Pirates appear to be taking advantage of international naval strength being diverted to Middle East

Three vessels have been hijacked off the coast of Somalia in the past week, raising fears of a resurgence in piracy around the Horn of Africa, and adding to the woes of the global shipping industry.

The merchant vessel Sward was taken over on 26 April, a day after a dhow was seized. These followed the 21 April hijacking of Honour 25, a motor tanker carrying 18,000 barrels of oil, according to the Maritime Security Centre Indian Ocean (MSCIO), the tracking service of the EU’s naval force.

Jubilation is turning to disenchantment as young activists arrested after protest calling for election date to be set

The arrest of several protesters in Madagascar has increased fears among young people that the military regime that took power last year after huge Gen Z demonstrations will be no better than the government it overthrew.

Four Gen Z activists, Herizo Andriamanantena, Miora Rakotomalala, Dina Randrianarisoa and Nomena Ratsihorimanana, were arrested on 12 April, one of their lawyers said, two days after taking part in a protest calling for an election date to be set.

Leader of leftwing Economic Freedom Fighters was convicted last year for firing rifle in the air at 2018 rally

The South African leftwing politician Julius Malema has been sentenced to five years in prison for firing a rifle in the air at a political rally in 2018.

Lawyers for the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, South Africa’s fourth largest political party, immediately appealed, and Malema will remain free while the appeal proceedings are under way.

Struggle for justice symbolises limitations of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose hearings began 30 years ago

Darkness had fallen on 27 June 1985 when Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sicelo Mhlauli and Sparrow Mkonto set off on the 150-mile drive back from a meeting of anti-apartheid activists in the South African city of Port Elizabeth, now known as Gqeberha. They never made it home.

About an hour into their journey, as the road wound north from the coast towards their home town of Cradock (now called Nxuba), the four men were pulled over by three white security police officers. They were handcuffed and driven back towards Gqeberha.

Military has described devastating attack that killed up to 200 people, many of them civilians, as a ‘precision airstrike’

Survivors and observers have questioned the Nigerian military’s rationale for a devastating airstrike on a busy market that killed as many as 200 people, many of them civilians.

The hit on Jilli market on the border of the north-eastern Borno and Yobe states on Saturday is the latest in a string of attacks by the country’s air force over the past decade with a high civilian death toll.

The men, sent to the southern African country in July, have been denied in-person counsel for nine months

Four men deported by the US to Eswatini and denied in-person legal counsel for nine months while detained in a maximum security prison have the right to see a local lawyer, Eswatini’s supreme court ruled.

The men, from Cambodia, Cuba, Vietnam and Yemen, were sent to the small southern African country, formerly known as Swaziland, in July despite having no connection to the country, as part of Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to ramp up deportations.

Pheap Rom was one of 15 people sent to prison in African kingdom last year despite completing US sentences

A Cambodian man deported by the US said he would have accepted being sent to Cambodia, but instead ended up imprisoned in Eswatini, a country he knew so little about that when he first read the name he thought it was another immigration detention centre in Louisiana.

Pheap Rom, who had been convicted of attempted murder, was one of 10 deportees sent to Eswatini by the US in October 2025. They joined a group of five men, from Cambodia, Cuba, Jamaica, Vietnam and Yemen, who were deported to the small southern African country in July. All were sent to a maximum-security prison. Rom was deported from Eswatini to Cambodia in March.

Ibrahim Traoré, who took power in 2022 coup, tells state broadcaster ‘we must tell the truth, democracy isn’t for us’

People in Burkina Faso should forget about democracy as it is “not for us”, the military president, Ibrahim Traoré, told the country’s state broadcaster.

Traoré took power in a coup in September 2022, toppling another junta that had taken power just nine months earlier. He has since stifled opposition and in January banned political parties outright.

Dozen people arrive under new deal but legal challenges expected with scheme criticised as ‘dehumanising process’

A flight carrying people being deported from the US has landed in Uganda, as Donald Trump’s administration pushes on with its strategy of expelling migrants to countries they have no ties to.

The deported people would stay in the east African country as “a transition phase for potential onward transmission to other countries”, an unnamed senior Ugandan government official told Reuters.

Minister’s decision to ditch town’s colonial-era identity and honour anti-apartheid activist divides residents

A South African town is divided over changing its name from the colonial-era Graaff-Reinet to Robert Sobukwe, after the anti-apartheid activist, in a debate that has inflamed racial tensions.

Petitions have been signed, rival marches held and a formal letter of complaint sent to the sports, arts and culture minister, Gayton McKenzie, who approved the name change on 6 February.

Market in North Darfur and truck carrying civilians in North Kordofan hit as civil war approaches fourth year

At least 28 civilians have been killed in two separate drone strikes in Sudan, according to health workers, as the country’s brutal civil war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) approaches its fourth year.

A strike hit a market in the town of Saraf Omra, in North Darfur state, on Wednesday, killing “22 people, including an infant, and injuring 17 more”, a health worker at the local clinic told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Social media full of complaints about digital nomads, while waiting list for social housing gets longer

Earlier this month, graffiti appeared on the promenade in Sea Point, on Cape Town’s wealthy Atlantic Seaboard: “Digital nomads go home! Now!”

Social media is full of complaints about the abundance of American and German accents, foreign property buyers, and properties being listed on Airbnb, all of which are being blamed for soaring housing costs.

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.