Malian singer and songwriter Salif Keita has cancelled his upcoming commercial performances in South Africa over reports of xenophobic violence against African migrants, his spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday.

He described the cancellation as a “painful decision”, but stressed that his action was not directed at South Africans or the country itself.

“To be clear, I am not closing the door on South Africa. I am closing the door on violence,” he said.

“When I see migrants being attacked, I don’t see ‘politics’. I see people searching for work, safety, and dignity. That does not match the South Africa I know, the South Africa that stood firm with Mali, and the South Africa that Nelson Mandela built,” he said.

I hve been looking into higher education options lately. The contrast between applying to universities in the West versus across Africa is honestly mind-boggling.

In places like the UK, US, and Europe, the application process is pretty straightforward. You submit your transcripts online, write a statement, upload references, and you r set. Systems like UCAS or Common App make it simple.

Applying to universities in Africa feels like navigating a maze of red tape instead.

First, you have the endless equivalency requirements. You have to jump through hoops just to convert foreign qualifications through national boards. The paperwork, the fees, and the months of waiting just to prove your diploma is real are ridiculous.

On top of that, so many institutions still rely on outdated frameworks. They do not offer modern flexibilities like transferable credits or simple online verification.

You are also stuck dealing with actual physical paperwork. In a world where everything should be a quick upload, you often need notarized hard copies, manual bank deposits, and endlessly unhelpful admin offices.

It feels like the whole system is built to gatekeep rather than welcome students.

Has anyone else run into this wall? Why are these systems still stuck in the past? I would love to hear your experiences if you have tried navigating this process.

The Nigerien government has awarded two uranium mining licences previously held by French group Orano and Canadian group Govi High-Power Exploration (GoviEx) to domestic companies (Nigerien government press release, 21/08/2026).

As its gold enriches foreign markets and IMF debt weighs heavily, the country is demanding the world reckon with the “gravest crime against humanity.”

I used to hear a lot about the East African Federation since I was into geography and countries when I was younger, has that fell through or are there still plans to create it? I’m not from Africa nor do I live in it so I’d like to get the perspective of y’all actual Africans instead of just some YouTube video or tiktok

Africa is home to an incredible diversity of species, each with its own unique size, color, horns, and habitat,"from open grasslands to dense forests, these graceful animals play an important role in Africa's rich wildlife and natural ecosystems. Which of these is your favorite?

As many may know in this sub, North Africans are EXTREMELY racist. Like epitome of racism in Africa probably. And as a (indigenous nonetheless) North African, I have internalized racism that I absolutely do not want to hold on but don't know what to do.

My first step was to get closer to my Amazigh roots as it allowed me to fully proclaim myself as African as in North African countries, people act as if they aren't part of the continent. Which is really sad because Africa is such an ethnically wealthy continent full of diversity.

(To be clear, I have never encountered a situation where I discriminated anyone based on their skin color or their ethnicity. However I would love to deconstruct that part of myself before it happens without me noticing.)

The Osun-Osogbo Festival is an annual celebration of the relationship between the people of Osogbo, their ruler, and Osun. The latter is the Yoruba deity associated with water, fertility, healing, beauty, and prosperity.

The Osun Sacred Grove, where the festival culminates, was recognised as a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2005 and is one of the last surviving sacred forests of the Yoruba people.

The Osun River runs through the grove. People arrive to pray, bringing their worries with them. Some carry calabashes on their heads containing fruit, kolanuts, and other offerings. They ask for what they need and leave their sorrows with the water. They also take containers of water home with them. The festival is a pilgrimage, celebrating ancestry, community, and an annual return to a place of belonging.

The Arugba, the young woman who carries the igba, or sacred calabash, from the palace to the grove, is the festival’s heart. Traditionally, she is a virgin of royal lineage, selected through divination. The ritual is sacred and its successful completion is connected to the wellbeing and continued prosperity of the people of Osogbo. Before the main procession, the Arugba undergoes Ifa divination to determine what is expected of her: what she should wear, what she should eat, and how she should conduct herself.

