name as her killers hacked her to death. Velene Kankwanzi said she had survived by lying still, pretending to be dead, among relatives killed by militiamen. She said she had heard the men saying that they should take a break because their “hands are tired” from all of the killing. Rashid Bagabo recalled how his own hands went numb as he and five others buried some 300 people.

Ms. Mukantaganda, the woman whose husband was killed, spoke about how neighbors, friends and family turned against each other.

When the carnage began, she said a close Hutu friend, who was a leader of her church’s choir, suggested locking her and her family in their home so that when the militiamen came, they would think they had left. But, she said, the man went and informed the killers where they were.

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White strings hang from the ceiling over dances on a stage in a dark arena.

Dancers performing during the commemoration event on Sunday at the BK Arena in Kigali.Credit...Guillem Sartorio/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“It’s been 30 years and I am still learning how to forgive,” she said, crying on a recent afternoon as she twisted the gold wedding ring on her finger that she said her husband had given her. Ms. Mukantaganda lost eight other family members, including her parents, in the genocide.

The commemoration event in Kigali will also be a testament to the power of Mr. Kagame, whose governing Rwandan Patriotic Front party ended the genocide. Mr. Kagame has led Rwanda since then, and has transformed his nation from a byword for genocidal violence to an African success story.

Since 1994, this hilly nation of about 14 million people has grown economically, significantly reduced maternal mortality and poverty and improved education and health access. Rwanda has also become a major conference and tourist destination, and each year it hosts a star-studded gorilla-naming ceremony that has attracted people like Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, and Idris Elba, the British actor.

But even as he pulled his nation back from the brink, Mr. Kagame became increasingly authoritarian, jailing opposition figures, limiting press freedom and targeting critics at home and abroad. Mr. Kagame, 66, is up for election this year, and is expected to win another seven-year term.

Rwanda has also been accused of backing rebel forces in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and plundering mineral riches in that country’s eastern regions — accusations that Mr. Kagame’s government denies.

On Sunday, Mr. Kagame thanked Congo for hosting Rwandan refugees during the 1994 genocide. But he also accused the country of providing “state support” to the remnants of Hutu rebels whose intentions were to “reorganize and return to complete the genocide.”

“Our people will never — and I mean never — be left for dead again,” Mr. Kagame vowed at the end of his half-hour speech.

For some in Rwanda, the solemn commemoration on Sunday also marked a day when humanity triumphed over hate.

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People and motorbikes on a street.

Kigali this month. Since 1994, Rwanda has prospered, growing economically, significantly reducing maternal mortality and poverty and improving education and health access.Credit...Jacques Nkinzingabo for The New York Times

This is true for Mariane Mukaneza, a mother of four whose husband was killed in the city of Rubavu, in the west. As she fled, Ms. Mukaneza said she was given shelter by Yussuf Ntamuhanga, an ethnic Hutu, who became well known for hiding Tutsis and helping them cross into Congo.

Mr. Ntamuhanga is also Muslim, who like many in the Rwandan Muslim community did not participate in the bloodshed. At the onset of the genocide, Muslims were socially and economically marginalized in Rwanda, said Salim Hitimana, the mufti of Rwanda. As such, their leaders were not as close to the political establishment, he said, and from the outset, they denounced the violence and saved those fleeing in their homes and mosques.

“He is my family and my hope,” Ms. Mukaneza, 68, said of Mr. Ntamuhanga on a recent afternoon as the two sat across from each other during an interview. “He did not care about my religion or where I came from.”

Mr. Ntamuhanga, 65, who was fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, said he personally helped rescue more than three dozen people. “My father raised me on love and compassion,” he said, “and Islam reinforced that message, too.”

For now, Ms. Mukantaganda, betrayed by a close friend, said she was learning how to heal. But reminders of those bloody days are constant, she said: places around town that trigger memories of killings; the bodies that continue to be exhumed; and even the rain falling on her rooftop on a recent afternoon, reminding her of similar rainy days in April 1994.

“It all feels like it happened yesterday,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3

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South Africa Is Not a Metaphor

If you want to understand why the party that liberated South Africa from white rule lost its parliamentary majority in the election this week, you need to look no further than Beauty Mzingeli’s living room. The first time she cast a ballot, she could hardly sleep the night before.

“We were queuing by 4 in the morning,” she told me at her home in Khayelitsha, a township in the flatlands outside Cape Town. “We couldn’t believe that we were free, that finally our voices were going to be heard.”

That was 30 years ago, in the election in which she was one of millions of South Africans who voted the African National Congress and its leader, Nelson Mandela, into power, ushering in a new, multiracial democracy.

ImageNelson Mandela holding up his fist to a crowd of supporters in 1994.

Nelson Mandela on the campaign trail in 1994.Credit...David Turnley/Corbis, via Getty Images

But at noon on Wednesday, Election Day, as I settled onto a sofa in her tidy bungalow, she confessed that she had not yet made up her mind about voting — she might, for the first time, she told me, cast a ballot for another party. Or maybe she might do the unthinkable and not vote at all.

“Politicians promise us everything,” she sighed. “But they don’t deliver. Why should I give them my vote?”

That a mighty party like the A.N.C., which delivered one of the most inspiring triumphs of the 20th century, could a few decades later be dismissed by a loyal voter as mere “politicians,” hardly worth a trek to the polls, may seem like a dispiriting outcome. The A.N.C. could be forced for the first time into an unwieldy coalition government with smaller parties that might not make for ideal allies.

This change of fortune naturally sparks fear and speculation: Has South Africa’s transition failed, and is the country headed for the kind of strife that has bedeviled most countries in the aftermath of liberation from colonization?

South Africa has long loomed large in the global imagination. It is a country that was born at a particularly potent time in human history, at the end of the Cold War, built in the aftermath of grave injustice and constituted under a set of egalitarian ideas. It was, and is, as a new democracy, a symbol of what a new future might look like.

It is natural that 30 years later, we might ask for a verdict on how it has all gone, especially living as we do now, with sprawling wars on at least four continents, democracy in retreat in many places across the globe and a new conflagration in Israel and Palestine, a place that resonates with South Africa’s story.

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African National Congress representatives at a voting station in a settlement.

The long-ruling African National Congress campaigning in Johannesburg.Credit...Lindokuhle Sobekwa for The New York Times

I returned to South Africa ahead of the election for my first reporting trip since I was a correspondent here for The Times more than a decade ago. It can be hard to separate the outsize expectations the rest of the world places on South Africa with the ordinary experiences of South Africans. Yet I could not help feeling a sense of relief and even optimism at the prospect of the A.N.C. being humbled at the polls and being forced to compete, openly and vigorously, for the votes of South Africans who have, for understandable reasons, given the party a very long rope.

In 2011, the year I moved to South Africa, people were evenly split on whether the country was going in the right direction, according to the Afrobarometer survey. Last month in the Afrobarometer survey, 85 percent agreed the country is headed in the wrong direction.


That’s for good reason. Economic growth has stalled, and a staggering 32.9 percent of the working population is jobless. The government can’t seem to keep the lights on. Political corruption is endemic and rapacious. Violent crime wracks many areas, especially in the townships and informal settlements where poor people live. The country’s roads, bridges and ports — once vaunted as the continent’s best — are crumbling. Inequality between Black and white people, an intentional feature of the apartheid state, has widened in recent decades, within the Black community itself as a new Black elite with close ties to the government and big business has mushroomed.

Mzingeli did not need this litany. She is living it. The first decade after the end of apartheid was a euphoric period: The global political and economic conditions favored the new South Africa, and her own prospects soared. After years of working as a housekeeper, she was able to go back to school 19 years ago to become a nurse, a lifelong dream.

But she has watched with dismay as her children’s prospects have crumbled. Two of her grown children have not been able to find jobs, and in a galling reversal of traditional norms in her Xhosa community, she was supporting them as she aged, not the other way around. The party that promised “a better life for all” was delivering even less to her children than she was able to build for herself.

Take housing. For decades she has lived in a small but tidy cement block bungalow in this sprawling township. Her daughter lives in a tin shack in an informal settlement nearby, one of the millions of people desperate for proper housing in this country. She worries constantly about crime, about the rising cost of living, about whether the electricity will be on.

“I just worry and worry, so many things are going wrong,” she said.

The question now is who will fix it. It might sound counterintuitive that the rejection of the party of Nelson Mandela is a good thing. There are times when the task at hand is so monumental that nothing but total unity will do the job, and a politics of ideological flexibility and ruthlessly enforced unity, the A.N.C.’s stock in trade, must prevail. Ending apartheid was one such moment.

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A color photograph of voters lined up at the polls on Election Day.

A polling station at Soweto Emdeni Secondary School in Johannesburg.Credit...Lindokuhle Sobekwa for The New York Times

But there are other times when conflict is a profoundly productive force. Competition and contention over ideas is absolutely critical now in South Africa. The country has long labored under the burden of this story, the tale of its exceptional birth. On this trip I wondered what sort of unexpected liberation giving up that story might offer, even at the risk of unleashing unpredictable and sometimes frightening forces like ethnic nationalism and deeply patriarchal traditionalism.

When I moved to South Africa, the shimmering afterglow of hosting the 2010 World Cup, a triumphant moment for a soccer-mad nation, had already begun to fade. Jacob Zuma, a divisive and mercurial political figure, was president, and the early signs of the wholesale looting of the South African state that would happen under his watch were just beginning to reveal themselves.

A critical turning point came in August 2012, when the police opened fire on platinum miners engaged in a wildcat strike in a town called Marikana, killing 34. It was the first time since the end of apartheid that the state had meted out such violence on Black people, and it stunned everyone, including me. I had been in Marikana that day, reporting on the strike, and saw the aftermath firsthand.

The day after I arrived in the country this month, the A.N.C. had planned an election rally just a few miles from Marikana, to fight for votes in the platinum belt, a dusty landscape where low-slung mountains dotted with scrubby brush compete for altitude with giant piles of mine waste. It seemed like a good place to take the political temperature.

When the A.N.C.’s current leader and South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, finally arrived, he bounded onstage, energetic in his yellow polo shirt.

“We’re going to win the election on the 29th of May,” he declared, with remarkable confidence for a man whose party has been steadily losing support in the polls. “We are not making a coalition with anybody!”

He ran through a litany of promises: to create millions of jobs, to set up a national health care system, to tackle crime. It was the kind of ambitious agenda that might sound impressive had his party not been in power the past three decades.

Less than a mile away, a party called the Economic Freedom Fighters was holding its own event. In some ways, the party was born out of the Marikana massacre. It has emphasized a populist left-wing program of wealth redistribution, adopting the red beret as a kind of sartorial signifier. But the party is also a vehicle for the political ambitions of Julius Malema, a former A.N.C. youth leader who was expelled from the party amid allegations of brazen corruption. The E.F.F. had a big moment in 2019 when it got over 10 percent of the vote, but its momentum appears to have slowed.

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A photograph shows a woman holding up a poster for Jacob Zuma’s MK party at sunset.

Jacob Zuma’s MK party is one of many new challengers to the A.N.C.’s rule.Credit...Lindokuhle Sobekwa for The New York Times

Meanwhile, Zuma has formed his own party, uMkhonto weSizwe, or MK, after the former armed wing of the A.N.C. It’s another breakaway shard, this time with a strong dose of social conservatism and a hint of tribalism. These hardly represent new ideas.

The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, offers up a mix of laissez-faire capitalism and fealty to white wealth that limits its appeal in a deeply impoverished, mostly Black nation. Small parties have proliferated, some with bizarre or even frightening proposals, like mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and the reinstating of the death penalty to deal with crime.

As of Friday, with almost 90 percent of the results in, the A.N.C.’s share of the vote was at 41 percent, a shocking drop of more than 16 points since 2019. It will in all likelihood lead the next government, but will need to form a coalition with smaller parties. The Democratic Alliance was at almost 22 percent. Zuma’s MK showed surprising strength for a new party, at 13.6 percent, while the E.F.F.’s share dropped below 10 percent. One especially worrying sign was the strong showing of the Patriotic Alliance, a small party with a virulently xenophobic platform. In 2019 it failed to qualify for a single seat in the Parliament, but in the early counting it has had a strong showing.

