Afrique XXI

Senegal. In Casamance, the courts have ruled, but the zircon mining goes on

Fanny Pigeaud — 2026-09-25T10:06:55Z

For twenty years, the people of Niafrang, in Casamance, have opposed zircon mining on their coastline. In November 2025, Senegal's Supreme Court struck down the company's permit. But extraction continues in defiance of that ruling, threatening the dunes, the mangrove and the village's water supply.

It has been a twenty-year fight, waged relentlessly against pressure and threats. In the village of Niafrang (also known as Niafourang), in Casamance, in southern Senegal, residents have stood firm against a mining project that threatens their coastline.

In November 2025, their struggle reached a decisive turning point: Senegal's Supreme Court struck down the zircon extraction licence granted by the mining ministry for a site next to the village. A major legal victory — and a final one.

Yet the ruling has not been enough to halt operations. Just a few kilometres from Niafrang, the mining company continues working the mineral-rich sands to extract this highly sought-after ore.

The origins of this long battle go back to 2004. That year, the Senegalese state granted the Australian company Carnegie Minerals an exploration permit for the mineral-rich sands along the Casamance coast, which are rich in zircon, titanium and other strategic minerals. Around a hundred square kilometres of coastal dunes were affected, including the one bordering Niafrang.

A coastline vulnerable to flooding

The extraction project quickly stirred concern among local people: behind the dune lies a vast area of around 50 000 hectares, home to close to 25 000 people spread across some forty villages. Sitting at sea level, the area would be especially vulnerable to flooding should the dune deteriorate further.

From 2006 onwards, a committee against zircon mining, bringing together forty-four villages, began lobbying the media and public authorities. “We carried out research and visited sites where zircon had already been mined. That's how we became aware of just how serious the consequences of this kind of extraction could be for our environment,” the group's leader, Ousmane Sané, who lives in Niafrang, where he runs an eco-tourism camp, told Afrique XXI.

Opposition to the project grew so fierce that Carnegie Minerals eventually gave up without ever starting work. Another Australian company, Hong Kong-based Astron Corporation Limited, then took up the project and, in 2017, secured an operating permit. But it too ran into the same determined resistance from residents.

In 2023, the government eventually cancelled Astron's permit for “inactivity.” “We tried everything necessary to get the project off the ground — the authorities in the Ziguinchor region launched consultations. Unfortunately, there was a lack of buy-in from the local population,” Roseline Mbaye Carlos, the mining ministry's director-general of mines, told Le Quotidien newspaper in October 2023¹.

At Abéné, a car and envelopes stuffed with cash

But the reprieve was short-lived. Even before Astron's permit was withdrawn, the state had granted another permit to a different company, G-Sand, which has Chinese backing and is based in the Gambia. This licence covers the Abéné area, a town roughly five kilometres from Niafrang as the crow flies.

This time, something changed: G-Sand met with no significant opposition on the ground. Although it was a member of the anti-mining committee, the population of Abéné no longer stood in the way of the project. G-Sand began operations in 2024, led by around ten Chinese nationals and dozens of workers recruited locally in Abéné.

Several accounts point to corruption as the reason for this reversal. “The day after the agreement with the mining company was signed, the mayor of one of the municipalities covered by the zircon mining plan — the one where Abéné is located — received a car worth 3 million CFA francs [€4,500], along with an envelope containing 3.5 million,” journalist Pape Sané reported². According to Amnesty International, cheques worth 200 000 CFA francs were also handed out to certain families who hold local power.

A resident of Abéné, who asked not to be named, says: “G-Sand bribed local officials with a few thousand euros and token promises — repairing the mosque, providing an ambulance — to win their backing.” In a local political system with a strong hierarchy, these influential figures were then able to impose their position on the rest of the population, particularly on young people, who were generally opposed to the project.

“Today, after serious tensions, the subject has become almost taboo in Abéné: most people don't want to talk about it anymore. Many are disgusted by the mining under way, but have now resigned themselves to it,” the same source adds. Contacted by email, neither G-Sand nor Senegal's mining ministry responded.

Niafrang keeps up the resistance

In Niafrang, the mood is altogether different: there is no question of backing down or giving in. If anything, concern and anger keep growing. Two events in particular have shaken residents.