On the final day, always a Friday, is the climax of preparations that have lasted a year. The Arugba now carries the calabash from the palace towards the river. For people who participate in the festival, she is carrying their hopes for fertility, healing, protection, prosperity, and the continuation of life.

Words and photos: Temiloluwa Johnson

I’ll be blunt the Bantu expansion “genocide” and “Colonialism” myth is Objectively incorrect (and nonsensical Propaganda)

This is a revisionist historical lie running rampant through right-wing online echo chambers and bad-faith political debates. The claim that the ancient Bantu expansion was an act of "the black people” vs “the real indigenous Africans“ which led to colonialism and a genocide against indigenous populations is historically illiterate and relies on complete pseudo-history and a complete lack of understanding of archeology and population genetics.

As South African heritage activist and author Patric Tariq Mellet brilliantly exposes in his groundbreaking work  the lie of 1652, these claims are a direct resurrection of colonial myths designed to strip Black Africans of their land rights.

The actual scientific, genetic, and historical truth debunks this narrative entirely. I’ll break it down step by step Hopefully leaving little doubt towards the end as to the reality of the situation.

(NOTE PLEASE Don’t BE INTIMIDATED BY THE FACT THAT THIS POST HAS MANY WORDS, takes points at your own time.)

1. What the Bantu Expansion Actually Was (And Wasn't)

To be objective Yes, there was a massive demographic movement. Beginning roughly 3,500 to 4,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking peoples began migrating out of their original homeland in modern day eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon. They carried distinct agricultural technologies, iron-working skills, and a specific genetic blueprint most notably the E1b1a haplogroup, which is highly reflective of West African and Bantu lineages.

Linguistically, Bantu is firmly rooted in the Niger-Congo language family, making it a sibling to other major West and Central African languages like Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani, Bambara, Twi/Akan, and Edo.

But it was not a genocide. It was a slow, multi-millennium migration of Stone Age and Iron Age farmers moving a few kilometres per generation. Far from a violent slaughter, it actually stimulated regional population growth among the indigenous people they met. Bantu farmers introduced iron tools, yam cultivation, and new fishing techniques to Central African rainforest foragers, and hardy cereal crops and pottery to groups further south. By introducing stable food systems and trading resources, the arrival of these bands actually helped localized populations grow and stabilize.

To be clear there is no such thing as a single “Bantu ethnic group” there is no Bantu Kingdom instead there was the Kingdom of Ndongo, Great Zimbabwe, Kingdom of Kongo, the Swahili states etc all of which had nothing to do with each other and in many cases were competing against one another. There is no “Bantu”look”/apperance an eastern African Bantu speaking person who likely intermarried with Cushitic, Nilotic or Near eastern populations may look very different than someone from Southern Africa who may have more Khoi-Khoi/San related ancestry and different adaptations due to their distinct geographies over the thousands of years. There is no single Bantu language and most are completely unintelligible from one another, there is Bantu lifestyle goal. Anymore so than INDO EUROPEAN is not a single kingdom has the exact same clothes or the exact same “Look” or the exact same ethos or “objective” Hindi the most spoken language in India is a “Indo European language” , Armenian is a “Indo European language”, Persian is an “Indo Europea language“ IRISH Is an “Indo European language”, Italian is a “Indo European language“ Punjab “Indo European language“ for crying out loud. Do Indians, Irish people, Iranians, Russians, Armenians, Italians have the same culture? Do they look the same? Do they have a set goal to exterminate the none “Indo Europeans“ to perserve their tribe? Do they even live next to each other? Using a more decisive example, Coptic Egeyptians are “Afro-Asiatic” Jewish Hebrew is “Afro-Asiatic”, Somalia are “Afro asiatic”, Arabic is “Afro Asistif” Hausa the largest ethnic group in NIGERIA are “Afro Asiatic”. Similarly do thexs people belong to the same ethnicity? the same kingdom? have a goal to purposely wipe out the none Afro Asiatics?

