‘Mastermind’ Dawie Groenewald given fine of 2m rand or four-year jail term almost 16 years after arrest

Two traffickers of rhino horns have been sentenced by a South African court in what police said was the world’s largest such case, partly bringing to an end an almost two-decade legal saga.

Dawie Groenewald and Tielman Erasmus had faced more than 1,700 charges ranging from illegally hunting and dehorning rhinos to racketeering and money laundering.

16 June 1976 is not just another chapter in the history books, nor is its aftermath and legacy, say those who took part and their families

The day of 16 June 1976 began peacefully in Soweto. Student leaders at high schools across the sprawling Johannesburg township, to which the apartheid regime had exiled hundreds of thousands of black South Africans, took charge of the morning assemblies. They led their fellow students into the streets and began to march toward Orlando stadium.

The students were protesting against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Their teachers barely spoke the white minority language and the students did not want to learn the oppressor’s language. They were tired of the intentionally substandard Bantu education, tired of being second-class citizens.

African migrants say legal status offers little protection as rallies against illegal immigration gain momentum

African migrants in South Africa say they are living in fear after a series of marches calling for illegal immigrants to leave reignited long-held xenophobic sentiment in the country.

March & March, a campaign group at the forefront of recent protests, has given people living illegally in the country until 30 June to leave, without specifying what will happen to those who do not.

Healthcare should be free but lack of essential supplies has led to patients being told to buy their own medicines

In late 2023, Boitumelo Mosege fell sick. Her neck swelled up, her whole body itched and she fainted frequently. She was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism and had to give up her work as a farmer on the outskirts of Molepolole, a town about 30 miles north-west of Botswana’s capital, Gaborone.

In Botswana, public healthcare is supposed to be universal and free. However, Mosege said she had only sporadically received medication since becoming ill. The 53-year-old relies on her four children’s occasional piecework (where a worker is paid a fixed rate per task or unit produced), and her mother’s 1,400 pula (£77) monthly pension, to afford 2,000 pula-worth of medication every month. In early May, she said it was three months since she had last bought medicine.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus calls for ceasefire, saying no conflict was worth condemning people to death from preventable disease

The deadly Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo can be stopped, the head of the World Health Organization has said, as he arrived in the country to support efforts to contain the disease.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus arrived in Kinsasha on Thursday and was due on Friday to travel to Ituri province in the north-east, where the outbreak was centred.

Parents face anxious wait for updates after blaze tears through Utumishi girls academy in Gilgil, Nakuru county

A fire that ripped through a dormitory at a girls’ school in Kenya overnight has killed at least 15 students, according to police, while dozens more were injured.

Gilgil police station said at least 15 girls died at Utumishi girls academy in Gilgil, Nakuru county, about 76 miles north-west of Nairobi, according to a police report seen by Reuters.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warns of ‘catastrophic collision of disease and conflict’, as Uganda closes border with DRC

The head of the World Health Organization has called for an immediate ceasefire in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo to help tackle the Ebola outbreak there, as Uganda closed its border with its neighbour in an effort to stop the spread.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted on social media that the region was in the midst of a “catastrophic collision of disease and conflict with the Ebola outbreak in Ituri province outpacing the response”. Tedros said on Monday that he would travel to the DRC this week.

Bonolo Selelo and Tsholofelo Kumile are going to court for right to wed but face fierce opposition from church groups

Bonolo Selelo was at Botswana’s national museum for a Gaborone Pride event when she spotted Tsholofelo Kumile and was struck by her good looks. The two initiated a conversation and when Kumile expressed anxiety about what a tarot reading at the event might hold, Selelo thought nothing of offering her a hug. The reading turned out positive but Kumile claimed her hug anyway and they talked for hours.

That was 1 October 2023. Two months later, they moved in together. Then, on a hike during the Easter holidays in 2024, Selelo proposed to Kumile. A year later, they visited a local government office to register their intent to marry and were told it wasn’t legal.

Country with a population of just 2.5m credits investment in young athletes for its rise but this progress is under threat

It was a fairytale ending to the World Athletics Relays in Gaborone. In the final strait, Collen Kebinatshipi surged past South Africa’s Zakithi Nene to win the men’s 4x400m relay for Botswana. The home crowd, a sea of light blue, went wild.

“It means so many things to us,” Letsile Tebogo, 22, the reigning 200m Olympic champion, who ran the second leg, told reporters afterwards. “Not just the team … but for the people that always cheer for us behind the TV. Now they had that experience to see first-hand how much effort, how much pressure, how much we give for them.”

Africa is leading a change in news consumption habits – and transforming the lives of current affairs enthusiasts

Last year Amahle-Imvelo Jaxa posted a TikTok video about South African peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She explained an argument that had erupted between the South African and Rwandan presidents, then listed roles different South African groups would play in a war with Rwanda: the Sotho strategists, the Xhosa negotiators, the Afrikaner muscle. The video went viral and she racked up 100,000 followers in three days.

This breakout video enabled Jaxa to pivot from being a marketing and restaurant entrepreneur to a “professional yapper and current affairs enthusiast”, part of a group of content creators explaining the news to young South Africans who, like many of their global peers, are eschewing traditional news in favour of social media.

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.