It is clear that South Africa is entering a new period of uncertainty and profound change. Voters will be choosing among many paths, some of which may lead them away from the ideals enshrined in the country’s deeply aspirational but still inspiring Constitution, with its stirring preamble:

“We, the people of South Africa, recognize the injustices of our past; honor those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land; respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.”

There are movements that tap deeply into this spirit, building on it and trying to reinvent it for a new era. A small new party called Rise Mzansi, led by a former businessman and journalist named Songezo Zibi, proposes a European-style social democracy, delivered with care and competence, under the slogans “2024 is our 1994” and “We need new leaders.” It faced long odds in this election, so far winning less than half a percentage point of the vote, but building new movements takes time.

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A photograph shows a line of people on a sunny street with campaign posters around them.

Long lines to vote in Johannesburg lasted until after midnight on Election Day.Credit...Lindokuhle Sobekwa for The New York Times

“South Africa is moving on, and moving on is tough,” Zibi told me. “One of the reasons we got into politics is to try and provide intellectual and moral clarity in a time of change. We understand that it’s not the sort of thing that you do in one election cycle. You look at 10 to 15 years.”

One of South Africa’s most indefatigable activists, Zackie Achmat, is running for Parliament as one of the country’s first independent candidates. Achmat helped start one of the most effective post-apartheid movements, which forced the government, then run by Thabo Mbeki, an AIDS denialist, to offer free AIDS drugs to millions of South Africans struggling with the disease.

I caught up with him on Election Day in the township of Gugulethu, in the vast flatlands outside Cape Town, where he visited polling stations to thank volunteers for his long-shot campaign. His supporters sang freedom songs, ululating as they performed the toyi-toyi, the high-stepping, foot-stomping dance of the fight against apartheid.

“Parliament is a sewer,” he told me after he walked an older voter, unsteady on her feet, to a voting booth. “I’m going in as an independent who is part of a movement that organizes people living with disability, people who are poor, queer people, people who are hungry, people who are living in informal settlements.”

He told me that if he wins, he hopes to get a seat on the parliamentary committee that oversees the public accounts, and would be a clearinghouse for transparency and accountability. Achmat’s energy has always been infectious, but seeing him roam the townships with his band of volunteers, a mix of South Africans of every race, hinted at new possibilities and energies.

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A photograph shows a pair of hands holding an orange marker and drawing on another person’s thumb.

The A.N.C. party is unlikely to come out on top in the recent election.Credit...Lindokuhle Sobekwa for The New York Times

But the most powerful South African energy shows up these days not in the election, but on the global stage, where the country has used its history and moral authority to stand for justice beyond its borders. A group of formidable jurists representing South Africa appeared before the International Court of Justice in December to argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. The court agreed in a decision in January that South Africa’s case was at least plausible and demanded that Israel take greater care to protect civilians and provide aid. This month the court went further, ordering Israel to stop its incursion into Rafah.

There is a special and complicated relationship between South Africa, Israel and Palestine. The apartheid government had longstanding ties to Israel, and the A.N.C. to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was for much of the struggle against apartheid an important left-wing ally. Israeli partition and occupation of lands long inhabited by Palestinians have imposed a system of separation and oppression that to many South Africans exceeds the darkest days of their experience with apartheid, in which the races mixed to some degree, by necessity, as Black and brown labor was necessary to the white regime.

Palestinian activists, for their part, have taken inspiration from the South African divestment movement, and some dare to hope that someday, a peaceful one-state solution like the one that ended apartheid here could be possible, creating a truly democratic shared nation under a constitution that enshrines equality between Palestinians and Israelis under the law.

There are, of course, real limits to comparing South Africa’s transition with the possibilities for transformation in Israel and Palestine. They are different places with different histories, and these are different times. Still, the echoes are useful and are a source of inspiration to activists who have found themselves dispirited by what has become of the A.N.C.

Last week I met with Merle Favis, a Jewish South African activist who had been deeply involved in the struggle against apartheid. The movement for Palestine, she told me over tea in a Johannesburg cafe, harks back to the fights she was involved in back in the 1980s that led to the fall of apartheid. “What was really important was mass struggle, grass roots struggle,” she said. That spirit lives on in campus protests, and in Muslim and Jewish solidarity groups.

In his 2020 book “Neither Settler Nor Native,” the political theorist Mahmood Mamdani offered the idea that South Africa’s transition was possible because of an extraordinary act of creativity and imagination in which the holders of what were once seen as fixed, eternal and opposed identities — settler and native — mutually surrendered those identities and took on new ones, as fellow survivors of a brutal colonial project who would try to build something new from its ruins. It is hard to imagine such a project in Israel and Palestine in these dark days. But what was possible once can be possible again.

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A photograph shows a group of men wearing sashes with the South African flag, surrounded by reporters.

South Africa’s justice minister appeared at The Hague in January after the country brought genocide charges against Israel to the International Court of Justice.Credit...Remko De Waal/EPA, via Shutterstock

What does South Africa offer us today? I had been thinking of its history as a burden, but there is a different metaphor that might emerge from the story of this very special particular nation: It is a map. It’s not the kind of map that tells you the most efficient way to get from here to there, but one that identifies the mountain ranges to be climbed and the rivers to be crossed that you’ll face along the way. It sketches the terrain on which the battle for liberation must be waged, offering clues and inspiration, if not answers.

But it also reminds us that the ecstatic moment of freedom’s birth in South Africa 30 years ago was a beginning, not an end. We call birth a miracle not because we know how it’s going to turn out, but because of the limitless possibility that it contains. The birth of a nation is no different. The new South Africa is still at the beginning of its story. No country, no person, is only a symbol or a metaphor.

Indeed, there are no miracles here, and that is a good thing. Because miracles cannot be repeated. But what can be repeated is the hard, sometimes ugly, always unglamorous work of compromise and negotiation, and the working through of the inevitable consequences of those compromises. It is only through this process of improvisation and invention that true self-determination comes.

The business of ending apartheid as a form of government in South Africa is over. It is never coming back. But if this election tells us anything, it is that the work of building a true multiracial democracy has really just begun.

Mandela once said, “I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”

He was speaking of himself, but he just as easily could have been speaking of the whole nation. South Africa could be born only at the end of history. But history had other ideas, raging forward as ever, surprising and disappointing us by turns, same as it ever was.

Listen to ‘Matter of Opinion’

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/opin ... theid.html

[kmaherali]

Nigeria Confronts Its Worst Economic Crisis in a Generation

People in Africa’s most populous nation are suffering as the price of food, fuel and medicine has skyrocketed out of reach for many.


A woman suffering from hypocalcemia, caused by a lack of calcium, in a hospital in Nigeria. Food prices have shot up and Nigerians are not eating enough.

Nigeria is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, with skyrocketing inflation, a national currency in free-fall and millions of people struggling to buy food. Only two years ago Africa’s biggest economy, Nigeria is projected to drop to fourth place this year.

The pain is widespread. Unions strike to protest salaries of around $20 a month. People die in stampedes, desperate for free sacks of rice. Hospitals are overrun with women wracked by spasms from calcium deficiencies.

The crisis is largely believed to be rooted in two major changes implemented by a president elected 15 months ago: the partial removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the currency, which together have caused major price rises.

A nation of entrepreneurs, Nigeria’s more than 200 million citizens are skilled at managing in tough circumstances, without the services states usually provide. They generate their own electricity and source their own water. They take up arms and defend their communities when the armed forces cannot. They negotiate with kidnappers when family members are abducted.

But right now, their resourcefulness is being stretched to the limit.

A map of Nigeria locating Kano, Ibadan and the state of Nasarawa. Lagos and Abuja are also located.

NIGER

CHAD

Kano

BENIN

NIGERIA

Abuja

Ibadan

NASARAWA

Lagos

CAMEROON

200 MILES

By The New York Times
No Money for Milk

On a recent morning in a corner of the biggest emergency room in northern Nigeria, three women were convulsing in painful spasms, unable to speak. Each year, the E.R. at Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital in Kano, Nigeria’s second-largest city, received one or two cases of hypocalcemia caused by malnutrition, said Salisu Garba, a kindly health worker who hurried from bed to bed, ward to ward.

Now, with many unable to afford food, the hospital sees multiple cases every day.

Mr. Garba was sizing up the women’s husbands. Which source of nutrition he recommended depended on what he thought they could afford. Baobab leaves or tiger nuts for the poor; boiled-up bones for the slightly better off. He laughed at the suggestion that anyone could afford milk.

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A man in a white coat silhouetted against a window with blue drapes puts on a pair of rubber gloves as he prepares to treat a patient.

Salisu Garba, a community health worker, treating patients at a hospital in Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city, last month.

More than 87 million people in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, live below the poverty line — the world’s second-largest poor population after India, a country seven times its size. And punishing inflation means poverty rates are expected to rise still further this year and next, according to the World Bank.

Last week, unions shut down hospitals, courts, schools, airports and even the country’s Parliament, striking in an attempt to force the government to increase the monthly salary of $20 it pays its lowest workers.

But over 92 percent of working-age Nigerians are in the informal sector, where there are no wages, and no unions to fight for them.

For the Afolabi family in Ibadan, in southwestern Nigeria, the descent into poverty started in January with the loss of an electric tuk-tuk taxi.

Forced to sell the taxi to pay his wife’s hospital bills after the difficult birth of their second child, Babatunde Afolabi turned to occasional construction work. It paid badly, but the family managed.

“We had no thoughts about starvation,” he said.

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Women in colorful hijabs and men in tunics and pants wait outside a white-painted hospital building.

Patients wait to be seen at the Murtala Muhammad General Hospital. The crowds are thinner than they used to be, as many can no longer afford the bus fare.

But then, he said, cassava — the cheapest staple in many parts of Nigeria — tripled in price.

All they can afford now, he said, is a few biscuits, a little bread, and for their 6-year-old, 20 peanuts a day.

A Country Built on Gas

Nigeria is a country heavily dependent on imported petroleum products, despite being a major oil producer. After years of underinvestment and mismanagement, its state refineries produce hardly any gasoline.

For decades, the national soundtrack has been the hum of small generators, fired up during daily power outages. Petroleum products move goods and people around the country.

Until recently, the government subsidized that petroleum, to the tune of billions of dollars a year.

Many Nigerians said the subsidy was the only useful contribution from a neglectful and predatory government. Successive presidents have pledged to remove the subsidy, which drains a hefty chunk of government revenue — and later backtracked fearing mass unrest.

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A yellow tuk-tuk – an electric tricycle taxi – and a man on a red motorcycle cruising down a tree-lined street in Kano.

Nigeria is a country that runs on imported gasoline, which the government has long subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars a year.

Bola Tinubu, who was elected Nigeria’s president last year, initially followed through.

“It was a necessary action for my country not to go bankrupt,” Mr. Tinubu said in April, at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia.

Instead, many Nigerians are going bankrupt — or working multiple jobs to stay afloat.

Mr. Garba, the hospital worker, used to be solidly middle class, even though 17 family members, including 12 children, depended on him.

After shifts at the hospital, where he is setting up the first statewide ambulance service in addition to working in the emergency room, for which he is paid $150 a month, he heads to the Red Cross. There he occasionally receives a $3.30 volunteer stipend for helping tackle a severe diphtheria outbreak.

At night, he works at the pharmacy that he and a colleague set up. But few people have money for medicine anymore. He sells about $7 worth of medication per day.

Last year, Mr. Garba sold his car when the gas subsidies were removed, and now takes a tuk-tuk to work. Unable to power the generator, he reads medicine labels at the pharmacy by the light of a small solar lantern. He can only afford to buy rice and cassava in small quantities.

Life under the previous government was very expensive, he said, but nothing like today.

“It’s very, very bad,” he said.

It’s gotten so dire that there have been several deadly stampedes for free or discounted rice distributed by the government — including one in March at a university in the central state of Nasarawa where seven students were killed.

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A man carries a heavy-looking sack past a petty trader’s stall offering baby clothes and toys.

The vast majority of Nigerians work in the informal sector, with no salaries, unions, or safety net. And because of skyrocketing inflation, many can no longer afford basics, like food.