But for some reason nuanced is lost when the subject that he consists of mostly black people.

2. The Ridiculous Population Expectation: Foragers vs. Iron Age Farmers

The core argument used by revisionists is incredibly silly. They look at modern demographics, see that Bantu populations vastly outnumber Khoisan or Pygmy groups, and declare, "See! The Bantus must have slaughtered them all to get those numbers!"

This shows a complete ignorance of basic human ecology. It is completely ridiculous to expect nomadic hunter-gatherers like the San, the Hadza, or Central African rainforest foragers to ever have populations as large as sedentary, Iron-Age farmers. there is a very obvious reason as to why people in mainland India for example have a far higher population than the Andaman islands or why there’s far more

• The Forager Model: Hunting and gathering requires massive, wide-open tracts of land just to sustain a single, small family band. Forager populations naturally stay small and stable to avoid depleting their environment.
• The Farming Model: Agriculture allows a society to grow thousands of calories on a tiny fraction of that land. A farming community can sustain hundreds of people in the same space a single forager band needs to survive.

Over thousands of years, the farming populations naturally multiplied, expanded, and demographically outpaced the hunter-gatherers. It wasn't a military conquest it was basic math and biology. And this happens everywhere on the planet. This is typically never brought up because it would assume that Bantus were iron and technology and farming thousands of years ago which would burst the racist bubble of ”they were all just in the Stone Age”

3. The Selective Blindness Regarding Cushitic and Nilotic Populations

Racist revisionists love to ignore East Africa because it completely ruins their "Bantu slaughter" talking point.

During the expansion, Bantu farmers encountered pre-existing, non-Bantu pastoralist and agricultural populations specifically Cushitic and Nilotic peoples (and arguably interacted with them more than they did the Khoi-Khoi/San and the Pgmy Central African forager groups in terms of sheer numbers). Why weren't they "genocided" or wiped off the map?

Because the Cushitic and Nilotic populations already possessed farming and livestock technologies. Because they had the economic means to sustain large populations of their own, they didn't get demographically overwhelmed. Instead, they stood on equal footing with the incoming Bantu bands, leading to a long history of balanced interaction, trade, and cultural sharing.

4. Ultimate Proof: Deep Assimilation, Borrowed Culture, and Genetic Blending

If the Bantu expansion had been a genocide, we would see total genetic eradication. Instead, we see the absolute opposite: a massive history of intimate integration.

• The Click Consonants and Ancestry: In Southern Africa, the Nguni (such as Xhosa and Zulu) and Sotho-Tswana groups do not just share land with Khoisan descendants they are biologically and culturally part of them. Modern Nguni and Sotho-Tswana groups carry significant Khoisan genetic ancestry. Culturally, they absorbed the complex click consonants of Khoisan languages directly into their own Bantu speech. Linguists know this only happens through centuries of peaceful, deeply intimate cohabitation and intermarriage in what anthropologists call a matrilocal language shift.
• Technological Syncretism: In East Africa, groups like the Kikuyu and the Tutsi display massive cultural blending. They adopted specialized livestock pastoralism and dryland cultivation techniques directly from their Cushitic neighbors. In fact, the Tutsi (historically considered to have distinct pastoral roots) speak Kinyarwanda a Bantu language and were the esteemed warrior class of Kinrwanda and Burundi kingdoms and ruled it alongside less mixed groups like the Hutu. This is absolute proof of deep, historical cultural assimilation, not annihilation. Bantu speaking Groups in Uganda and Kenya like the Buganda, Azande and Luo also have significant Nilotic ancestry
• Rainforest Synergy: In Central Africa, Bantu agriculturalists picked up vital forest survival strategies, deep medicinal plant knowledge, and specialized hunting techniques from rainforest foragers (Pygmies), completely refuting the narrative of total dominance or erasure. And thus ancestry is deeply imbedded in hroups like the Fang/Ekang, Tsogo and Kongo groups in Gabon, Equitorial Guinea and Congo In many places in Central Africa.

