Here’s my latest link round-up from Africa Update. We’ve got Angolan goat delivery apps, contraception compromises in Rwanda, a deep dive on the Congolese election, postdocs for African physicists, and more.
Happy New Year from Nairobi! (Photo by Sarah Kimani)
West Africa: Meet the only bookseller of Guinea-Bissau. Read about one Nigerian man’s horrifying experience in captivity in Libya as he tried to emigrate to Europe. This all-female biker gang in Nigeria drives around the country doing health education for other women. Here’s some useful background on the current protests in Togo. Listen to this podcast on statelessness in West Africa from the Center for Democratic Development in Ghana. Across West Africa, women are increasingly likely to ask for divorces if their marriages aren’t going well.
Central Africa: In Rwanda, where the Catholic Church runs many hospitals, the government has come to a compromise with them about birth control by providing access to contraception in tiny clinics right outside the hospitals. Tim Longman recommends this profile of Rwanda’s Kagame (in French) as balanced and insightful. Burundi has officially moved its capital from Bujumbura to the small city of Gitega. North Korean soldiers are training elite army forces in Uganda. Secondary schools in Uganda are also piloting new Mandarin language classes before rolling them out nationwide. In the Central African Republic, carrying out surveys is a dangerous pasttime. Check out these data visualizations of Kinshasa’s population and flight patterns.
Congolese elections: Here’s a detailed overview of the political landscape in the DRC in the runup to the Dec. 30 election. Human Rights Watch and Christoph Vogel have written about widespread human rights abuses during polling. Election monitors organized by the Catholic Church have announced that opposition candidate Martin Fayulu gained a majority of votes. The government complained that the Church shouldn’t have announced their results before the official results, widely expected to favor the president’s preferred candidate Emmanuel Shadary, were in. Laura Seay and Jason Stearns have both shared informed speculation about how the situation will evolve on Twitter.
Map interlude: this is a remarkable map of selected anti-colonial uprisings from Paperless History
East Africa: Kenyans are speaking up about extrajudicial killings by the police. In your unusual political dispute for the day, Kenyan salt companies are complaining after the water regulator said they should have paid for the use of sea water in their factories. Here are some good overviews of the last year in politics in Kenya and Tanzania. Ethiopian refugees in Sudan have accused UNHCR of demanding bribes before they can be listed for resettlement elsewhere. What can the popular uprisings of 1964 and 1985 tell us about Sudan’s current protests? The Saudi-backed coalition in Yemen is hiring teenage soldiers from Darfur to fight on the front lines. Eritrea’s secretive president rarely tells his ministers anything about policy before it’s implemented. This is why cycling is so surprisingly popular in Eritrea.
Southern Africa: This was an insightful post about the politics of cholera control in Zambia. In Mozambique, pregnant students at secondary schools can now attend classes during the day instead of being forced to attend night classes “where they cannot be seen.” Madagascar’s prisons sound really horrifying. As the tobacco market shrinks, farmers in Malawi are considering switching to marijuana instead. Angola now has an app for delivering live goats to your door.
Politics + economics: Apolitical is curating stories of young people’s experiences in the civil service across Africa. Don’t miss this new book about the rich histories of medieval trade in Africa. African activists are taking on climate change. Here’s why medium-scale farms have quietly been on the rise across Africa.
Research + conferences: The National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia is a making all research from Ethiopian universities available online. African physicists should apply to this Fields Institute postdoc by January 31. Apply to the East Africa Social Science Translation Collaborative at Berkeley by March 1. Read about why conferences on Africa should be held in Africa. Nigerian magazine The Republic is soliciting essays about the experience of conducting research in Africa.
Calling all African artists! (Via KAN Festival)
Art + innovation: The Nigerian publisher Kachifo has a call for manuscripts open till March 31. Check out five inspired inventions from African engineers. Africa Science Week Kenya produced a lot of fascinating material, including the Faces of Kenyan Science and this book of interesting facts about Kenyan science. African edutainment programs for kids are on the rise. Here are the must-read books of 2018 by African authors.