Mr. Tinubu promised to create a million jobs and quadruple the size of the economy within a decade, but has not said how. The International Monetary Fund said last month the state has started subsidizing fuel and electricity again — though the government has not acknowledged this.

“There’s still very little clarity — if any — on where the economy is headed, what the priorities are,” said Zainab Usman, a political economist and director of the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Tapping Craze

A spate of new crypto-mining games that promise to generate income the more the user plays has people across Nigeria spending all day tapping on their smartphone screens, desperate to earn a few dollars.

People tap as they pray, in mosques and churches. Children tap under desks at school. Mourners tap at funerals.

Image
A man holds a foldable smartphone with his left hand and taps on an image of a gold coin with his right.

Many Nigerians desperately hope that hours spent tapping on smartphone cryptocurrency apps will eventually earn them a bit of cash. One man, Rabiu Biyora, says he made millions of naira this way.

There’s no guarantee any of them will ever benefit from the hours they put in mindlessly tapping.

Then again, they can’t count on the national currency, the naira.

The government has twice devalued the naira in the past year, trying to enable it to float more freely and attract foreign investment. The upshot: It’s lost nearly 70 percent of its value against the dollar.

Nigeria cannot produce enough food for its growing population; food imports rise 11 percent annually. The currency devaluation caused those imports — already expensive because of high tariffs — to explode in price.

Nigerians can become paupers almost overnight. So they’re searching for anything that might hold its value — or ideally, get them rich.

“People are looking for me everywhere,” said Rabiu Biyora, the undisputed king of tapping in Kano, opening one of his five foldable phones to add to his 2.7 billion taps on the TapSwap app. “Not to attack me, but to collect something from me.”

A relaxed, businesslike 39-year-old followed everywhere by young tech-savvy acolytes, Mr. Biyora would only say that he made “over $10,000” from the previous tapping craze.

Image
A man supervises a young construction worker as he installs a drawer unit in an office.

With the proceeds from his tapping, Rabiu Biyora is opening an office in Kano to promote and educate people on cryptocurrencies. Nigeria already has the world’s second highest cryptocurrency adoption rate.

He profits from everyone else’s taps, so he encourages them in posts on social media, and by providing free internet to anyone willing to sit outside his house. Nigerians don’t need much encouragement — despite the risks and volatility, Nigeria has the second highest cryptocurrency adoption rate in the world.

So every evening, struggling young men gather by Mr. Biyora’s home and tap.

Pleas for Help

In much of Nigeria, it’s normal to share with your neighbors and give alms to the poor.

Every day, people come to the gate of Kano’s Freedom Radio station to drop off sheets of paper containing heartfelt appeals for help paying medical bills or school fees, or to recover from some disaster.

A radio presenter chooses three to read out daily, and often a sympathetic listener calls in to pay the supplicant’s bill.

But lately the appeals have multiplied, and offers of help have dried up.

Good Samaritans used to come to the E.R. and pay strangers’ bills for them, Mr. Garba said. That rarely happens now either.

Still, Mr. Garba said, the number of patients coming to his hospital has almost halved in recent months.

Many of the sick never even make it. They can’t afford the 20-cent bus ride.

Image
A man sits at a blue desk covered with radio equipment. He wears headphones.

A presenter on Kano’s Freedom Radio station reads out petitioners’ requests for assistance. But these days, few listeners have the means to help.
Pius Adeleye contributed reporting from Ibadan, Nigeria.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Many African Nations Want France Out. This Country Wants It In.

France is facing deep anticolonial resentment across Africa, but has found a partner in Rwanda, which is embracing French influence despite years of acrimony.


Mashauri Muhindo Memcan, the head of the French department at the Good Haven International School in Kigali, Rwanda, in April. The French language, once snubbed, is back in classrooms in the Central African nation.

By Abdi Latif DahirPhotographs by Guillem Sartorio
Reporting from Kigali, Rwanda

June 24, 2024
Updated 9:07 a.m. ET
After decades of wielding political, military and economic power across Africa, France is scaling back its presence on the continent as it faces significant resentment in many African countries. Yet one nation has emerged as an exception: Rwanda.

As other African nations seek to reduce France’s influence, Rwanda is embracing it, celebrating French culture, language and food, despite decades of frosty relations with Paris over its role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. In return, French companies are scaling up their investments in Rwanda.

The détente, which is being championed by Rwanda’s longtime leader, Paul Kagame, has garnered France a much-needed security partner in Africa and secured Rwanda millions of dollars in development and trade funds. The warming relations are also rare good news for the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who has faced a wave of indignation across Africa and was crushed by the far right in the European parliamentary elections this month.

“We have a partner in Kagame,” Hervé Berville, a French minister of state, said in an interview in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.

“It’s really the beginning of a new chapter,” said Mr. Berville, who was born in Rwanda, adopted by a French family during the genocide and grew up in France.

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Three workers in a restaurant kitchen. One holds a pan with flames rising from it.

Anastase Nteziryayo, right, cooking at L’Épicurien, a French-owned restaurant in Kigali. Mr. Nteziryayo said he had improved his French language skills even as he sought to learn and prepare classic French dishes.

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An outdoor area at a bar with people drinking and talking.

An event at the Francophone Cultural Center of Rwanda in Kigali. In the past three years, more than 12,000 Rwandans have registered to learn or take French exams at the center, the institute’s director, Johan-Hilel Hamel, said.

For decades, diplomatic rancor and hostility characterized relations between the two countries. Mr. Kagame accused France, and especially the government of François Mitterrand, then president, of enabling the Rwandan officials who oversaw the 1994 genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered.

The relationship frayed so much in the early 2000s that Rwanda abandoned French for English in classrooms, expelled the French ambassador, shuttered the French international school and cultural center, and blocked the French state radio broadcaster.

But events began to shift when Mr. Macron came to power. In 2021, a report he commissioned concluded that, while France was not complicit in the genocide, it bore “serious and overwhelming” responsibility for it. Rwanda published its own report weeks later and accused Paris of providing “unwavering support” to the government that carried out the genocide in order to maintain its own influence.

Mr. Macron visited Rwanda soon after the reports were released, beginning a cascade of events that brought about the rapprochement between the countries.

By mid-2021, France had appointed a new ambassador to Rwanda. The French Development Agency inaugurated a new office in Kigali. France donated hundreds of thousands of doses of Covid vaccine during the pandemic.

French conglomerates poured in millions of dollars in investments in real estate, technology, entertainment and tourism. Last month leaders from more than 50 French companies attended the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, French officials said. Some of them, including the head of TotalEnergies, personally met with Mr. Kagame.

Image
Surgeons in an on operating theater standing over a patient.

Surgeons doing laparoscopy surgery training at IRCAD Africa. The major French research and training institution, which specializes in minimally invasive surgery, opened its first Africa center in Rwanda last year.

Image
Motorcycles and other vehicles on a road on a hillside overlooking city lights at night.

Overlooking Kigali. The arrival of French businesses in the city is “a testimony of how when politics become better, it has an impact on business,” said Sophie Tchatchoua, the head of the French business club in Rwanda.

In Rwanda, French has been reintroduced in schools. Mr. Macron opened a newly built French cultural center. Young Rwandans now dine in restaurants offering French cuisine. Rwandan artists and fashion designers perform and exhibit their works at major French cultural institutions.

“Everywhere you look, there’s French and France,” said Mashauri Muhindo Memcan, a teacher in Kigali. A few years ago, he was the only French-language instructor at his school, he said, but he now leads a growing department with six French-language teachers.

For France, the new engagement with Rwanda reflects Mr. Macron’s efforts to find allies and business partners on a continent where rival nations like China and Russia are vying for influence.

But it’s also aimed at engaging the younger generations in conversations about the past, so as to “avoid a repetition,” said Mr. Berville, the French minister. “We need to be vigilant,” he told a group of French and Rwandan students in Kigali on a recent afternoon, wearing a dark tie over a white shirt, à la Macron.

Despite the warming ties, the two countries still have disagreements.

Image
Four children outside a schoolroom. On the wall are the French words, “carré,” ‘l’étoile,” rectangle,” ”triangle,” and “cercle.”

A school in Kigali. The relationship between France and Rwanda was once so frosty that Kigali expelled the French ambassador and scrubbed French from its classrooms.

Image
A young student writes French in an exercise book.

A French lesson at the Good Haven International School in Kigali. The French Development Agency has helped promote the teaching and learning of French as a foreign language.

France has accused Rwanda of supporting rebel fighters wreaking havoc in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, which Kigali has long denied.

Rwanda still takes umbrage at the fact that France has not claimed more responsibility for the genocide. Those tensions surfaced during the 30th anniversary of the genocide in April, when Mr. Macron backpedaled on acknowledging France’s failure to halt the genocide.

But Rwanda and France have solidified their defense cooperation, even as French troops have been expelled from several African countries, including Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

Though small in size, Rwanda has used its military to leverage its influence internationally, particularly through peacekeeping missions. And France, wary of another military intervention, has looked to Rwanda as an alternative to deploying troops on African soil, said Federico Donelli, a professor of international relations at the University of Trieste, who has written extensively about Rwanda’s military.

This was the case in Mozambique, where France backed the deployment of Rwandan troops to fight an insurgency in Cabo Delgado Province. The region is home to a multibillion-dollar gas project owned by TotalEnergies of France.

France also promoted Rwanda’s involvement in Mozambique at the European Union, Mr. Donelli said. The bloc funded Rwanda’s mission to the tune of 20 million euros, or $21.4 million.

“France sees Rwanda as a perfect partner in its new African agenda,” Mr. Donelli added. “Paris’s political costs, both domestic and continental, are lower. And Kigali stands to gain both a good reputation and economic benefits.”

Beyond security, France has increased its development funding to the landlocked nation. The French development agency has spent half a billion euros creating jobs and renovating health facilities. In April, the two countries signed a development partnership valued at 400 million euros, or about $429 million.

Image
Mechatronics students work at consoles with wires and switches.

Students at the mechatronics department at the Integrated Polytechnic Regional College in the town of Tumba, in northern Rwanda. The program hopes to provide young graduates with the skills needed to find vocational jobs.

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A few people outside a modern-looking building with the words “MECHATRONICS DEPT” on the outside.

The mechatronics department in Tumba was built after President Emmanuel Macron visited Rwanda in 2021. Since then, France and Rwanda have deepened their economic, political and security relations.

France is also paying for vocational training for thousands of Rwandan college students in disciplines including mechatronics, a hybrid field that combines mechanics and electronics.

On a recent morning, several French officials toured a college that France funded and built in Tumba, a town about 20 miles northwest of Kigali. Students there huddled in classes and laboratories studying industrial automation and working up robotic systems.

“There’s a willingness in Rwanda to change, improve and even build systems that could benefit the wider Africa,” said Arthur Germond, the Rwanda country director for the French development agency, who led the tour. “We want to help that vision.”

For some Rwandans, the shifting relations augur new opportunities.

For years, Hervé Kimenyi, a comedian, refrained from performing in French as Rwanda pivoted away from the language and his audiences dwindled. But with relations improving, he is now setting up a comedy club that will feature standup, poetry and music exclusively in French.

By doing so, he said, he hopes to reach both older and younger Rwandans but also French-speaking students and professionals from elsewhere on the continent, mostly West Africa, who now call Rwanda home.

For Mr. Berville, the French minister, strengthening relations with Rwanda will entail working on challenges facing both nations, such as climate change. But it will also involve France’s taking active measures to reckon with the past, including trying genocide suspects still living in France.

That’s the only way to make improving relations “irreversible,” no matter who succeeds Mr. Macron in the next French election, Mr. Berville said. “Words are good,” he said, “but actions are better.”

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An audience under a canopy.

Watching a documentary at the French cultural center in Kigali in April.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/worl ... agame.html

[kmaherali]

Protest against new taxes proposed in a controversial finance bill


Police fire tear gas toward protesters as they march through the streets in the capital, Nairobi, on Tuesday to protest against higher taxes.