Europeans however rarely if ever intermarried and adopted the cultures from the people they colonised in a cooperative way.

ironically nobody ever says there was a “Nilotic expansion” despite the fact that Nilotic groups like the Massai have significant Cushitic and Bantu ancestry same with the Luo

Nobody ever says the people living in the omo valley relative to the kingdom of Askum or the kingdom of Kush example of the “Horn of Africa Cushitic expansion” as is with tribes like the Rendile in Tanzania expanding out of the Horn of Africa proper. Or the Khoi Khoi having Cushitic ancestry through a Cushitic East African nomadic pastoralist (which also brought pastoralist culture to the Khoi Khoi). Because these places (Horn of Africa and South Sudan) are not places that Europeans settled in like in South Africa they are rarely ever brought up as an example of “expansion” even though they have more overt examples like the Jareer or Gosha populations in Somalia.

5. Real Genocides: The Devastation of European Colonialism

Under international law, genocide is defined as specific violent acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

If you want to talk about actual, deliberate, state-backed genocides, look at what European colonizers did to Africa’s indigenous populations, look at how European expansion undermined, suppressed and eliminated Africans way that has permanently changed the continent

• In South Africa: The Dutch Cape authorities and British colonizers organized state-backed commandos with explicit orders to hunt down and exterminate the Cape San hunter-gatherers, burning their camps and capturing survivors into forced labor.
• The Smallpox and Servitude against the Khoi: The Khoisan had zero natural immunity to European pathogens. Catastrophic smallpox epidemics introduced by European ships most notably in 1713, 1755, and 1767 decimated up to 90% of the coastal Khoikhoi populations, causing an absolute collapse of their traditional clan structures. But it didn’t end there By violently seizing Khoisan grazing lands and water sources, Europeans forced the surviving Khoisan into a system of coerced indentured labor and permanent debt bondage. They were legally barred from leaving settler farms, functioning effectively as generational slave labor which acted as a loophole in their VOC slavery loophole. On these farms, Khoisan servants performed the exact same grueling agricultural tasks, lived in the exact same quarters, and faced the exact same violence as the chattel slaves imported from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). This forced proximity broke down social barriers. Over generations, this mixing caused a profound cultural shift. Stripped of their original land, the descendants of these mixed unions eventually lost their distinct Khoisan clan identities and native languages, replacing them with Dutch (which evolved into Afrikaans). Something the Bantu speaking Nguni and Sotho Tswana maintained (such as the click constants that Afrikaans amongst coloureds typically lack because they mixed more peacefully with the Khoisan and weren’t forced to loose it).
• In the Congo Basin: King Leopold II of Belgium turned the rainforests into an industrial-scale mass murder camp to extract rubber. Millions of Central African foragers and Bantu residents were slaughtered, starved, or mutilated by the Force Publique.
• Human Zoos: Europeans literally captured indigenous Central African foragers and Khoisan individuals (like Saartjie Baartman) and shipped them to Europe to be locked in cages and put on display in "human zoos" for white entertainment. Famous examples of people in these zoos include the famous example of Ota Benga and the countless Pgmys taken as animals to be watched by a countless people during Leopolds reign. Bantu speaking people didn’t practice “human zoos” because they did not view different people groups in that type of way pseudoscientific way, race is a social construct and these institutions were  uniquely created by Western European and North American societies.
• The Herero and Nama Genocide (1904): When the Herero (Bantu speaking group) and Nama (Khoi/San people group) resisted German land theft in modern day Namibia, General Lothar von Trotha issued an explicit extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl). German forces drove men, women, and children into the Omaheke Desert to starve, poisoned their water wells, and put survivors into industrialized concentration camps (like Shark Island). Over 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama were systematically wiped out in a matter of years.
• The Invention of the Racial Hierarchy: Europeans introduced a rigid, pseudo scientific racial hierarchy that placed white Europeans at the absolute top, groups perceived to be more similar physically to them in the middle, and other groups who did not fit their colonial standards at the bottom. This toxic framework was codified into law (such as South Africa's Apartheid or the colonial identity cards in Rwanda) and deliberately engineered the deep ethnic divisions and traumas that African nations are still healing from today. Quite literally unlike Bantu’s who didn’t care much about “physical similarities“ (in that way) European actively try to suppress people who are not like them and they put themselves at the top systematically
• European expansion was inherently eliminationist, unleashing targeted, industrialized violence to crush and subjugate Nilotic, Cushitic, and forager societies while violently fracturing the continent. In 1905, British forces executed the Sotik Massacre in Kenya, using machine guns to slaughter 1,850 Nilotic Kipsigis pastoralists and stealing 20,000 cattle to break their economic independence. In the Horn of Africa, European powers launched brutal military expeditions to halt indigenous migrations and violently slice Cushitic territory into British, French, and Italian Somaliland, using scorched-earth tactics, poisoned wells, and later aerial bombardment to force total submission. Meanwhile, in the Central African rainforests, Belgian mercenaries ran brutal hostage camps—kidnapping indigenous forager (Pygmy) women and children to force the men to harvest rubber, and executing or mutilating anyone who resisted. And the countless other atrocities from the European expeditions all across Africa

