March 5, 20255:19 PM ET
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JOHANNESBURG — In his Tuesday night address to Congress, President Trump defended his administration’s humanitarian aid cuts to countries around the globe, including one nation he joked “nobody has ever heard of.”
It is the southern African nation of Lesotho.
Politics 6 takeaways from Trump’s pointedly partisan address to CongressThe country’s foreign minister, Lejone Mpotjoane, told NPR it was “quite shocking for the head of state to make such a remark.”
“The government of the United States has an embassy in Maseru [Lesotho’s capital],” Mpotjoane said on Wednesday, adding that the two countries have had “a long cooperation.”
He invited Trump to visit the country.
At least one person attending the address on Capitol Hill could likely place the tiny country on a map: Elon Musk, Trump’s South African-born adviser, who has been instrumental in dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development. Just last fall, Lesotho’s prime minister met ..

March 3, 20256:08 PM ET

The average person in Lagos, Nigeria, spends over six hours of their day in traffic. NPR battles the chaos of a Lagos gridlock to find out if new Chinese-backed rails have made a difference.

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February 28, 20252:59 PM ET
A Palestinian man serving 18 life sentences for a pair of bus bombings in 2004 speaks to NPR days after his release. And, the average person in Lagos, Nigeria, spends over 6 hours of their day in traffic – have new Chinese-backed railways made a difference?

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Enlarge this imageEyad Abu Shkheidem in his family’s home in Hebron.

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Eyad Abu Shkheidem in his family’s home in Hebron.

Daniel Estrin/NPR

February 17, 20254:05 AM ET

Rwandan-backed rebels have taken over a second city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as they continue to seize territory under the watching and passive eyes of the international community.

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February 13, 20255:25 PM ET

President Trump’s offer of refugee status to economically privileged white South Africans has enraged some people in that nation. NPR gets more reaction from South Africans on the issue.

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February 13, 20254:17 AM ET

President Trump’s offer of refugee status to economically privileged white South Africans has enraged some people in that nation. NPR gets more reaction from South Africans on the issue.

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February 12, 20254:10 AM ET

Mpox continues to impact parts of Africa. And experts say the outbreak stands at a critical moment as the U.S. halts foreign assistance and rebel violence scramble efforts to control the virus.

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February 11, 20257:03 AM ET
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Megan J. Goff/Click Here

Megan J. Goff/Click Here

The trip that changed Tigran Gambaryan’s life forever was supposed to be short — just a few days. When he flew to Nigeria in February of 2024, he didn’t even check a bag. Tigran is a former IRS Special Agent. He made his name investigating high-profile dark web and cryptocurrency cases. Some colleagues called him the ‘Crypto Wizard’ because of his pioneering work tracing crypto transactions for law enforcement. Since 2021, he’s worked at the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance.
Tigran was in Nigeria as a sort of envoy. He was supposed to meet with government officials and show them that Binance – and crypto itself – was safe, reliable, and law-abiding.

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One of the most important meetings was at the headquarters of the Office of the National Security Advisor. He says officials there made him wait hours. And when officials finally came into the roo..

February 10, 20255:15 PM ET

The Nigerian government issues new warnings against the dangers involved in using skin whitening products, in a country that has often been called the ” world capital of skin bleaching”

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February 10, 20254:20 PM ET

The Trump administration is dismantling the United States Agency for International Development, USAID. They had been doing humanitarian work in more than 100 countries. We hear from NPR correspondents around the world about what the agency had been doing on the ground and what it’s elimination could mean.

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February 9, 20252:34 AM ET
Namibian and ruling Swapo party President Sam Nujoma speaks during an election rally in Windhoek, Namibia, Nov. 13, 2004.

Themba Hadebe/AP

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Themba Hadebe/AP

WINDHOEK, Namibia — Sam Nujoma, the fiery freedom fighter who led Namibia to independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990 and served as its first president for 15 years, and was known as the father of the nation, has died. He was 95.
Nujoma’s death was announced Sunday by current Namibian President Nangolo Mbumba. Mbumba said Nujoma died on Saturday night after being hospitalized in the capital, Windhoek.
“The foundations of the Republic of Namibia have been shaken,” Mbumba said in a statement. “Over the past three weeks, the Founding President of the Republic of Namibia and Founding Father of the Namibian Nation was hospitalized for medical treatment and medical observation due to ill health.”