Police opened fire on demonstrators trying to storm Kenya's legislature on Tuesday, with at least five protesters killed, dozens wounded and sections of the parliament building set ablaze as lawmakers inside passed legislation to raise taxes.

In chaotic scenes in Nairobi, protesters overwhelmed police and chased them away in an attempt to storm the parliament compound. Flames could be seen coming from inside.

Police opened fire after tear gas and water cannons failed to disperse the crowds.

A Reuters journalist counted the bodies of at least five protesters outside parliament. A paramedic, Vivian Achista, said at least 10 had been shot dead.

Another paramedic, Richard Ngumo, said more than 50 people had been wounded by gunfire. He was lifting two injured protesters into an ambulance outside parliament.

"We want to shut down parliament and every MP should go down and resign," protester Davis Tafari, who was trying to enter parliament, told Reuters. "We will have a new government."

Opposition to rising taxes

Police eventually managed to drive the protesters from the building amid clouds of tear gas and the sound of gunfire. The lawmakers were evacuated through underground tunnels, local media reported.

Protests and clashes also took place in several other cities and towns across the country, with many calling for President William Ruto to quit office as well as voicing their opposition to the tax rises.

Parliament approved the finance bill, moving it through to a third reading by lawmakers. The next step is for the legislation to be sent to the president for signing. He can send it back to parliament if he has any objections.

Ruto won an election almost two years ago on a platform of championing Kenya's working poor, but has been caught between the competing demands of lenders such as the International Monetary Fund, which is urging the government to cut deficits to access more funding, and a hard-pressed population.

Kenyans have been struggling to cope with several economic shocks caused by the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, two consecutive years of droughts and depreciation of the currency.

The finance bill aims to raise an additional $2.7 billion US in taxes as part of an effort to lighten the heavy debt load, with interest payments alone consuming 37 per cent of annual revenue.

Festival-like atmosphere turns

The government has already made some concessions, promising to scrap proposed new taxes on bread, cooking oil, car ownership and financial transactions. But that has not been enough to satisfy protesters.

Tuesday's protests began in a festival-like atmosphere but as crowds swelled, police fired tear gas in Nairobi's Central Business District and the poor neighbourhood of Kibera. Protesters ducked for cover and threw stones at police lines.

People clambered over police vehicles stalled in the downtown streets.

Police also fired tear gas in Eldoret, Ruto's hometown in western Kenya, where crowds of protesters filled the streets and many businesses were closed for fear of violence.


Holding a stick, a protester lobs back a teargas canister at police; he is standing next to another protester, with a crowd behind them on a road.
Police in Kenya fired live ammunition at anti-government protesters in the capital Nairobi on Tuesday as thousands continued to rally, demanding legislators vote against new taxes proposed in a controversial finance bill. Here, a protester lobs back a tear gas canister at police during a nationwide strike in downtown Nairobi. (Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images)
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Clashes also broke out in the coastal city of Mombasa and demonstrations took place in Kisumu, on Lake Victoria, and Garissa in eastern Kenya, where police blocked the main road to Somalia's port of Kismayo.

In Nairobi, people chanted "Ruto must go" and crowds sang in Swahili: "All can be possible without Ruto." Music played from loudspeakers and protesters waved Kenyan flags and blew whistles in the few hours before the violence escalated.

Police did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Days of protests

Thousands had taken to the streets of Nairobi and several other cities during two days of protests last week as an online, youth-led movement gathered momentum.

Whereas protests in Kenya have typically been called for by political leaders who have been amenable to negotiated settlements and power-sharing arrangements, the young demonstrators have no official leader and have been growing increasingly bold in their demands.

On Sunday, Ruto praised the protesters, saying they had been peaceful and that the government would engage with them on the way forward. But while protesters initially focused on the finance bill, their demands have broadened to demand Ruto's resignation.

The opposition declined to participate in the vote in parliament, shouting "reject, reject" when the house went through the items one by one. The bill will then be subjected to a third and final vote by acclamation on the floor of the house.

The Finance Ministry says amendments would blow a $1.56 billion US hole in the 2024/25 budget, and compel the government to make spending cuts or raise taxes elsewhere.

"They are budgeting for corruption," said protester Hussein Ali, 18. "We won't relent. It's the government that is going to back off. Not us."

CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices|About CBC News

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/kenya-par ... -1.7245625

[kmaherali]

High living costs are straining even Africa’s most stable economies.


Informal housing in Nairobi, Kenya. The country has one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, but the benefits have not trickled down to many ordinary people. Credit...Ed Ram for The New York Times

Kenya, a thriving business hub in East Africa, has become a cautionary tale for a growing economic crisis in Africa. The country is one Africa’s fastest growing economies and home to new digital industries. But a new tax law promoted by the president and passed by Parliament on Tuesday showed how vulnerable the public is to economic shocks.

The tax law would increase the cost of essential items, some of which are imported from nearby East African countries and some from further away. The affected items include eggs, cooking oil and other goods. It also raises taxes on ride-hailing and food-delivery services, which employ many young people, and on telephone and internet usage.

The Kenyan government has said the tax increases are necessary to pay off the country’s crippling debt and avoid default.

East Africa has the fastest growing economy of any region in Africa, where economies show growth on a large scale. However, in many places, including Kenya, benefits have not trickled down to the average person.

Inflation across Africa has risen at an average of nearly 18 percent, the highest in more than a decade, according to figures from the African Development Bank. International shocks, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a growing climate crisis, have hampered agricultural production and increased food prices, sending inflation climbing, the regional bank said.

These pressures have rocked some of the continent’s most stable and most promising economies. Nigeria, once Africa’s largest economy and the focus of praise for innovation, is buckling under the worst economic crisis in decades. Inflation has skyrocketed and the national currency, the naira, is in freefall. The cost of basic food items have become so high that markets have seen pockets of protest and even stampedes.

In southern Africa, Zambia, is struggling to avoid default on a massive debt and enmeshed in a cost-of-living crisis. Costs for fuel and basic food items, like maize meal, are high, and rolling electricity blackouts have become common. In May, the country’s currency, the kwacha, plummeted to a record low against the dollar, pushing import costs even higher.

The economic crisis has dimmed the hope that Zambians and the international community had placed in President Hakainde Hichilema, a businessman turned politician. Critics and civil society organizations have warned that the economic crisis is a ticking time bomb.

In South Africa, the most advanced economy in Africa, the economy was a dominant issue for many voters in May elections. Rolling blackouts and record unemployment, especially among the young, were among the issues prompting voters to punish the governing African National Congress at the polls, with the party earning its lowest majority yet.

Weaker economies are even more vulnerable to these shocks. In Cameroon, a West African nation already divided by internal strife, impoverished communities are struggling to put food on the table as food and fuel prices increase.

In its economic outlook for this year, the African Development Bank warned that “internal conflicts and violence could also result from rising prices for fuel and other commodities.”

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/06/25 ... -economies

[kmaherali]

A day after at least 23 people were killed in demonstrations against a tax increase, President William Ruto withdrew the law that he said was necessary to avoid defaulting on the country’s debt.


President William Ruto of Kenya said on Wednesday that he would not sign the contentious finance bill.Credit...Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Abdi Latif Dahir
Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya

June 26, 2024
In a sudden reversal, President William Ruto of Kenya announced on Wednesday that he would not sign a finance bill that he had long said would stabilize the country’s economy — a response to devastating protests a day earlier that left nearly two dozen people dead.

Though the precise toll was still being tallied, human rights groups said that 23 people were killed and over 300 others injured after the police used tear gas and bullets to respond to demonstrators who had marched on Parliament to protest the tax increases in the bill.

Some people broke into the Parliament building and set it on fire hours after lawmakers voted to pass the legislation. The death toll makes Tuesday’s violence one of the bloodiest days in the country’s recent history.

“Listening keenly to the people of Kenya who have said loudly that they want nothing to do with this finance bill, I concede, and therefore, I will not sign the 2024 finance bill, and it shall subsequently be withdrawn,” Mr. Ruto said in an address to the country on Wednesday.

Among those sitting behind him were lawmakers who, just a day earlier, had passed the bill in Parliament, some while being loudly condemned by their constituents for supporting the legislation.

The announcement was a change of course for Mr. Ruto, who in an address on Tuesday night had called the demonstrators “dangerous criminals” and “treasonous,” and deployed the military to join the police in quashing the protests.

Mr. Ruto’s government introduced the finance bill last month to raise revenue by imposing additional taxes. The government said the bill was necessary to pay the country’s enormous debt, avoid defaulting on loans and to cover the costs of roads, rural electrification and farming subsidies.

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A person walks past a charred vehicle on a street.

The wreckage of a car burned on Tuesday in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, during protests over proposed tax increases.Credit...Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But the legislation stoked widespread discontent among the public, with opponents arguing that it would onerously increase the cost of living. Critics of the bill also pointed to the lavish lifestyles of Mr. Ruto and members of his administration, and called on officials to limit their expenses. Mr. Ruto also said his office would cut spending on travel, cars and office renovations and proposed that other government branches do so.

Young protesters, who observers say largely initiated and guided the demonstrations, were also incensed by the dismissive way in which some leaders had addressed their concerns. Mr. Ruto said his government would engage with the young people and a broad range of groups in the next two weeks to chart a new economic course.

On Tuesday, as lawmakers debated and voted on the finance bill, protesters in Nairobi marched to Parliament to urge them to back down. But Mr. Ruto’s coalition, which has a majority in Parliament, quickly passed the legislation.

A tense mood lingered in major cities across Kenya on Wednesday after protesters on Tuesday stormed Parliament and set parts of it ablaze in actions that Mr. Ruto said posed an “existential danger” to the East African nation.

Some protesters vowed to march again on Thursday to protest the crackdown and mourn those killed.

Political analysts said on Wednesday the president remained besieged on multiple fronts and faced crucial tests to his leadership.

“He scuppered a great deal of good will,” said Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan analyst who writes about how the internet has affected the country’s politics. “While he might survive this moment, he has pushed Kenya into such deep, uncharted territory.”

Roseline Odede, the chairwoman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, a state agency, told a news conference on Wednesday that the group would start an inquiry into Tuesday’s violence.

“It violates a lot of rights in terms of response,” Ms. Odede said.

The state agency put the death toll at 22, while the independent Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Police Reforms Working Group, a coalition of grass-roots organizations, cited 23 dead.

Although businesses were slowly reopening across the country on Wednesday, newspapers being sold on the streets of Nairobi, the capital, captured the chaos of the previous day. “Pandemonium,” the front page of the Daily Nation newspaper said. “Deaths, chaos, rage,” The Star newspaper declared.

“I am shocked and sad and fuming,” said John Thwagi, a taxi driver who had ventured into the city. “The death and destruction is so unbelievable and so unnecessary.”

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A person reads a newspaper while sitting near a display of newspapers and magazines.

Front pages in Nairobi the morning after the violence.Credit...Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The nationwide protests have been leaderless, with young protesters using social media to organize and directly address their lawmakers. Observers say that a large majority of the protesters are members of Gen Z, the generation born in the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s.

Many had taken to platforms like X and TikTok to agitate against the bill — and to also tell politicians to stay away from the demonstrations and not threaten their movement.

Several people have also put out calls on social media about friends, colleagues and family members who were last seen during the protests on Tuesday.

Activists also say a wave of abductions occurred in the days and hours leading up to the demonstrations and that the disappearances have continued in the aftermath of the violence.

About 50 young Kenyans have been abducted, said Faith Odhiambo, the president of the Law Society of Kenya. Those missing had been vocal about their opposition to the tax bill, were threatened, physically trailed and had their communications monitored, she said.

Rights groups have long accused Kenya’s police force of kidnappings and extrajudicial disappearances. The disappearances have rattled the country, and prompted chief justice Martha Koome to condemn the alleged abductions on Tuesday.

Mr. Ruto said in his speech that all those who had been missing were “found in police custody and those that were already processed were already released.”

Kasmuel McOure, a musician who had been at the forefront of protests on Tuesday, remained missing, Ms. Odhiambo said.

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A person sweeps the area outside a damaged storefront as others stand nearby. Broken glass and other debris litter the pavement.