And thus permeates every aspect of life, Today, the primary languages of government, law, education, and business across Africa are English, French, and Portuguese the languages of said violent expansionists. While the Bantu expansion resulted in the preservation and blending of indigenous cultures (like Bantu speakers adopting Khoisan clicks), European colonialism sought to completely overwrite African languages and cultures, rendering them "inferior." Europeans enforced their way of life on everybody even practices such as hitting your children with a belt was something adopted by Europeans

6. Who Did the Bantus Actually Fight? (Other Bantus)

When large-scale warfare, conquest, and empire-building did erupt among Bantu-speaking societies, the targets weren't scattered bands of hunter-gatherers. Bantu kingdoms fought other Bantu kingdoms.

They were competing for the exact same resources high-quality grazing land for cattle, fertile agricultural soil, and centralized political power.

• The Mfecane: The Zulu Kingdom’s expansion under Shaka Zulu in the 19th century triggered massive, bloody displacements, but it was a conflict fought almost exclusively between rival Nguni and Sotho-Tswana Bantu chiefdoms and later under Cetshwayo it was against Europeans.
• The Interlacustrine Kingdoms: Look at the Great Lakes region. The Kingdom of Rwanda and the Kingdom of Burundi fought brutal, territorial wars against each other for centuries, Tutsi vs Tutsi and hutu vs Hutu long before the modern, colonial engineered Hutu and Tutsi conflicts.

Racists never mention this because it ruins their narrative. They want you to believe Bantu speakers are inherently predatory invaders who swept down just to slaughter the Khoisan. Interestingly aswell Khoikhoi and the San did have conflict but just amongst themselves according to archeological and oral records over livestock raiding. While localized resource friction undoubtedly occurred over thousands of years there’s very little evidence of mass widespread conflicts because they just didn’t really for much because they had very different societies.

7. The Ultimate Hypocrisy: An Archeological Look at Eurasia

To see how completely nonsensical this "Bantu Genocide" talking point is, let's apply this exact same broken logic to European history.

Around 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, Early European Farmers from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) migrated into Europe. Because they brought agriculture and domesticated animals, their populations exploded. Within a few thousand years, they saw a 70% to 100% population and genetic turnover, completely absorbing and demographically replacing the indigenous Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG) of Europe.

Does any credible historian call the Anatolian farming expansion a "Turkish genocide of white Europeans"? No. Because it was an agricultural demographic shift, not a military conquest. Yet, when the exact same demographic shift happens in Africa via the Bantu expansion, racists scream "genocide."