In February 2025, they first discovered that G-Sand had gone beyond its permitted mining area and begun working part of their land. They then found out that, as far back as October 2023, the company had filed a request to extend its permit to include the Niafrang dune, seen as the most promising part of the deposit.

For the village, home to around 250 people, the stakes are existential: nothing less than the balance of the whole territory is at risk. Niafrang's ecosystem is particularly fragile, as Ousmane Sané explains: “To the east are the houses, with the rice paddies and other crops down in the lowlands, at sea level; to the west is the dune, the mangrove and the Atlantic Ocean. Over roughly a decade, we've seen the sea advance by more than thirty metres. And our only defence against that is the dune. In the village, everyone knows it's a natural sea wall — without it, salt water would flood the rice paddies, the other crops and the houses. For a village that depends on farming, that would be catastrophic: we'd lose everything.”

In 2015, geographers Luc Descroix and Jean-Claude Marut³ were already warning that the coastal dune belt where the zircon deposit lies had been weakened by climate change and was subject to accelerated marine erosion. As they put it at the time: “With the ocean already advancing from the west, is it really wise to add the advance of the excavators from the east?”

Fears of a water shortage

The mining work would also threaten the mangrove that separates the dune from the ocean. Both fragile and exceptionally rich in biodiversity, this ecosystem plays a crucial role in maintaining the balance of the coastline. It is also a vital resource for part of the population, who gather shellfish and fish there.

Niafrang's concerns extend to water as well. Since zircon mining began, residents of several surrounding villages have noticed the water table dropping. Women, who grow vegetables, are finding it increasingly difficult to irrigate their crops. With too little water to go round, they now have to take turns — some watering one day, others the next.

These observations echo warnings raised by scientists back when the project was first conceived. They had cautioned that the pumping operations needed for mining risked lowering the water table. Extracting mineral-rich sands requires millions of cubic metres of water drawn from underground. In northern Senegal, where another company, the French group Eramet⁴, also mines zircon, farmers report similar water disruptions.

The water has also changed colour, according to Ousmane Sané: it has reportedly turned reddish. Is it toxic? Impossible to say for certain at this stage. Experts had nonetheless warned of pollution risks linked to the mining operation, particularly from the use of heavy machinery.

Procedures under challenge

Alongside these environmental concerns come questions about how the project has been run. Niafrang residents point to a lack of transparency and say several procedures have not been followed. They say they have found it extremely difficult to get information, both on the project itself and on the administrative steps that preceded it.

According to a legal source, the permit application for Abéné was filed without an environmental and social impact assessment ever having been carried out beforehand. Yet such an assessment is mandatory, and is required to obtain the environmental compliance certificate that is itself a precondition for any mining to begin.

The impact assessment required to apply for the Niafrang permit extension was, likewise, reportedly carried out after the fact. It was in this context that a public hearing was held in October 2025. It was not, however, held in Niafrang, despite the village being directly affected — it took place in Kabadio, a nearby town. Niafrang residents nonetheless travelled there to voice their opposition to the project.

Another major issue, according to Bocar Kanté, a lawyer representing a group of Niafrang residents, concerns compliance with regulatory setback distances. Article 48 of the Environment Code requires this category of facility — industrial zircon mining — to be sited at least 200 metres from any watercourse. Yet the Niafrang dune lies no more than 108 metres from a river at most. At that distance, industrial zircon mining should not, in principle, be authorised at all.

“The MPs did nothing to stop G-Sand”

Faced with these risks and alleged failings, around fifteen residents have pursued several legal actions, despite threats and attempted bribery, in an effort to protect their land.

It was one of these legal challenges that led to the November 2025 ruling: the Supreme Court struck down the operating permit granted to G-Sand for the Abéné area, finding that procedures for consulting the population and protecting the environment had not been followed. That ruling also removes the legal basis for the permit extension covering the Niafrang area.

In principle, G-Sand should therefore have stopped its operations. But after a brief suspension, work resumed as though nothing had happened. “The company keeps mining five kilometres from our homes despite the Supreme Court's ruling,” a local source laments. Since then, Niafrang residents have stepped up efforts to get the court's ruling enforced.