Cleaning up in downtown Nairobi on Wednesday morning after the previous day’s demonstrations turned violent.Credit...Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Mr. McOure said he had previously been threatened and accosted by people who he thought were plainclothes officers. “No matter what they do, we will remain unbowed,” he said.

On Wednesday, one prominent protester, who declined to be named for safety reasons, said that he had survived an abduction attempt and was in hiding. The protester said that several men had tried to force him into a car near his home, but that he ran away after members of the public stepped in.

Tensions gripped the capital soon after lawmakers approved the finance bill on Tuesday, with large crowds reaching Parliament, scaling its walls and pillaging parts of the facilities. After sundown, Defense Minister Aden Duale said he would deploy the military to support the police in dealing with the “security emergency” in the country. The Law Society of Kenya called the minister’s move “unconstitutional” and sued to stop the deployment.

An hour later, Mr. Ruto struck an uncompromising tone in a televised speech, calling the demonstrators “criminals pretending to be peaceful protesters.”

“I assure the nation that the government has mobilized all resources at the nation’s disposal to ensure that a situation of this nature will not recur again at whatever cost,” Mr. Ruto said.

On Wednesday, the strong smell of tear gas still wafted through the air in downtown Nairobi. A burned car sat next to the City Hall offices that protesters had breached. Across the street, the fence at the entrance to the Supreme Court complex was destroyed.

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A woman covers her face while sitting beside a wall.

A woman mourning after visiting a Nairobi funeral home on Wednesday to view the body of her son, who was fatally shot during Tuesday’s protests.Credit...EPA, via Shutterstock

Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent for The Times, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He covers a broad range of issues including geopolitics, business, society and arts. More about Abdi Latif Dahir

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/26/worl ... taxes.html

[kmaherali]

This Alliance United West Africa for Decades. Now Countries Are Backing Out.

Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are withdrawing from a 49-year-old regional alliance that has allowed goods and nearly 400 million people to travel freely across a tightly connected region.


While absorbing the news of a fracture, heads of state and leaders of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) pose for a group photo at their meeting in Abuja on July 7.Credit...Afolabi Sotunde/EPA, via Shutterstock

Three West African countries have broken away from a 15-member regional bloc that has long ensured free movement of people and goods among its tightly knit economies, further destabilizing an area that is home to nearly 400 million people and threatened by violent insurgents.

The leaders of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger last weekend announced their “irrevocable and immediate” withdrawal from the bloc, the Economic Community of West African States, known as ECOWAS. They said that they are creating their own confederation.

The three countries, all ruled by military leaders friendly to Russia, span more than half of the bloc’s geographic area and are among its most populous. However, they are not the region’s largest economies, and as landlocked nations, all three depend on access to ports in coastal countries for overseas trade.

“Our region is facing the risk of disintegration,” Omar Alieu Touray, the president of ECOWAS’s executive arm, said on Sunday.

The bloc has appointed Senegal’s newly elected president as a mediator in the crisis. But experts say that the breakup is now underway — and the consequences for people in the region may be stark.


Three countries announced their intent to leave the Ecomonic Community of West African States.

Algeria

Libya

Mauritania

Mali

Niger

Cape Verde

Senegal

Gambia

Burkina

Faso

Guinea–Bissau

Guinea

Benin

Nigeria

Ivory

Coast

Togo

Sierra Leone

Ghana

Liberia

Cameroon

MAP

EXTENT

Equatorial Guinea

Gabon


By Veronica Penney

Why are Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger leaving the bloc?

The three countries share borders, cultural and ethnic ties, and recent political history: Military leaders there ousted civilian governments in coups, accusing them of failing to defeat Islamist terrorist groups. The military juntas sidelined presidents, even locking one up in his residence, and refused to relinquish power or organize elections. As a result, ECOWAS imposed economic sanctions on them, hoping to compel the juntas to restore civilian rule.

But that approach has mostly hurt the countries’ populations, and in the founding treaty of their new alliance, the three leaders condemned the West African bloc’s “illegal, illegitimate and inhuman sanctions.”

The leaders’ supporters, as well as independent analysts, have also denounced what they call a double standard: ECOWAS has rarely applied sanctions to civilian leaders in West Africa who cling to power despite terms limits — what experts refer to as “constitutional coups” — while issuing punishments after military coups.

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People in the small country of Gambia cheered as troops from ECOWAS arrived at the statehouse in Banjul in 2017 to ensure a safe transition of power.Credit...Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images

Meanwhile, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have forged closer ties with Russia while cutting off military cooperation with the United States, France and other European countries.

Through their new confederation, known as the Alliance of the Sahelian States, the three countries’ leaders vowed to create a joint investment bank and conduct projects in sectors like agriculture, energy and infrastructure — priorities that ECOWAS has been promoting for decades.

The leaders also announced the creation of a joint military force to fight jihadist insurgents who have killed tens of thousands of civilians in the three countries over the past decade.

What does it mean for local people?

Freedom of movement for goods and people between countries is at stake, according to analysts.

For instance, families, traders and their wares have long moved freely across the border between Nigeria and Niger, a populous area of people who share the same ethnic groups and languages. That could change if new visa and customs rules are imposed.

Garba Maina, a 57-year-old trader, sells clothing from Nigeria in Niger and brings back rice, onions and pepper to sell in Nigeria. He called the breakup “a great disadvantage to us doing business along the Nigeria-Niger border.”

And he expressed a fear held by many in the border region.

“We might now need a visa to visit our families living less than 500 meters away from each other,” he said, referring to a distance less than one-third of a mile.

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At an outdoor market, vendors sitting on the ground sell large tubers arranged in piles to a customer in a long black abaya.

A market in Jibia, northern Nigeria, near the border with Niger, in February. Families, traders and their wares have long moved freely across the border between Nigeria and Niger, until recently.Credit...Kola Sulaimon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

However, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger remain part of a currency union, the CFA zone, that has ensured freedom of movement among its eight members. So for now, experts say, people and goods in those countries would still be able to pass freely.

But that would not include Nigeria, an ECOWAS member that is the region’s most populous nation and one of Niger’s biggest trading partners, according to the World Bank. Nigeria uses Naira as a currency, while Niger, like many other former French colonies, uses the colonial-era Franc CFA.

How are other West African leaders responding?

In a statement released on Sunday, ECOWAS leaders expressed “disappointment with the lack of progress in engagements” since the three countries announced their intent to withdraw in January.

The bloc was founded in 1975 to promote economic integration in the region. It has now appointed Senegal’s newly-elected president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, to try to bring the three countries fully back in.

Mr. Faye, 44, is from the same generation as the rulers of Burkina Faso and Mali. He shares some of their Pan-African views and their criticism of Western powers. He is also the only West African head of state to have met with the three leaders in recent months.

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Attendees sit in rows of chairs, flanked by flags of African countries, with a man standing at a green screen displaying the date and location of the meeting.

Delegates and observers at a meeting of the bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Abuja, Nigeria, last weekend after the three countries had announced their withdrawal.Credit...Kola Sulaimon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Gilles Olakounlé Yabi, founder and president of the West Africa Think Tank known as WATHI, said that although the countries were unlikely to rejoin anytime soon, “Through President Faye, ECOWAS is keeping the door open.”

When will the changes be felt?

Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali will still be part of the regional bloc for a year, the legal period of transition after a member nation announces its withdrawal.

So it is unclear when the first consequences might be noticeable — when, for instance, visas could be required between Niger and Nigeria.

“Now we need to see the three governments get the ball rolling in terms of disengagement,” said Idayat Hassan, a Nigeria-based senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s not only about theatrics and rhetoric anymore.”

Mr. Yabi, with the West Africa Think Tank, pointed out that the military rulers had withdrawn from the regional bloc without consulting their populations, in the same way they had taken over their countries.

“These leaders seized power in a coup, and nobody can say how long they will last,” he said. “One important political change in one these countries, and they might be back into ECOWAS.”

Ismail Alfa contributed reporting from Maiduguri, Nigeria.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Tanzania Arrests 520 People in Mass Opposition Crackdown

The clampdown came after the police banned a youth rally and pointed to the anti-government protests that have swept neighboring Kenya in recent months.


Freeman Mbowe, the chairman of the Tanzanian opposition party Chadema, was among those arrested before a planned rally.Credit...Ericky Boniphace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Tanzanian police said on Tuesday they had arrested more than 500 people, including top opposition leaders, as they planned to attend a youth rally, a stunning development in the East African nation where a pathbreaking female president had once promised to restore political freedoms.

Some 520 people were arrested across the country ahead of a Monday rally in the southwestern city of Mbeya, Awadh J. Haji, the police commissioner for operations and training, said in a statement. The police, he said, also seized 25 vehicles that had been transporting people going to the rally and officials from different regions in the country.

The rally was organized by the opposition Chadema party, which said it wanted to mark International Youth Day. But the police banned the gathering before it was underway, and accused party members of making statements that showed their intention to carry out anti-government protests similar to those that swept across neighboring Kenya in recent months.

“Their goal is not to celebrate International Youth Day, but to initiate and commit violence to cause disruption of peace in the country,” Mr. Haji said.

The latest crackdown does not augur well for Tanzania, whose president promised to oversee a more open nation after coming to power in 2021. The country’s first female leader, President Samia Suluhu Hassan, reversed some of the measures put in place by her populist predecessor, including by lifting a yearslong ban on political rallies, easing restrictions on the press and allowing pregnant girls to attend school.

Tanzania was one of three African nations that Vice President Kamala Harris visited last year in her efforts to bolster democratic governance and women’s empowerment in the continent.

But since then, Ms. Hassan’s government has been accused of cracking down on protests against a port management deal, forcibly evicting Maasai communities from their land, suspending news media outlets and arresting journalists — issues that activists say are alarming as the country prepares for local elections in December and a general election next year.

Ms. Hassan has also been criticized for delaying wider reforms, including a review of the country’s Constitution, which grants vast powers to the executive branch and was adopted in 1977, when the country was still a one-party state.

Ms. Hassan’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The planned youth rally in Tanzania comes as anti-government protests have gripped African countries, including Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. Demonstrators have focused their ire on government officials, whom they accuse of corruption and overseeing bad economic policies.

In Tanzania, among those arrested was Freeman Mbowe, the chairman of the Chadema party, and his deputy in the mainland, Tundu Lissu. Mr. Mbowe was released from prison in 2022 after charges against him related to terrorism were dropped.

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A man wearing a turtleneck and dungaree jacket folding his arms.

Tundu Lissu, a deputy in the Chadema party, was arrested on Sunday. He, Mr. Mbowe and other top officials were released after posting bail.Credit...Kenzo Tribouillard/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Over the years, Mr. Lissu has become a key detractor of the governing Chama Cha Mapinduzi party — or Party of the Revolution — which has ruled the country since it declared independence. In 2017, he survived an assassination attempt and left the country, but he returned to run for president in the 2020 elections. Facing harassment and intimidation after the bloody and contentious vote, Mr. Lissu again left the country. He returned last year, encouraged by Ms. Hassan’s decision to lift a ban on political rallies, he said.

Mr. Lissu was arrested in Mbeya on Sunday as he and other party members were gathering in the city for the rally. He, Mr. Mbowe and other top officials were released on Tuesday after posting bail, according to a statement from the party posted on social media. The party said its office in Mbeya was “surrounded by the police and they are not allowing people to enter” them.

The latest clampdown has drawn criticism from rights groups who have called on Ms. Hassan to stop them. As elections near, the mass arrests of government opponents were “a deeply worrying sign” for the country, Sarah Jackson, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for East and Southern Africa, said in an emailed statement.

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A portrait President Samia Suluhu Hassan wearing glasses and a polka dot hijab.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania.

Credit...Malin Fezehai for The New York Times

On Tuesday, the police said they will closely monitor any planned protests or gatherings and will decisively deal with anyone who they say breaches the law.

“The police force continues to closely monitor various information related to plans to break the peace,” Mr. Haji said. “Whoever is identified will be dealt with strictly according to the law, regardless of their rank, position or ideology.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Africa’s Debt Crisis Has ‘Catastrophic Implications’ for the World

Crushing obligations to foreign creditors that have few precedents have sapped numerous African nations of growth and stoked social instability.

