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
pavalena/Getty Images/iStockphoto
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pavalena/Getty Images/iStockphoto
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.
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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