“We wrote to a group of MPs, including one who represents our department, Ousmane Sané notes bitterly. We called on them to act and put a stop to the project, given the many failings we had documented. A parliamentary delegation, including the chair of the mining committee, came to see for themselves. They saw the mining operation and met with us. But we came to understand that the Senegalese state was firmly committed to a pro-mining agenda. No one ever said so openly, but these MPs did nothing to stop G-Sand.”

“They're trying to isolate me”

“People in this area live off farming, fishing and tourism. So the state should be protecting them, not exposing them to risk,” says Serigne Sarr, one of the group's supporters and president of Senegal's Association for the Defence of Water and Sanitation Rights.

But the village's resistance is gradually isolating it. After nearly twenty years of solidarity among villages in the area, Niafrang's stance is now viewed unfavourably across the region. Relations have soured, to the point that the village now “finds itself alone, facing everyone else,” a local source observes.

Ousmane Sané says he has been the target of verbal and physical attacks, attempted bribery and threats. “I've become a scapegoat because I'm originally from another part of Casamance, and the people behind the project think I'm influencing the villagers. The fact that I speak to the media and at press conferences bothers them. They're trying to isolate me.”

He also describes several intimidation attempts that could have turned violent: “Last year, some people came all the way to my house. They surrounded it, armed with machetes and knives, intending to set it on fire. I wasn't there, but my wife went outside and stood up to them. They were young men from Kabadio.”

After the mining, “hardship”

Niafrang residents do not reject the idea of development for their region, but they favour a different vision for its future. In their view, it is possible to create jobs and economic activity without sacrificing the ecosystem's fragile balance. To make the case for this alternative, the anti-mining committee has drawn up a “community protocol”⁵, setting out principles for managing the land, preserving biodiversity and traditional knowledge, while reaffirming local people's right to take part in decisions over their resources and to share fairly in the benefits.

“This area has real potential and simply needs support to pursue a form of development that is sustainable and beneficial for the population, explains Ousmane Sané. Zircon mining is an activity that will only last a few years. After that, people will be left facing hardship, because by then they will have lost a forest and the mangrove's resources…” A group of residents has therefore filed a request to have Niafrang classified as a mining protection zone, under the Mining Code. Another battle to safeguard the future, against the odds.

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This article was translated from French into English using AI and proofread by a human journalist.

¹« Exploitation du zircon de Niafrang : l'État ferme la mine à Astron », Le Quotidien, 13 octobre 2023.

²« Sénégal : extractivisme prédateur », magazine Amnesty n°117, juin 2024.

³Luc Descroix et Jean-Claude Marut, « L'exploitation des sables métallifères du littoral casamançais (Sénégal) : un projet à risques », Regards géopolitiques, 1 (3), 2015, p. 11-17.

⁴Fanny Pigeaud, « Un groupe minier français détruit un désert unique au Sénégal », Reporterre, 13 janvier 2025.

⁵« Protocole communautaire bioculturel de la communauté de Niafrang », Natural Justice, 2025.

Zeinab Badawi: “African scholars' accounts carry more weight”

Victoria Brittain — 2026-09-18T04:00:00Z

With An African History of Africa, published in French on 18 September, the English broadcaster and film-maker of Sudanese origin sets out to tell the continent's story through a lens other than a Western one — a project built on interviews with dozens of African researchers.

Zeinab Badawi is a journalist born in Sudan and raised in Britain from the age of 2. She had a long career in television (ITV Yorkshire, Channel 4 News, the BBC…) and as a documentary-maker, notably producing a twenty-part BBC television series on Africa, “The History of Africa”, broadcast in 2020. She later moved into academia, becoming president of the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in October 2021. She is also an honorary fellow of her former Oxford college. She sits on the boards of several influential organisations, among them the International Crisis Group, Afrobarometer (based in Ghana), and the Mandela Institute for Development Studies.

Her father, Mohammed-Khair El Badawi, was a Sudanese journalist and activist heavily involved in pre-independence Sudanese politics, before joining the BBC's Arabic service in London. She is also the great-granddaughter of Babikr Bedri, a pioneer of women's emancipation in Sudan.

At 66, Zeinab Badawi has stepped back from television studios and journalism. She now runs a communications firm, Kush, named after the powerful kingdom (1070 BC – 350 AD) that once spread across the confluence of the Blue Nile, the White Nile and the Atbara river, in what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt. Her company produces documentaries and advises organisations and businesses.