The police using a water cannon on a truck to disperse protesters who are gathered in a street. Some of them are holding signs and flags.

Proposed tax increases resulted in deadly protests in Kenya this summer.Credit...Brian Otieno for The New York Times

Patricia Cohen
By Patricia Cohen
Aug. 28, 2024
Updated 4:53 a.m. ET

After a new tax increase incited weeks of deadly riots in Kenya early this summer, President William Ruto announced that he was reversing course. He abandoned the finance law he had proposed, and then he shook up his cabinet.

Last week, the government reversed itself again. The newly appointed finance minister announced that some of those discarded tax increases would be reintroduced.

The Ruto administration is desperately trying to raise revenue to pay off billions of dollars in public debt and avoid defaulting on its loans, even as critical public assistance and services are being cut.

Governments throughout Africa are facing the same dilemma.

The continent’s foreign debt reached more than $1.1 trillion at the end of last year. More than two dozen countries have excessive debt or are at high risk of it, according to the African Development Bank Group. And roughly 900 million people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health care or education.

Outsize debt has been a familiar problem in the developing world, but the current crisis is considered the worst yet because of the amounts owed as well as the huge increase in the number and type of foreign creditors.

And in Africa, a continent pulsating with potential and peril, debt overshadows nearly everything that happens.

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People walking outside a white tent with a USAID sign on its exterior.

An mpox treatment center in the Democratic Republic of Congo this month. The excessive debt that many African nations are carrying leaves less money to put toward services like health care.Credit...Guerchom Ndebo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It leaves less money for investments that could create jobs for what is the youngest, fastest-growing population on the planet; less money to manage potential pandemics like Covid or mpox; less money to feed, house and educate people; less money to combat the devastating effects of climate change, which threaten to make swaths of land uninhabitable and force people to migrate.

If nothing is done to help countries manage the financial crunch, “a wave of destabilizing debt defaults will end up severely undermining progress on the green transition, with catastrophic implications for the entire world,” warned a new report from the Finance for Development Lab at the Paris School for Economics and Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue.

At the same time, economic stagnation in combination with government corruption and mismanagement has left many African countries more vulnerable to brutal wars, military coups and antigovernment riots.

In Nigeria, where foreign debt amounts to $40 billion, rising inflation and widespread hunger spurred a string of violent antigovernment protests this month. Forty percent of the country’s 220 million people live in extreme poverty. Yet more than a third of the revenue collected by the government is used to pay the interest on its public debt.

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People shopping at an outdoor market, some carrying baskets on their heads. Vehicles line the street near the marketplace.

The central market in Yola, Nigeria, a country that is experiencing rising levels of inflation.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

In Uganda, where foreign creditors are owed $12 billion, demonstrations in July targeted corruption. And in Kenya, which has $35 billion worth of external debt, some protesters have said they are ready to march again after the latest news of impending tax increases.

In many African countries, there has been zero per capita income growth in the past decade. The debt crisis has caused the value of many currencies to depreciate, further sapping purchasing power.

The string of economic shocks produced by the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped to supercharge the debt crisis. Food and energy prices soared as government coffers dwindled. The moves by central banks in wealthy countries to fight inflation with higher interest rates caused borrowing costs to rapidly climb.

The issue, though, is not just how much money countries like Kenya and Nigeria have borrowed, but whom they have borrowed from.

In recent decades, the pool of potential lenders has exploded to include thousands of private bondholders and a major new geopolitical player: China.

Seeking to spread its own clout and counter American and European influence, China has transformed itself into the world’s biggest national lender, financing roads, ports, bridges, airports, power plants, telecommunications networks and railways in developing countries.

Many nations, bristling at loan conditions dictated by Western lenders or the International Monetary Fund, were eager to find an alternative source of financing. Agreements with China often came without environmental, financial or human rights restrictions, though they were more opaque so difficult for outsiders to assess.

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A highway lined by buildings, running through a city.

The Nairobi Expressway is among the infrastructure projects in Kenya that have been built by China.Credit...Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

China now accounts for 73 percent of bilateral borrowing in Kenya, 83 percent in Nigeria and 72 percent in Uganda, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Over the past two decades, one in five infrastructure projects in Africa was financed by China, a report from the National Bureau of Asian Research found, and Chinese firms built one in three projects.

Some of them — like Kenya’s railway between Nairobi and Mombasa — have turned into showcases of corruption and blunders. Many of these large-scale infrastructure projects will never produce enough revenue to justify the costs.

Economic conditions and loan repayment prospects have soured, but China has been reluctant to offer debt relief. It has instead been holding out for repayment, extending credit swaps and rollovers that end up putting off the day of reckoning.

It took Zambia nearly four years to reach a loan restructuring agreement after it defaulted in 2020, for example, primarily because of opposition from China, the country’s single largest creditor.

The monumental increase in the number of private bondholders and creditors has further complicated efforts to resolve debt crises.

Image
President William Ruto speaking at a lectern, with an American flag and a Kenyan flag behind him.

President William Ruto of Kenya pulled back proposed tax increases after deadly riots erupted in June. But last week, his finance minister said some of those tax increases would be reintroduced.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank encouraged poor and middle-income countries to embrace Wall Street and seek private loans overseas in the 2010s, said Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Interest rates were extremely low, investors were on the hunt for higher returns and development officials hoped countries could tap a big new source of capital.

As a result, governments looking to rally political support or finance development borrowed too much and creditors seeking gains lent too much.

When interest rates suddenly rose, countries were forced to take out new loans, at high costs, to repay the money they had previously borrowed.

Investors were also able to impose costly loan terms like higher rates on struggling nations that were sometimes on the edge of default — what’s known as a risk premium. Kenya’s government paid more than 10 percent on international bonds to pay off a $2 billion debt that was due in June.

Countries that borrow more than they can afford end up experiencing intense economic and social pain as output crashes, employment dries up, and inflation and poverty rise. The systemic problem, said Indermit Gill, chief economist at the World Bank, is that lenders who also made bad decisions by extending too much credit often don’t pay a financial penalty.

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Several people, including members of law enforcement, restraining a person during a protest.

A demonstrator was detained during an anticorruption protest in Kampala, Uganda.Credit...Isaac Kasamani/EPA, via Shutterstock

“You got paid a risk premium for a reason,” Mr. Gill said of the lenders, adding that if they don’t absorb losses, they will make more reckless loans. “That’s a major weakness in the way the system works.”

The debt overhang leaves countries unable to make the kind of investments that could put their economies on stable footing, which would enable them to repay their loans.

And money that was intended for economic development ends up being siphoned off: Emergency loans from international institutions like the I.M.F. and the World Bank have been used to pay off private foreign creditors or China.

In Kenya, the central bank announced in June that private creditors would get $500 million of a World Bank loan.

As the Finance for Development Lab report concluded, “The global community is currently funding loans to developing countries, which end up ‘leaking out’ to pay off other creditors.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/busi ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

No Vaccines, Tests or Treatments: Congo Lacks Tools to Confront Mpox

The country at the center of a global health emergency is struggling even to diagnose cases and provide basic care.


Benedi Manegabe, 21, discussing his mpox progression with a nurse at a hospital in Kavumu, South Kivu Province, in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Saturday.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

Health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of a shape-shifting mpox outbreak, say they lack even the most basic tools necessary to contain and treat the virus.

The country has limited capacity to diagnose cases of mpox, even as transmission and the presentation of the disease are changing. That is complicating efforts to trace contacts and establish the true scale and spread of the outbreak.

There is no effective antiviral treatment for mpox in Congo. The country is also short on the medications necessary to treat people with painful mpox lesions. Its fragile public health system is struggling to provide those infected with basic care, which has been shown to improve survival rates even in the absence of antiviral drugs.

And the country is still waiting for vaccines to begin a campaign to protect health workers and close contacts of those infected and to try to check spread of the virus.

“We thought when there was an emergency declaration from the World Health Organization in 2022 that then we would get help with surveillance and really understanding this disease,” said Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, the director of the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa.


//Battling Mpox in the Outbreak’s Epicenter in Congo https://www.nytimes.com/card/2024/08/29 ... latedLinks
//An early look at a remote treatment center where children and adults suffer with mpox, recently declared a global health emergency.
//
//Aug. 28, 2024

“Then the number of cases declined very quickly in the West, and the interest ended — but here our cases were still growing,” said Dr. Muyembe-Tamfum, who has studied mpox since 1970, when the first cases were diagnosed.

Now, researchers in Congo are scrambling to understand the behavior of a new variant of the mpox virus, one that is spread through sexual and other intimate contact, and that may be more easily transmitted.

One form of mpox, known as Clade 1a, has spread in Congo for years, affecting primarily children who were in contact with wild animals in the forest. Last year, however, mpox also started to spread among young adults in the eastern Congo, where it had rarely been seen.

Dr. Muyembe-Tamfum and his colleagues traced the outbreak to a mining town called Kamituga, where they found that sex workers and their gold-miner customers — many of them migrant workers from neighboring countries — were the part of a network driving spread of the virus.

Image
Two health workers clad in blue medical gowns walking between two makeshift white buildings. They are also wearing blue face masks, and one worker is wearing a blue hairnet.

Health workers doing morning rounds at an mpox treatment center in North Kivu Province in Congo last week.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

In some patients, the new subtype of the virus, known as Clade 1b, seems to be causing lesions only on the genitals but not on their limbs or faces, as it had in Congo. Some may therefore be able to hide the infections, if they are worried about being stigmatized or losing income while they spend time in a treatment center.

Some of these patients are not seeking care or being identified, said Dr. Placide Mbala, who leads the epidemiology and global health division at the N.I.B.R. in Kinshasa.

Only 30 percent of suspected mpox cases in Congo are being confirmed with molecular testing, the health minister Dr. Samuel-Roger Kamba said. The rest are diagnosed based on clinical symptoms. (Some infections may be confused with varicella, the virus that causes chickenpox, or with sexually transmitted infections.)

“We need the means to test the maximum number of people with suspected cases to be certain we’re finding everyone who has the virus,” Dr. Kamba said.

Congo’s capacity to do PCR testing, the gold standard for diagnosis, was bolstered by international assistance during the Covid-19 pandemic. But there are still only six labs processing the tests in Congo, a country the size of Western Europe.

In some places, samples scraped from the lesions of possible patients must travel for two days to reach a lab, Dr. Mbala said.

And the cost is prohibitive: An mpox test run on a GeneXpert PCR machine requires two disposable cartridges, each costing about $11, while testing at the national laboratory costs $5 to $10 per test.

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A woman in a colorful patterned dress sits on the ground with several other women and their children in a tent. Her baby is lying in her lap, and she is applying honey to his face with a spoon.

Martine Mwagakala treating her son Baraka’s sores and throat infection with honey in a tent for mpox patients in Kavumu in South Kivu Province, Congo.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

“We need, at a minimum, a laboratory capable of doing these tests in every one of the 26 provinces,” said Dr. Dieudonné Mwamba, the director of Congo’s National Institute of Public Health.

No rapid tests are available for mpox. When the spread of the virus caused the global emergency in 2022, diagnostics companies began to develop new tests — but they shelved the effort when the high-income market disappeared, and mpox returned to the status of neglected tropical disease.

None of those tests were put through field trials or regulatory review. “There are some tests in the pipeline, but more funding is needed to validate them quickly,” said Dr. Emmanuel Agogo, the director of pandemic threats at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics.

It is not yet clear whether the standard mpox PCR tests on the market can all consistently and effectively detect Clade 1b, the new subtype of the virus, he said. On Thursday, the W.H.O. began an emergency-use licensing process for mpox tests and invited manufacturers to submit data, in an effort to expand the options.

Congo is also struggling to provide care to the patients who are diagnosed.

Mpox causes high fevers and painful lesions. An antiviral drug called tecovirimat provided relief for patients in a trial in the United States and Europe in 2022 and 2023.

But an unpublished study recently carried out in Congo by the N.I.B.R. and the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases found that tecovirimat did not work there.

Dr. Mbala and other researchers who worked on that trial noted a key finding: The drug did not reduce the amount of time that patients had lesions. Yet, the mortality rates of those who received the drug and those who were given the placebo were the same — and were significantly lower than the usual mortality rate in Congo.