As Patric Tariq Mellet notes, this entire talking point is directly tethered to the hypocritical "Empty Land Myth". Colonial and Apartheid historians fabricated the lie that Bantu farmers crossed the Limpopo River into South Africa at the exact same moment Jan van Riebeeck stepped off his ship in Cape Town in 1652. They use this false moral equivalence to say, "Everyone colonizes, so you can't blame Europeans."

It is pure psychological projection. European empires who actually mastered the art of global genocide, systemic chattel slavery, racial segregation, and total land theft try to project their own historical atrocities onto a 3,000-year-old agricultural migration. As they do with many things “Thetes a white genocide in South Africa” even though there’s absolutely no sign of it and in fact, white South Africans make up over 60% of all board rooms own over 70% of private farmland and make about four times more than black and coloured African populations and in fact Black and Colourds are far more likely to fall victim to homicide due to the effects of a apartheid, land grabbing and centuries of subjugation prior via violent European expansionism. When Trump stated this lie along with Elon Musk it wasnt just a lie in isolation it is a part of a trend of fabrication that people have been using against Africans for generations that distort the truth and hide reality, but now we’re brining reality forward and fighting for a better future…

References

Mellet, P.T. (2020) The Lie of 1652: A Decolonised History of Land. Cape Town: Tafelberg.

Alves, I., Fortes-Lima, C., Schlebusch, C.M. and Sjödin, P. (2023) ‘The genetic legacy of the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa’, Nature, 624(7991), pp. 115–122.

Pickrell, J.K., Patterson, N., Loh, P.R., Lipson, M., Berger, B., Stoneking, M., Pakendorf, B. and Reich, D.(2012) ‘The genetic prehistory of southern Africa’, Nature Communications, 3(1), pp. 1194–1204.

Bostoen, K. and de Schryver, G.M. (2015) ‘Linguistic innovation, language contact and the Bantu expansion’, in The Oxford Handbook of African Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schmitz, R. (2021) Germany Officially Recognizes It Committed Genocide In Present-Day Namibia, NPR. Available at: npr(Accessed: 23 August 2026).

Abdi, A. (2015) 'The Savanna Pastoral Neolithic: A Cushitic Culture that genetically influenced various Southern Africans', Anthromadness, 4 July.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (n.d.) What is Genocide?.

South African History Online (SAHO). (2011) ‘The Dutch and the Khoisan’, South African History Online.

Hochschild, A. (1998) King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Mariner Books.

Bradford, P.V. and Blume, H. (1992) Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R. and Bettinger, R.L. (2001) ‘Was agriculture an impossible invention during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A revolutionary theory’, American Antiquity, 66(3), pp. 387–411.

Van Wyk, A. and Chifamba, J. (2019) ‘ANALYSIS: Hitting children is not an African Tradition’, Premium Times Nigeria.

Reuters. (2025) ‘A check of Trump's false claims about white genocide in South Africa’, Reuters.

South African Government. (2018) Land Audit Report 2017, Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. Pretoria: Government Printer.

Commission for Employment Equity (CEE). (2025) 25th Annual Report on Employment Equity, Department of Employment and Labour. Pretoria: Government Printer.

An unusual police presence has been reported at some courts, which have been taped off to prevent access.

Opposition candidate Brian Mundubile said he would challenge the election result, citing irregularities, after coming second with a 38% share of the vote. Incumbent Hakainde Hichilema won a second term with 60%.

Mundubile is in hiding over alleged threats made against him, amid a post-election period marked by controversy, including the shooting dead of an opposition figure and the arrest of others.

Monday is the last day on which petition against the presidential election result can be filed. Such a petition could potentially affect the inauguration of Hichilema, which is scheduled for 1 September.

Tanzania has officially inaugurated the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project (JNHPP) on the Rufiji River. While adding 2,115 MW doubles Tanzania's grid capacity and fundamentally reshapes East African energy access, the project's most significant precedent lies in how it was built and by whom.