On 18 September, the Paris-based Éditions du Faubourg publish the French edition of her book An African History of Africa (Une histoire africaine de l'Afrique, translated by Eric Faye), which came out a year earlier under W.H. Allen. She drew on dozens of interviews with researchers across the African continent, many of them conducted while filming the episodes for the BBC series.

She makes no secret of her ambition to offer a “de-Westernised” — and decolonised — account of the continent's history, accessible to everyone. She is also working on a version for younger readers. Her work was inspired in particular by Unesco's eight-volume General History of Africa.

Victoria Brittain: What was the spark that set off this whole undertaking?

Zeinab Badawi: I had no idea, on a sunny afternoon in the summer of 2013, sitting in the office of my friend Getachew Engida, an Ethiopian who was then Unesco's deputy director-general, that I was about to set off on a great intellectual journey. As we drank tea, I noticed a bookshelf behind him holding a set of volumes titled General History of Africa, the GHA. He explained that it was a history of Africa written from its origins to the modern era, most of it by African intellectuals.

It was a project launched in the early 1960s, at that moment of rapid African decolonisation, when newly independent African leaders felt that, with their countries now decolonised, their history needed decolonising too, and needed to be written from an African point of view. Unesco backed the ambition and set up a committee of African academics to oversee this extraordinary undertaking. I told my friend I wanted to make a BBC television series drawing on these volumes, to tell the history of Africa with Africans. So I travelled, over six and a half years, to some thirty countries across the continent, interviewing dozens upon dozens of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and cultural experts about the history of their region.

After twenty episodes of “The History of Africa”, a great deal of material remained unused. I felt I hadn't done justice to the African scholars I had interviewed, and so I decided to write this book. That was the spark for An African History of Africa. Of course, for the book I couldn't rely solely on interview transcripts; I had to do a great deal more research — fortunately, we have SOAS, one of the finest libraries in the United Kingdom. It took me around two years to write the book. All told, the whole project — television and writing — kept me busy for the best part of a decade.

Victoria Brittain: You've said you wished you'd had a book like this as a child. Are you planning a children's version?

Zeinab Badawi: Yes, I'm working this year on an illustrated edition for young readers, say 7 to 11-year-olds, due out sometime next year, and I'm also writing a version for children of around 12 to 16.

Victoria Brittain: What was your relationship with the African academics like?

Zeinab Badawi: Every academic I interviewed is brilliant. I think there are good Africanists elsewhere in the world doing remarkable work on Africa, but there's undoubtedly something more powerful when someone from the country or region itself speaks about their own history. It seems to add an essential dimension. I felt these African academics' accounts carried more weight because it was their own story they were telling, and because they speak the local languages and are therefore more attuned to oral tradition than some Africanists are.

What's more, they turn the telescope round and look at history from their own vantage point. A distinguished Nigerian historian, Professor Muywai Falaiye, put it to me this way: “A Black person has to write their own history, to speak for themselves, in order to offer a different perspective from the one orchestrated by the West — and I say that bearing in mind that no one can explain your history better than you can yourself. If you approach African history and its belief systems with a Western mindset, you're bound to misunderstand what the African represents. You need to understand what Africans do, why they think the way they think. To me, that matters enormously: telling the history isn't enough — understanding the African mindset matters even more.”

Victoria Brittain: Could you tell us about some of them?

I could name so many remarkable people, and they're all in the book. Take the Cameroonian professor Augustin Holl, a genuine polymath. Trained as a palaeontologist, he chaired the GHA's international committee. The breadth and depth of his knowledge are, quite literally, astonishing. He was a real source of inspiration for the whole book.

Two brilliant Liberian academics, Carl Patrick Burrowes and William Ezra Allen, gave me fascinating insights into what drove the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and the arrival of freed African-Americans from the United States. Dr Kitouni Daho is one of Algeria's foremost specialists on the Numidians, those key allies of Rome whom the Roman historian Livy described as “by far the best horsemen in Africa”.

Professor Doualye Konaté, one of Africa's most eminent academics, spoke to me at length about the 1236 “Manden Charter”, which granted freedom, dignity and equality to every citizen of the Mali empire founded by Sundiata Keita. Professor Nigel Penn, of the University of Cape Town, has written extensively on the first European settlers in what would become South Africa, and on how they treated the Khoi and San peoples on their arrival. He works to debunk the myth of the “empty land” these Europeans supposedly arrived on.