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A close-up view of a health worker's gloved hands inspecting the hands of a small child with lesions.

A health worker inspecting the lesions of a new patient at the Munigi mpox treatment center.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

That suggests, the researchers said, that high-quality care like that received by participants in the study helps mpox patients survive. But that care is considerably more complex than what most Congolese clinics can offer.

Patients need painkillers, antibiotics to treat bacterial infections contracted through lesions, medication to control fevers, and support to maintain nutrition and hydration, all of which can be in short supply, Dr. Mwamba said.

Children, who make up the bulk of the more than 500 fatalities from mpox in Congo so far this year, are often more vulnerable because of other health problems, such as malnutrition, measles and malaria, he said.

There is one more clinical trial of a potential mpox antiviral treatment underway in Congo, said Dr. Nathalie Strub Wourgaft, who heads PANTHER, a network created during the Covid crisis to rapidly set up clinical trials for pandemics in Africa.

That trial is planned to expand to other African countries with mpox transmission. But beyond that, she said, there are few treatment possibilities in the pipeline.

“We need antivirals to reduce time of healing of lesions to decrease pain and the risk of progression and risk of transmission,” she said.

Dr. Strub Wourgaft described seeing children with mpox who were close to starving, as they could not swallow food because of pain from lesions.

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Several white tents in an encampment under a white sky.

A camp in Muja, North Kivu, where the first cases of mpox were discovered.Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

While there are no vaccines developed expressly for mpox, health agencies in high-income countries gave emergency authorization to vaccines for smallpox, a related virus, during the 2022 outbreak. Clinical trials found that those vaccines offered significant protection against mpox.

Congo’s government has authorized use of the vaccines but has none. Donated doses from the European Union and the United States are moving through logistical steps for delivery and distribution. Purchases of additional vaccine doses from Gavi and UNICEF, which supply most immunizations to Congo, have been slowed by bureaucracy.

Researchers also believe that children and young adults may be more affected because older people still have some immunity to mpox because they were vaccinated against smallpox.

“The emergency in 2022 led to the production of vaccines in the countries of the North because they were affected, but these vaccines have not been transmitted to Africa,” Dr. Kamba, the health minister, said.

“We should have already thought about protecting Africans,” he added, “because you didn’t have the sexual form that now circulates in Africa and is gaining momentum.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/heal ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

China Woos Africa, Casting Itself as Global South’s Defender

More than 50 African leaders have gathered in Beijing for a summit aimed at projecting the influence of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in the developing world.


China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and his wife, Peng Liyuan, with leaders of African nations at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday.Credit...Pool photo by Ken Ishii

African flags have been flown over Tiananmen Square. Leaders of African nations have been greeted by dancers, honor guards and children waving flags. They have been escorted in extensive motorcades past banners celebrating “A Shared Future for China and Africa” and giant, elaborate flower arrangements.

China has pulled out all the stops for a gathering of leaders and top officials from more than 50 African nations this week in Beijing, welcoming them with pomp and pageantry. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has cast his country as a defender of the developing world, one that can push the West to listen to the voices of poorer nations.

“Modernization is an inalienable right of all countries,” he told the gathering on Thursday. “But the Western approach to it has inflicted immense sufferings on developing countries.”

Mr. Xi had hosted a banquet for the visiting officials at the start of the event on Wednesday, after three straight days of back-to-back bilateral talks with nearly two dozen leaders of nations ranging from impoverished Chad to the continental economic powerhouse of Nigeria.

The three-day forum is meant to demonstrate Beijing’s global clout despite rising tensions with the West. Mr. Xi’s courtship of African countries is part of a great geopolitical competition with the United States that has intensified in recent years over Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s aggressive posture toward Taiwan.

China is “trying to take advantage of the space left by the U.S. and Europe, which are increasingly disengaged with Africa,” said Eric Olander, the editor in chief of the China-Global South Project website. “China sees an opportunity to really step up its engagement, and not necessarily just with money.”

And Beijing’s diplomatic push is more urgent this year as China, faced with slowing economic growth at home and accusations of dumping excess production abroad, seeks new buyers for its goods.


“As China’s relations with the U.S. and Europe deteriorate, African markets, as well as other parts of the global south, will become even more important for Chinese goods,” said Yunnan Chen, a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute in London who has studied cooperation between China and Africa. That is particularly true of new technologies like solar panels or electric vehicles, she added.

Even so, some African leaders have indicated that they would prefer a more balanced relationship, one in which China bought more finished goods from the region, for instance. “We would like to narrow the trade deficit and address the structure of our trade,” South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, told Mr. Xi on Monday during talks held on the sidelines of the forum, according to an official transcript.

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The presidents of China and South Africa walk on a red carpet past a military honor guard.

Mr. Xi with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa at the Great Hall of the People on Monday, in an image released by Chinese state media.Credit...Yao Dawei/Xinhua, via Associated Press

The event is also an opportunity for China to defend its engagement in Africa. It has come under criticism for offering financing without environmental, financial or human rights conditions, leading to projects tainted by corruption, pollution or labor abuses. China, one of the world’s largest creditors, has also been reluctant to offer debt relief to most countries despite the crippling load that some are carrying.

The meeting, held once every three years, has historically been a platform for China to pledge large, multibillion-dollar packages of financial and technical aid to Africa. President William Ruto of Kenya, for instance, hopes to get funding to finish a railway line from the Rift Valley to Malaba town on Kenya’s western border with Uganda. He is also looking for more investment to build roads and dams and set up an industrial park for pharmaceutical companies.

China has adjusted its approach to new aid for the region. Instead of large railway and other infrastructure projects, Beijing is now emphasizing less costly commitments, like digital skills training — a useful contribution on a continent with a youthful population — and what it calls “small and beautiful” projects. On Thursday, Mr. Xi said China would train 60,000 people, collaborate with African media and militaries and work with Africa on the “peaceful use of nuclear technology.”

“We are in a period of recalibration, where African governments and Chinese banks are both more sensitive to risks,” said Deborah Brautigam, director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Chinese lenders last year committed $4.61 billion to African countries and banks, the highest amount since 2016, according to data from Boston University. But that is still a fraction of the nearly $30 billion a year that they pledged in 2016, at the peak of Chinese financing in Africa.

The shift is driven in part by changes inside China, where the property sector is in crisis and local governments are overextended, and by higher interest rates post-pandemic, which raise the cost of debt for African countries. Angola and Zambia now owe billions of dollars to Chinese state-owned banks.

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A wide shot of a large conference room with a geometric design on the ceiling, with people sitting facing the stage.

The ministerial conference of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing on Tuesday.Credit...Ken Ishii/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“The world’s financial situation does not allow large-scale loans to developing countries,” said Tang Xiaoyang, an international relations scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, referring to the higher interest rates. “The cost is too high.”

Critics have said that past meetings led to bloated loans that African countries could not pay back. (African countries also owe significant amounts to the World Bank and other international lenders.)

And while Chinese lenders financed crucial infrastructure on the continent, they also backed coal-fired power plants and other projects that contributed to greenhouse gas emissions.

In the run-up to the summit, Chinese state media outlets have highlighted projects backed by Chinese lenders in African villages, like solar panel installations and soybean-planting techniques, as bringing direct benefits to communities.

The emphasis on smaller, greener initiatives may help assuage concerns in Africa about unprofitable megaprojects, said Jana De Kluiver, a research officer at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. “It has this aspect of making sure that the China-Africa relationship, at least on a global scale, doesn’t look predatory,” she said.

Even as the scale of Beijing’s cooperation with Africa has shifted or declined, “the fact that China has maintained these triannual summits over two decades is a huge political achievement,” said Ms. Chen, of the Overseas Development Institute.

Such meetings are a way for Beijing to demonstrate China’s commitment to Africa. The United States, by contrast, held one such summit with African leaders in 2022, after eight years.

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The shadows of three people standing in front of a bright screen showing an array of flags.

Flags of countries taking part in the summit in Beijing.Credit...Adek Berry/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Brautigam said that the summit follows months of behind-the-scenes diplomacy between Chinese and African officials. “You can contrast this with how we do things in the U.S., where engagement is far more ad hoc,” she said.

China has officially asserted that it does not see Africa as a region where major powers compete for geopolitical gains, insisting it is interested in working with the region toward so-called “win-win cooperation.” At the same time, China’s aid, investments and diplomacy have helped secure African backing for China at international organizations like the United Nations.

China has also won support on the African continent for the position it has taken on Israel’s war in Gaza. Beijing has brought rival Palestinian factions together for talks as it has sought a bigger diplomatic role in the Middle East. It has asserted its longstanding support of Palestinian statehood and criticized Israel’s bombardment of the region.

That position aligns China with countries like South Africa, which has called Israel’s policies toward Palestinians an “extreme form of apartheid.” A joint China-South Africa statement released on Monday cited the two countries’ shared interest in an “immediate cease-fire and end to all fighting” in Gaza.

“China’s full embrace of the Palestinian cause has fully aligned it with almost the entire global south,” said Mr. Olander. For many Africans, he added, the war “closely resembles the colonial wars that ravaged their countries.”

Abdi Latif Dahir contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

OLD WORLD
YOUNG AFRICA

How a TV Hit Sparked Debate About Having Too Many Babies


The Sani family in northern Nigeria has six children, more than the parents can afford but fewer than their own parents had. Birthrates, and the decisions couples make about family size, are changing across Africa.

Five young sisters and their brother crowded around a small television in their modest cement house, a wriggling, giggling pile of skinny limbs and abandoned homework. Like families across northern Nigeria, the Sani family had been waiting all week for Thursday night to watch the latest episode of their favorite show, a comedy drama called “Gidan Badamasi.”

Everyone was talking about the show last year in their suburb of Kano, Nigeria’s second-biggest city, where rows of well-behaved children sit on sidewalks every afternoon, learning the Quran by heart.

And almost everyone knew of someone like the show’s feckless protagonist: a wealthy serial divorcé who had had 20 wives and so many children he had lost count — and was too stingy to support them.

The show’s theme — the consequences of having many children — has struck a chord in Nigeria. It is a pressing issue for many in Africa, where a protracted baby boom is fueling the youngest, fastest-growing population on the planet, even as birthrates plummet in richer regions. The scale of this youth boom opens up enormous potential opportunities for global influence and possibly economic growth, but also huge challenges for societies that need to educate and employ all of these people.

The map highlights the Nigerian city of Kano, in the Sahel region of Africa. It also locates Abuja, the capital, in the middle of the country, as well as the southwestern city of Lagos.

NIGER

Kano

NIGERIA

Abuja

Lagos

CAMEROON

AFRICA

Sahel

Gulf of Guinea

NIGERIA

20O MILES

By The New York Times
Many African women have far more children than women on other continents do: Women in Nigeria have an average of over five children, while American and European women have about 1.5, and Chinese women even fewer. And recent progress in reducing child mortality in Africa means more of them survive into adulthood than ever before.

But Africa’s birthrate is also gradually dropping: It has fallen by about 38 percent over the past 60 years. That is largely because of education, economics and shifting attitudes toward family size on display in conversations prompted by shows like “Gidan Badamasi,” one of the biggest hits of recent years on the leading Hausa-language television channel.

“It’s a very bad habit, breeding children he can’t take care of,” said Sani Ibrahim, 53, a school principal and the father of the six siblings laughing along to the show on the sofa last year, tutting at the show’s lead character.

ImageA family of eight standing outside in what appears to be a small courtyard.

The Sani family at home in Kano. Baby, in navy blue, attends a free school for promising students. Sani Ibrahim, her father, can barely afford the cheapest schools for his other children, and agonizes that Nana, in white, is stifled academically.
Image
An aerial view of a trading hub. On the dirt roadway are silver sedans, white trucks and yellow, three-wheeled soft-top cabs.

A major trading hub in the Sahel, the ancient city of Kano is religiously conservative, but for centuries, it has also been a crossroads for goods, ideas and cultures.

The subject was close to home, though, Sani admitted. Sani came from a big family, but had wanted “two, or at most three,” children himself, he said. He blamed his wife for having six.

