Michael Randrianirina, who sacked PM and cabinet without explanation, claims measure is to root out corruption

Madagascar’s military president has said new ministers will have to pass lie detector tests to root out corrupt candidates, after he dismissed the prime minister and cabinet without explanation earlier this month.

Michael Randrianirina came to power in a coup in October after weeks of youth-led protests under the banner “Gen Z Madagascar”. However, young people were quickly disenchanted by his choice of government officials, which they saw as being part of the old, corrupt elite.

Volunteers are working to carve out safe spaces in townships with initiatives such as football training and dance classes

In 2015, Deniël de Bruyn moved almost 300 miles to Cape Town, to live with relatives and try to overcome a drug problem. Nine months later, he was dead, shot in what gangsters in the township of Wesbank claimed was a case of mistaken identity, according to De Bruyn’s cousin Lindy Jacobs.

The shooting was witnessed by Jacobs’s 12-year-old son Zunadin. “My son’s life was never, never ever the same again,” she said. In 2018, Jacobs said, gangsters tried to kill Zunadin. She went to the police. But just two months later her son was dead too. Jacobs is now raising her 12-year-old grandson Noah, whose father was another casualty of gang violence.

US president is ‘truly uninformed’ for spreading claims of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa tells New York Times

South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has called Donald Trump’s policy of allowing white Afrikaners to apply for refugee status in the US “racist”, saying the US president was “truly uninformed” in a rare instance of direct criticism.

Ramaphosa told the New York Times that last year’s Oval Office meeting with the US leader, when Trump turned down the lights and played a video that he falsely claimed showed there was a “white genocide” in South Africa, was a “spectacle” and an “ambush”.

The men, sent to Africa after completing criminal sentences in the US, are from Cuba, Jamaica and Yemen

Three men deported by the US to Eswatini – rather than their home countries – have filed a case against Eswatini’s government with the African Union’s human rights body, claiming their detention was an unlawful violation of their rights.

Two of the claimants, from Cuba and Yemen, have been in prison in Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, for eight months. The third, Orville Etoria, was repatriated to his home country, Jamaica, in September.

A rumour on social media brought dozens of fortune seekers to a field on the outskirts of mining town Springs

In a township 30 miles east of Johannesburg, a mechanical digger filled in holes in the dark brown earth, bringing to an end a brief but intense gold rush that saw dozens of fortune seekers descend on what was once a cattle field.

Less than two weeks ago, a rumour spread like wildfire on social media: someone had found gold while digging a hole for a fence post in a field on the edge of Gugulethu, an informal settlement of dirt roads and metal shacks on the outskirts of mining town Springs.

Animal rights activists disagree with authorities on how best to handle boom in primate population near Table Mountain

At the edge of Da Gama Park, where the Cape Town suburb meets the mountain, baboons jumped from the road to garden walls to roofs and back again. Children from South African navy families living in the area’s modest houses played in the street. Some were delighted; some wary; most were unfazed by the animals.

A few miles away, overlooking a soaring peak and sweeping bay, Nicola de Chaud showed photos of food strewn across her kitchen by a baboon. In another incident, a baboon threw one of her dogs across the veranda. In January, a male baboon lunged at her and refused to leave the house for 10 minutes.

Creators say they’re offering Africans a ‘hopeful, utopian feeling’ of retrieving objects looted by colonial armies

A new South African video game lets players take back African artefacts held in western museums in a series of heists, amid a growing campaign to repatriate treasures looted by colonial armies.

Players of Relooted become South African sports scientist and parkour expert Nomali, as she leaps and dives through museums to retrieve 70 real objects. They include an Asante gold mask that was taken by the British army when it destroyed the Asante empire’s capital, Kumasi, and is now in the Wallace Collection in London. Another object is the skull of the Tanzanian king Mangi Meli, which was taken to Germany after its colonial regime executed him in 1900.

Intelligence findings read to parliament say ‘rogue’ agencies and individuals recruiting Kenyan nationals to frontline

More than 1,000 Kenyans have been lured to fight for Russia in its war with Ukraine, according to an intelligence report to the Kenyan parliament that highlights the scale of a Russian operation taking African men to the frontline.

The majority leader of Kenya’s national assembly, Kimani Ichung’wah, said “rogue recruitment agencies and individuals in Kenya” were continuing to send Kenyan nationals to fight in the conflict, as he read MPs the summary of an investigation by Kenya’s National Intelligence Service.

Gabrielle Goliath says Gayton McKenzie violating freedom of expression after ‘highly divisive’ artwork Elergy banned from SA pavilion

A South African artist is suing the arts minister after he blocked her from representing the country at the Venice Biennale, having called her work addressing Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza “highly divisive”.

Gabrielle Goliath filed the lawsuit last week, with Ingrid Masondo, who would have curated the pavilion, and the studio manager, James Macdonald. It accuses Gayton McKenzie of acting unlawfully and violating the right to freedom of expression and demands the high court reinstates her participation by 18 February, the deadline for confirming installations with biennale organisers.

More than 100 people killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe

Devastating floods have killed more than 100 people in southern Africa since the beginning of the year and displaced hundreds of thousands, as authorities and aid workers warn of hunger, cholera and attacks by crocodiles that have spread with the waters.