These are just a few of the many academics I met. I've tried to faithfully convey some of their views, their research and their conclusions.

Victoria Brittain: As a woman of Sudanese origin, what did you learn about your country of birth?

The period of ancient Sudanese history I focused on is the 8^th century BC, when Sudan was not just a great African civilisation, but a superpower — one that protected the princes of Byblos and Tyre, in modern-day Lebanon, and King Hezekiah of Judah, and that fought the formidable Assyrian army.

Dr Shadia Taha, a Sudanese archaeologist, taught me a great deal, particularly about the history of ancient northern Sudan. The Egyptologists and archaeologists who went to work in Sudan long regarded ancient Sudan as a colony, or a mere offshoot of Egyptian culture — one that supposedly did nothing more than imitate Egypt and passively absorb its knowledge. Dr Taha's research has shown that, in reality, the two civilisations influenced each other, and that ancient northern Sudan had been, in its earliest form, an advanced civilisation that predated ancient Greece and Rome — yet one that has never received the recognition it deserves.

Victoria Brittain: East Africa was profoundly shaped by the arrival of the Arabs, whether through the slave trade eastward, the fusion of African and Arab cultures, or the spread of Islam…

Zeinab Badawi: The Arabs made contact with Africans as early as the 7^th century — centuries before the Europeans. They brought their religion, Islam, with them, of course. They helped spread literacy, since many African Muslims learned to read the Quran and even wrote in Arabic. Arabs sometimes settled and forged marriage alliances with local populations, as in East Africa. By 711, the Arabs had all but completed the conquest of North Africa. The history of Africa is therefore inextricably bound up with the Arabs, their language and Islam.

The grim aspect of this is that 14 million Africans were deported by Arabs and their partners between the 7^th and 19^th centuries to Arab lands, as well as to the Persian Gulf and India. That substantial estimate covers every route — across the Sahara to North Africa and the Arab families living there, as well as across the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The great majority, close to 10 million, were transported via the Indian Ocean.

Victoria Brittain: Is the subject of the Indian Ocean slave trade taboo, and why?

By the 9^th century, most of East Africa's coastal towns were predominantly populated by Swahili people, whose culture combined African, Arab and, to a lesser extent, Indian elements. Many Swahili had converted to Islam and proved willing partners for the Arabs in the acquisition of enslaved Africans. There is deep reluctance to address this trade, both in the Arab world and in East Africa itself — the understandable discomfort of Muslim Swahili communities over their ancestors' involvement in this trade makes any open discussion of the subject particularly uncomfortable.

According to Professor Felix Chami, a Tanzanian historian, the merging of African and Arab cultures and the adoption of Islam created “a major problem in the history of coastal East Africa”. He argues — and many African academics share this view — that the Swahili's proximity to the Arabs made it easier for some of them to acquire non-Swahili African captives for enslavement.

In the Arab world, the only exhibition devoted to this subject is in Qatar, in a museum that opened in 2015, built on the site of a former slave trader's house. And there is no debate there over reparations of the kind we're familiar with regarding the transatlantic slave trade¹.

Victoria Brittain: Can Arab slavery and transatlantic slavery really be compared?

Slavery remains slavery, but there are major differences. Transatlantic slavery was built on the ownership of people and favoured men for plantation labour. Arabs, on the whole, preferred enslaved women, destined to become concubines or domestic servants. Another key difference: if an Arab man fathered a child with an enslaved African woman, that child was born free and could even rise to high social standing. What's more, enslaved African men in the Arab world could serve as soldiers, scribes, musicians and so on; they were not confined to hard labour alone.

That said, one particularly cruel aspect of their enslavement by Arabs is that many were castrated to serve as eunuchs, tasked with guarding women within households. In the transatlantic trade, if a white man fathered a child with an enslaved African woman, that child, too, was born into bondage.

Victoria Brittain: What did you discover, over the course of your travels, about attitudes towards restitution and reparations?

Zeinab Badawi: I think the more objects are returned, the more momentum can be sustained. The great majority of African academics I spoke to want to see their artworks restituted. I've visited many museums across the continent and found that they display very little of real significance: the centrepieces are often mere replicas of the originals, which remain held in Western museums or collections.