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“Unfortunately, this time, the most gallant ..

January 14, 20255:15 PM ET

A rescue operation is underway to bring up the miners who are still alive after a two-month standoff in South Africa between police and illegal miners. They’ll recover the bodies of those who died.

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January 13, 20254:06 AM ET

Sudan’s military has recaptured a strategic city from the paramilitary group accused of genocide. Could this be a key moment to mark a turning point in the conflict?

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January 7, 202512:30 PM ET
Sudanese refugees arrive in Acre, Chad, Oct 6. 2024.

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Sam Mednick/AP

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration said Tuesday that a Sudanese paramilitary group and its proxies are committing genocide in a civil war with the country’s military that has killed tens of thousands of people, leveling sanctions on the group’s leader and affiliated companies.
Up First from NPR Sudan’s ‘Forgotten War’Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the conflict, which began nearly two years ago and is considered the world’s biggest current humanitarian catastrophe, had escalated beyond a war crimes and ethnic cleansing determination he made in December 2023.
Blinken said that based on more recent reporting, he found that the Rapid Support Forces group is committing genocide.
“The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians,” Blinken said. “The RSF and allied militias have systematically m..

January 2, 20253:00 AM ET

Fighting between the Sudanese army and a paramilitary group have displaced some 12 million people in one of Africa’s biggest countries. In a story we first brought you in October, our correspondent travels to Sudan and gives us a glimpse of the devastation the war has caused.

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December 31, 20246:07 PM ET

An emerging film festival in Lagos, Nigeria, is trying to change the stories mainstream Nigerian films tell.

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December 31, 202410:52 AM ET
Democratic Republic of the Congo – vector map

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In early December, international alarm bells went off because of a mysterious disease circulating in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dubbed it “Disease X.”
National and international health experts raced to the scene. But because the rainy season made dirt roads hard to pass, it took days to get from the capital Kinshasa to villages in the Panzi district in Kwango Province, located in the south of the vast country. It was in these far-flung villages that about 900 people had fallen ill between late October and mid-December with symptoms ranging from fever to body weakness to difficulty breathing. Forty-eight of them died. And many of the ill are young children. At the very end of November, local medical providers alerted national autho..

December 29, 20248:34 AM ET

An emerging film festival in Lagos, Nigeria is trying to change the stories mainstream Nigerian films tell.

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December 26, 20244:33 AM ET

Nigeria’s president is defending his economic reforms, which have led to the worst economic crisis in decades. Poverty levels have soared. Fuel costs have more than tripled and people are hungry.

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December 25, 20245:09 AM ET

In Sudan, the severity of famine has worsen, according to hunger experts who say the country is experiencing one of the worst starvation crisis in modern times.

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December 24, 20244:08 AM ET

Africa experts Zainab Usman and Mvemba Phezo Dizolele talk with NPR’s Asma Khalid about what a second Donald Trump term could mean for the continent.

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November 28, 20243:00 AM ET
Enlarge this imageOkatakyi Dr Amanfi VII is known as the paramount chief of Asebu and created the Pan African Village project there in Ghana.

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Jude Lartey for NPR

Okatakyi Dr Amanfi VII is known as the paramount chief of Asebu and created the Pan African Village project there in Ghana.

Jude Lartey for NPR

In an episode we first posted in January, we go to the West African country of Ghana. The Ghanaian government began encouraging people of African descent from around the world to move to the country in 2019, calling it the “Year of Return”. They even created settlements for the people who took them up on the offer, giving out free land. But our correspondent talks to locals who say their farm land was stolen to give to foreigners.

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November 23, 20246:00 AM ET
An artisanal miner, locally known as a zama-zama, mines for gold at a mining operation in Stormhill, west of Johannesburg, on Aug. 11, 2023.

