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.
Jude Lartey for NPR
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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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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..
November 12, 20247:57 AM ET
Mahamat Djouma, 14, fled the war in Sudan without parents; his mother died in 2023 and his father subsequently disappeared. He came with 5-year-old twin brothers, whom he now cares for. Entesar, a 21-year-old student, also fled to escape the violence — and was raped by three soldiers. She asked to be identified by her middle name since she has not yet told close family members about the attack.
Claire Harbage/NPR
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Claire Harbage/NPR
Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault.
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 c..