More than 70 people have died in Zimbabwe and 30 in South Africa, where hundreds of people were evacuated from Kruger national park earlier this month after a deluge of rain.

For workers sending money to support their relatives, payments are both a burden and badge of pride

From Senegal to Somalia and Egypt to South Africa, credit alert notifications from fintech apps such as Western Union or WorldRemit often set the mood for the rest of the day, week or even month.

Transfers from workers within the continent and the diaspora to their relatives are often referred to as the “black tax”, whereby one person’s salary and relative success can become the safety net for a whole extended family.

Concentrated among 1,000 people in the remote Daliwe valley, siPhuthi has gained a dictionary, a Bible translation and official recognition thanks to intrepid linguists and activists

Tsotleho Mohale was addressing a group of people gathered on a mountainside still damp from an intense rainstorm that morning. The peaks on the other side of the steep valley were draped in cloud. Mohale was speaking in siPhuthi, a language spoken by just a few thousand people in parts of southern Lesotho and the north of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, about the plants he used and the ailments he cured as a traditional healer.

The questions came from Sheena Shah, a British linguist, and were translated into siPhuthi by Mohale’s grandson Atlehang. Shah’s German colleague Matthias Brenzinger was filming the exchange. The two academics have been travelling regularly to Daliwe, a remote valley in Lesotho about 15 miles from the nearest paved road, since 2016, working with local interpreters and activists to document siPhuthi.

A view of homes in Daliwe valley in southern Lesotho

Women gather outside factories hoping for work as the economy struggles under US export taxes

Every morning at 7am, women gather outside clothing factories in Maseru, the capital of the southern African mountain kingdom of Lesotho, hoping to be offered work. However, since Donald Trump imposed swingeing global tariffs in April 2025, those opportunities have been fewer and farther between.

Moleboheng Matsepe lost her full-time job sewing sports leggings for the California brand Fabletics in 2023. She was initially able to pick up three-month contracts, but has not had any work since September.

• British former boxing champion sustained minor injuries

• Sina Ghami and Kevin ‘Lateef’ Ayodel killed in accident

The British heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua has issued a statement after he was injured in a car crash in Nigeria on Monday morning which killed two of his close friends.

The former world heavyweight boxing champion was taken to an undisclosed hospital after his car hit a stationary vehicle at about 11am on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the Ogun state police commissioner, Lanre Ogunlowo, said. The driver of Joshua’s vehicle was also injured, he added.

Pete Hegseth says ‘more to come’ as Nigerian minister confirms his country provided intelligence for first wave

The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has warned of new strikes against Islamic State targets in north-western Nigeria, hours after the US military took action against militant camps in what Donald Trump has characterised as efforts to stop the killing of Christians.

Hegseth wrote on X: “The president was clear last month: the killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere) must end. The [Pentagon] is always ready, so ISIS found out tonight – on Christmas. More to come … Grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation. Merry Christmas!”

Rising numbers of people flee jihadists, as violence against civilians increases and foreign aid dwindles

More than 300,000 people have been displaced by an Islamic State insurgency in Mozambique since July, amid growing fears that authorities lack a workable plan to end the fighting.

With wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan attracting more attention and foreign aid falling, the grinding conflict in Mozambique has been largely ignored or forgotten. More than 1 million people have been displaced, many of them two, three or even four times.

Global Witness says plan to upgrade railway line to Angola puts up to 1,200 buildings at risk of demolition

Up to 6,500 people are at risk of being displaced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project funded by the EU and the US, amid a global race to secure supplies of copper, cobalt and other “critical minerals”, according to a report by campaign group Global Witness.

The project, labelled the Lobito Corridor, aims to upgrade the colonial-era Benguela railway from the DRC to Lobito on Angola’s coast and improve port infrastructure, as well as building a railway line to Zambia and supporting agriculture and solar power installations along the route. Angola has said it needs $4.5bn (£3.4bn) for its stretch of the line.

Officers say they are closing borders and suspending poll as president and main rival both claim victory

Soldiers in Guinea-Bissau have announced they are taking “total control” of the west African country, three days after elections that both the two main presidential contenders claim to have won.

Military officers said they were suspending Guinea-Bissau’s electoral process and closing its borders, in a statement read out at the army’s headquarters in the capital Bissau and broadcast on state TV. They said they had formed “the high military command for the restoration of order”, which would rule the country until further notice.

South African president bangs gavel after rejecting plan from US, which hosts next meeting, for him to hand over to junior official

South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, closed the G20 summit in Johannesburg by banging a gavel, having rejected a US proposal for him to hand over to a relatively junior embassy official for the next summit in Florida in a year’s time.

South Africa presented the two-day event as a triumph for multilateralism but it was marred by a boycott by the US, which has repeatedly accused South Africa of discriminating against white-minority Afrikaners, a claim that has been widely discredited.

Trump press secretary accuses Cyril Ramaphosa of ‘running his mouth’ after US boycott of summit in Johannesburg

The dispute between South Africa and the US over the Trump administration’s decision to boycott the G20 in Johannesburg has continued, with South Africa objecting to a US plan for a junior embassy official to take part in the closing ceremony meant to mark the handover to the next summit, which will take place in Florida.

The two-day summit, which opens on Saturday, comes at a febrile moment in global politics. The US has proposed a deal to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which it agreed with Moscow without the involvement of Ukraine or the EU.