Shiraaz Mohamed/AFP via Getty Images

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Shiraaz Mohamed/AFP via Getty Images

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Sleeping next to decomposing corpses and surviving on a foul mixture of toothpaste mixed with toilet paper.
That’s how an unknown number of unauthorized miners — believed to be in the hundreds — have been surviving for weeks, possibly months, over a mile deep underground in a disused mine shaft in the South African town of Stilfontein.
In South Africa, workers at illegal gold mines like these are known as “zama-zamas,” meaning “one who takes a chance” in the Zulu language.
Over the past several weeks, the zama-zamas at Stilfontein have been locked in a standoff with police, who surrounded the entrance to the mine shaft and blocked off their food supplies in an a..

November 19, 20244:34 AM ET

South African police have been in a stand off outside an abandoned gold mine with hundreds of illegal miners who are holding out underground. The situation is getting desperate.

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November 15, 20241:20 PM ET
Maggie Shaarawi, vice president of Animals Lebanon, tries to calm Sara the lion cub in Beirut before the animal is transferred out of the country, on Thursday.

Ali Khara for NPR

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Ali Khara for NPR

BEIRUT — It’s hours before dawn and the marina in Beirut’s Dbayeh district is deserted apart from a small group of men lifting a metal cage labeled “live lion” onto a yacht. The passenger is a cub rescued by a Lebanese animal welfare organization from its life as a TikTok video prop.
The group from Animals Lebanon has driven to the waterfront in a small convoy of vehicles, joined by NPR, spacedwidely apartto avoid being seen as a threat by Israeli drones overhead. As the sun began to rise, columns of smoke from an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs hung over the city.

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The boat trip to Cyprus on Thursday was the first part of a journey to deliver the animal to a wildlife refuge in South Afri..

November 15, 202410:27 AM ET
A technician at a Chinese pharmaceutical company works on breeding the plant sweet wormwood, used in creating artemisinin, the go-to medicine for killing the malaria parasite.

Huang Xiaobang/Xinhua via Getty Images

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Huang Xiaobang/Xinhua via Getty Images

Lately, Dr. Ruth Namazzi and her colleagues have been stopping one another in their hospital ward with worried looks.
Between treating patients, she says, they voice their concerns: “‘Malaria’s very stubborn,'” she says they tell her. “‘It’s not responding to treatment.'”
Namazzi is a pediatrician at MulagoHospital in Uganda, where — several times a day — she admits a child with severe malaria.
“These are very critically ill children,” she says, explaining that children are at greater risk of severe malaria than adults because they have not yet gained immunity. Severe malaria in a child can involve a high fever, convulsions, anemia, kidney damage and respiratory distres..

November 15, 20248:44 AM ET
Mahamat Djouma is happy when he gets a chance to play soccer. But most of the time this teenage refugee he is busy taking care of his five-year-old twin brothers and trying to earn money for food.

Claire Harbage/NPR

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Claire Harbage/NPR

When I meet him, 14-year-old Mahamat Djouma is doing what many teenagers do in their spare time: dribbling a soccer ball with his foot.
But when he’s done, tired and hungry, he doesn’t have anyone to welcome him home with a warm plate of food. Instead, he has a world of responsibilities: He’s the sole caregiver for his 5-year-old twin brothers, Hassan and Hissein, who are waiting for him in their mud brick home in a refugee camp in eastern Chad.
Mahamat and his brothers are refugees from Sudan — among the 10 million who’ve been displaced by the violence of the civil war that broke out in April 2023. The U.N. calls it the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Both aid experts and the r..

November 15, 20243:23 AM ET
Rescue workers, left, remove a body from a reformed mineshaft where illegal miners are inside in Stilfontein, South Africa on Thursday.

Jerome Delay/AP

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Jerome Delay/AP

JOHANNESBURG — South Africa’s government says it won’t help a group of illegal miners inside a closed mine in the country’s North West province who have been denied access to basic supplies as part of an official strategy against illegal mining.
The miners in the mineshaft in Stilfontein are believed to be suffering from a lack of food, water and other basic necessities after police closed off the entrances used to transport their supplies underground.
Goats and Soda Diamond diggers in South Africa’s deserted mines break the law — and risk their livesIt is part of the police’s Vala Umgodi, or Close the Hole, operation, which includes cutting off miners’ supplies to force them to return to the surface and be arrested.
Police had earlier indicat..