“It’s a problem for me,” he said, “that I have this many children.”

Counting the Pennies, and the Babies

Northern and southern Africa have long been going through “fertility transitions” — significant reductions in their birthrates. But in most of the rest of Africa, fertility has mostly stayed high.

That is not the case everywhere, though. Four decades ago, Kenyan and Malawian women had more than seven babies on average; today, that has come down to 3.4 and 3.7 respectively. Rwandan women had six babies on average in 2005, and four a decade later. The birthrates fell after contraception became more available, girls became more educated and governments encouraged having fewer children.

Even in places like Kano, home to the Sani family, change is afoot.

In Kano, a religiously conservative city, large families are considered a blessing and a sensible bet to ensure care in old age.

But for many in Kano — and across Africa — the economic and social calculation is changing.

Families used to live in large compounds, the children cared for by a whole extended family. Now, they increasingly live in smaller units in urban areas, putting parents under more pressure to provide. Far more children survive into adulthood than did 40 years ago, when one in five African children died before turning 5. Contraceptives are now more available and less controversial than before. And education is accessible and desired — including education for girls, which has been shown to reduce birthrates.

But paying school fees for big families gets expensive, as Sani knows only too well.

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Four young children stand in the doorway to a cement building.

The four youngest Sani children. Families in urban areas increasingly live in smaller units and away from extended family, who used to help care for children.
Image
A man in a courtyard overseeing children while they clean up.

Sani at the small school in Kano where he is principal, directing the morning tidy-up of the schoolyard.

As the children watched the show’s protagonist flirt with his latest 22-year-old wife on the screen that Thursday night, Sani and his wife, Fatima Ado Saleh, 37, hovered in the tiny courtyard outside.

They were anxious.

The children, whose ages range from 3 to 16, were putting the family’s finances under serious strain.

Sani spent his days teaching other people’s children, but could not afford the school fees for his own. He could barely afford a $42 sack of rice on his $72 monthly salary. The annual rent payment of about $120 was almost due — and between food, clothes and school fees, he had none of it.

Researchers have long said that the richer societies get, the lower fertility rates become. But in Kano, many said it was the other way around: Rich men still have dozens of children with multiple wives, but most people have fewer because of soaring living costs.

Sani’s father had four wives and 19 children; Fatima’s, three wives and 30 children, six of whom died as infants. Her grandfather had four wives, each of whom had at least 10 children, though many did not survive into adulthood.

So their six represented a major break from previous generations.

Getting Educated

As the light gradually materialized in their small gray home one morning, the Sani children got ready for school.

The two eldest, Saratu and Juwairiyyah — who go by the nicknames Baby and Nana — smoothed down their uniforms. Under their head scarves, each put on one earring of the pair they shared, small golden apples like the tech company’s logo. Like most Kano families, they had no running water, so Sadiq, the only boy, washed his face with water bought by the jerry can from a vendor. Baby swept the concrete courtyard, then set before her siblings two large plates of beans and homemade pasta. Bought pasta was too expensive.

Then, stepping onto the sandy street, she and Nana left for school, setting off in opposite directions.

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A young girl in navy blue walks along a dusty street.

After doing her chores, Baby, the eldest of Sani and Fatima’s children, walks through their neighborhood to school.
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A classroom full of children sitting at blue and yellow desks while facing their teacher, who stands at a whiteboard at the head of the class.

Baby’s class learning about rock formations. She sits in the front row.

Baby and Nana were exceptionally bright girls. Wide-eyed Baby, 16, was very academic; Nana, 14, more sage and worldly.

Sani had managed to get Baby into an excellent private school for underprivileged children, with free tuition. But Nana had not been so lucky. Somehow, he cobbled together about $9 annually for Nana’s private school, but he sighed as he flipped through her exercise books. He could tell the school was substandard.

“It’s obvious that Nana’s intelligence is deteriorating because I can’t afford a good school for her,” he said that afternoon after work on the sofa, cuddling Asma’u, then 2.

And after Baby and Nana, there were four more children to educate.

Sani had a diploma. Fatima had completed high school — unusual in their part of Kano, where some consider an educated woman to be unmarriageable. But they were determined their girls’ educations would be even better than their own.

Perhaps, as educated girls have been shown to have fewer children, his daughters would realize his dream and have smaller families themselves, Sani thought.

Discovering Birth Control

The problem, as Sani saw it, was his wife’s circle of girlfriends.

He suspected they held the traditional view, that modern contraception was bad, and were influencing her.

Clinics with free pills, condoms, implants and shots — much of it funded by international organizations — are in most Kano neighborhoods. But a taboo around contraception persists.

Many believe using it is un-Islamic — despite a half-dozen Kano clerics giving assurances, in interviews, that it was perfectly acceptable. (They all said the withdrawal method was preferable, however.)

Despite all of the free contraceptives, it is not always easy for women to get hold of them.

At one dilapidated clinic serving Fatima’s neighborhood, the family-planning provider said she used to send women home to get their husbands’ permission if they did not already have it. If they were unmarried, it was always a straight no.

“Religiously, you can’t give an unmarried woman contraceptives, when she’s under her parents’ supervision,” said the provider, Halima Umar Baba, before handing pills to a woman who had hidden under a face-covering niqab to walk to the clinic.

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A woman in yellow stands at a table where a woman in white is seated. They are looking at pill packets.

A nurse in the family-planning unit of a Kano health center explaining to a patient how to take a contraceptive pill. Women can struggle to get contraceptives, especially if they are unmarried or do not have their husband’s permission.
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Women sit waiting to be seen while another woman lies on a gurney as a nurse cares for her.

A nurse attending to patients in the family-planning unit of a health center in Kano.

Recently, though, Ms. Baba has relented on husbands’ permissions. Over the past decade, Nigerians have suffered through two recessions, runaway inflation and a cash crisis — and the women coming to her often do not have enough food. So she helps limit the mouths they have to feed. Often, she invites women to her home at night for their shots, so nobody sees them at the clinic.

Sani said he tried to talk to his wife about injectable contraceptives. He did not consider condoms viable, as they reduced pleasure. He said Fatima would not listen until their sixth child was on the way, and she realized what financial straits they were in.

“Now,” he said, “she understands what I was trying to say.”

That is not how his wife tells it. She found out about contraception from her sister Samira, she said, when she was pregnant with her third child in five years. It was a revelation. Having three infants in diapers “wasn’t a healthy situation,” she said.

Fatima got the shots and started spacing out her children. But she did not stop having them altogether.

Fertility Influencers

One Friday night, Sani’s imam, Sheikh Goni Auwal Alhassan, swept into the soundproofed studio of Radio Aminci, a bevy of clerics in his wake, for his weekly show.

The clerics had officiated at four weddings that day. They had advised each groom to keep close tabs on any children they might have.

These influential clerics said family size was a common topic of conversation among Kano’s imams. But ultimately the number depends on the parent, they said, citing a former emir of Kano and a business tycoon, each of whom had at least 60 children.

“It’s not about the number,” Salisu Al Hassan, one of the clerics, said, as they sat together on a plastic mat outside the radio station after the show, stars twinkling reddish in the dusty sky.

Many, including the creators of “Gidan Badamasi,” disagree. In an interview in a Kano hotel last year, the show’s main writer, Nazir Adam Salih, said there was a widespread view that people were having too many children for their own good — and for society’s.

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A man sitting and leaning against a cement wall is teaching a teenage boy, who sits in front of him, the Quran.

Sani’s imam, Sheikh Goni Auwal Alhassan, teaching the Quran to an advanced student. Many children in Kano attend primary school in the morning and Quranic school in the afternoon.
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A white mosque stands against a sky at twilight.

A mosque in Kano.

“Gidan Badamasi” had a “massive, instant” effect, starting conversations about reducing family size. It succeeded, he said, where many international organizations had failed.

“You can’t just come to this part of the world saying that people should not get married, people should not give birth to many children, people should get birth control,” Mr. Salih said.

For decades, African leaders have pushed back against Western characterizations of African population growth as a problem that needs solving.

One morning in a Kano grain depot, Mohammed Mahmoud, an accountant with a sideline as a social media influencer, who has a large following in Kano, explained to his colleagues why he was a birth control skeptic.

A vocal proponent of early marriage and large families, Mr. Mahmoud pointed to shrinking populations in the West and their reliance on migrant labor.

“So many Western countries are having problems due to this birth control. Why should we imbibe it? Why should we accept it?” he said. If Nigeria started having labor shortages, he said: “Who will migrate to us? Will Americans? No way!”

Praying for a Boy

After her fourth and fifth children were born — both girls — Fatima said she decided that was enough. But then, she said, she went to her local clinic for her latest contraceptive shot, and was told she did not need it.

“The nurse said I had enough in my blood already, and that my blood was too weak to take any more,” she said. The clinic declined requests for an interview.

Fatima’s sister Samira doubted this story. She thought her sister was trying for another boy. As in many patriarchal societies, sons are often valued more highly than daughters. And Sani’s family had never hidden their disapproval of Fatima producing girl after girl. Fatima recalled bitterly the day her mother-in-law told her she was “giving birth to liabilities.”

When she became pregnant with their sixth child, Fatima said she was distraught. The family was already under severe financial strain. How would they cope?

She even considered abortion. In Kano, sharia law applies, and abortion is almost always illegal, taboo and dangerous.

“It’s forbidden,” she said. But, she added, “I just had these feelings in me.”

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Fatima sits outside against a wall while her youngest child lies on her lap.

When Fatima realized she was pregnant with Asma’u, her sixth child, she panicked at the thought of the additional burden on the family’s finances, even considering abortion. Now, Asma’u is a mischievous, beloved 3-year-old.
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Baby stands at a clothesline that is holding drying pasta.

Baby and her younger brother, Sadiq, collecting handmade pasta from a clothesline in the courtyard of their home. Bought pasta is unaffordable.

Her circle of girlfriends said Fatima should have the baby, but ensure it was her last. Then, knowing the pressure she was under from her in-laws, they immediately started praying for a boy.

Fatima prayed fervently for a boy, too.

But she had another girl.

Today, that girl, Asma’u, is a dearly cherished 3-year-old, constantly stealing the TV remote and trying to escape into the street. But because she is a girl, Fatima said she and her mother-in-law no longer speak to or visit each other.

Nana, especially, feels the sexism from her father’s relatives keenly, and fights fiercely against the idea that boys are inherently better than girls.

“You hate us, but we’ll make you proud of us,” she said she recently told her aunt.

A Woman’s Place
Feet up on the sofa, Baby and Nana whispered into each other’s shoulders as they watched the “Gidan Badamasi” star rage at his latest love interest.

“He found out she had six children, so now he doesn’t want to marry her,” Baby explained.

Fatima ducked into the living room and picked up Asma’u, whose bedtime was approaching. Having spent most of the day at a naming ceremony for a new niece — the latest addition to her huge extended family — she had missed most of the “Gidan Badamasi” episode. But she knew Nana, the resident expert, would catch her up later.

The power went off. The children poured into the dark courtyard, unrolling a plastic mat and turning back to their homework, writing by the light of a cellphone. By the time the power came back on, Alhaji Badamasi had abandoned his new wife.

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A teenager looking at the Quran.

Quranic school in Kano.

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The Sani family sitting outside, some of them watching TV on a cellphone.

Baby, right, studying for an upcoming exam, as her younger siblings watch a show on their father’s phone.

Before she got married, Fatima longed to become a nurse, but she was reliant first on her father and then her husband, and they did not support her. But, she said, since she grew up, “Things have changed.” Many families are reconsidering the place of women and girls in society, particularly as more women are getting jobs and helping pay for soaring household expenses.

Many of Baby’s friends at Quranic school are getting married. But Baby wants to train as a doctor at medical school first.

Fatima wants that, too, and wants Nana to become a nurse, fulfilling her own old dream.

Determined that nothing will stop her daughters, she has gone to extreme lengths, telling credulous Baby that merely touching a boy will get her pregnant.

“I missed out on things,” Fatima said.

If she can help it, she said, her daughters will not.

Ismail Alfa and Ismail Auwal contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3