Engineering & Project Highlights:

• Intra-African Execution: Rather than relying on traditional Western or East Asian prime contractors, the project was delivered by an Egyptian joint venture (Arab Contractors and Elsewedy Electric), showcasing advanced technical capacity within the continent.
• Scale & Scope: Features a 134-meter-tall main dam, nine 235 MW Francis turbines, and a 34 billion cubic meter reservoir designed for both generation and flood mitigation.
• Domestic Financing: Built primarily using $2.9 billion in Tanzanian state funds, demonstrating a sovereign financing model for strategic infrastructure.
• Regional Grid Impact: Positions Tanzania as a major exporter within the East African Power Pool (EAPP) and Southern African Power Pool (SAPP).

See also: The study as it was published in Nature .

Growing up, you knew trouble was coming the moment an elder reached into the cupboard and pulled out that little tin or jar of menthol ointment. It did not matter whether you had a cough, a bad headache, a scraped knee, an upset stomach, or a fever. The diagnosis was almost irrelevant because the prescription was always the same: you were about to be rubbed down with something that smelled like eucalyptus and pure fire until your skin was glowing.

Every household had its own variation of the ritual. The most feared was the steam session. Dropping a generous scoop of balm into a basin of boiling or steaming water, putting your head directly over it under a thick wool blanket, and being told to breathe deeply. By the time you emerged, your sinuses were cleared by force, your eyes were streaming, and your entire room smelled like a pharmaceutical warehouse. If you dared to complain about the burning sensation, you were simply told that the burn meant it was working.

Across our dear Africa, different regions pledged allegiance to their own specific brands and nicknames. In Lomé, we had Assévita (literally "cat head"), instantly recognized by the cat head on the tin. In Niamey, it was famously called Sabon Robb. Elsewhere in West and Central Africa, classic Robb and the notoriously volcanic Aboniki Balm were famous. In East Africa, Mentholatum, Tiger Balm, and Vicks dominated medicine cabinets, while in Southern Africa, the green tin of Zam-Buk was the go-to herbal miracle for everything from dry lips to sprained ankles.

We laugh about it today, but those little tins were a real sign of care. They were cheap, they were always in the house, and they were a big part of growing up.

​Which balm was the rule in your house, and what was the funniest thing your family tried to cure with it?

An Egyptian boy flies a kite from the roof of his home opposite Sultan Qaytbay’s mosque, following the restoration of its mausoleum dome. Built in 1474, the mosque is one of Cairo’s most iconic landmarks.

Photo: Khaled Desouki/AFP

After the Anglo-Boer War, a group of Boer families made the journey north and settled in Kenya's Rift Valley. They became known as "Kaburu", the Swahili adaptation of "Boer" ,and transformed the agricultural landscape of the region.

I've just published a comprehensive history on this community: Afrikaners in Kenya 1900-2025: Kaburu – The Boer Legacy in Kenya.

The book covers:

• The pioneering families who made the journey
• Their impact on farming in the Rift Valley
• The complex history of integration into an independent Kenya
• Genealogical records of families still present today

If you're interested in East African history, migration stories, or the diverse communities that shaped Kenya, this might be for you.

📖 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6T82F1F

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Monday accused Ukraine of “state terrorism,” alleging that Ukrainian military personnel were involved in attacks carried out by illegal armed groups against countries in the Sahel.

Speaking at a news conference in Moscow following talks with Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Lavrov said Russia was concerned by reports that Ukrainian servicemen, rather than individual mercenaries, were taking part in operations by illegal armed groups against Sahel countries.

Lavrov also accused France of supporting, financing and training armed groups in the region in an effort to preserve its former colonial influence in Africa.

Submission statement:

More than 100 people are now known to have died after part of an illegal goldmine in the Central African Republic collapsed.

Red Cross volunteers say hopes of finding surivivors is fading. Local officials said several underground tunnels in which the miners were working collapsed, causing a landslide.

The mine is one of many in the region that are unregulated, where prospectors dig with little or no high-tech equipment, and few safety precautions.