Victoria Brittain: The subject of reparations sparks fierce debate…

A unified position among people of African descent would make things easier. The plan put forward by the Caribbean Community (Caricom) strikes me as sound². Taken up by the African Union, it essentially defines reparations as development aid. And at a time when development aid is being scaled back, that would be one good way of making up the shortfall.

Victoria Brittain: A strong thread runs through your account: that of the heroic women of African history, from the collective political suicide of the rebel women of the village of Walo, to powerful queens such as Queen Idia of Benin, Queen Njinga, who resisted the Portuguese and their slave trade in the kingdom of Ndongo (present-day Angola), and Yaa Asantewaa of Ghana, exiled to the Seychelles, where she died. How present are they in the imagination of the new generation?

Zeinab Badawi: Many people underestimate the role women played in shaping the continent's past. There are plenty more examples beyond the ones you've mentioned, and really, any one of them could be chosen to illustrate their strength and significance. How present are they in the imagination of the new generation? Let me give you a striking example: the queen mothers of the ancient kingdom of Kush, in northern Sudan, who wielded enormous power. Some of them led their armies into battle. They could act as co-regents alongside their sons or husbands. They were known as Kandakas.

And in April 2019, when Sudan's young people rose up against President Bashir's dictatorship, women were very much at the forefront of the movement. They called themselves Kandakas. They drew on Sudan's distant past to assert themselves on today's social and political stage. Similarly, Yaa Asantewaa has become a national symbol in Ghana. She appears on coins, banknotes and stamps, and a girls' school was even named in her honour when Ghana won independence in 1957 under President Kwame Nkrumah, who turned her into a genuine national icon.

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Zeinab Badawi, An African History of Africa, Éditions du Faubourg, 18 September 2026, €24.90 (French edition).

¹The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a panel of independent United Nations experts, found in a report submitted on 1 September that “States parties must implement comprehensive reparation measures for people of African descent, covering all aspects of reparations.”

²See in particular « Les Caraïbes plaident pour une justice réparatrice », Unesco, 21 June 2024.

In South Sudan, the drums of war return

Fabrizio Floris — 2026-09-09T04:00:00Z

National elections are due to be held for the first time in December. But the warning signs of a return to civil war keep piling up: arms shipments, rising clashes and a mounting death toll… On the ground, there is little doubt left about where this is heading.

“War is coming, and it will happen. It's only a matter of time. More and more weapons are starting to circulate. We don't know when, but it will come, unless something happens to stop it,” says an Italian aid volunteer based in South Sudan, who asked to remain anonymous. She is neither a military analyst nor a diplomat. She is simply describing what she sees and the rumours she picks up around her. In a country that has known decades of war, people have learned to recognise its approach long before it is ever declared.

Her warning is not an isolated one. In its July 2026 report¹, the United Nations secretary-general describes a political transition that remains stalled, alongside fighting that continues to rage in Greater Upper Nile, Jonglei, Unity and the Equatorias. Air strikes, ground offensives and attacks on civilians are no longer warning signs — in several regions, the war has already resumed. The question now is whether these local fronts will eventually merge back into a nationwide civil war.

The conflict pits against each other the two main wings of the former liberation movement. On one side stand President Salva Kiir, the ruling Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), and the South Sudan People's Defence Forces (SSPDF). On the other, Riek Machar's SPLM-IO and its armed wing, the SPLA-IO, now weakened and fragmented. Around these two poles orbit various community militias and former rebel groups whose integration into the army is often more nominal than real. The Agwelek, loyal to General Johnson Olony, are today fighting alongside the government ; the White Army, made up mainly of armed young Nuer men, backs the opposition intermittently, without forming a regular unit under its effective control.

The unfinished business of the 2018 agreement

Kiir is Dinka and Machar is Nuer, and their respective camps have often mobilised ethnic loyalties. But reducing the war to a conflict between two communities would be misleading. It is also a struggle for control of the state, the army, oil revenues — which make up the bulk of the country's income — and local administrations. Alliances shift, commanders switch sides, and land or pastoral disputes get folded into the wider national confrontation. The mere assumption that a village belongs to one side or the other can be enough to make it a target.

The “revitalised” agreement of September 2018² had brought an end to the deadliest phase of the war that began in 2013 — which killed close to 400 000 people and displaced 4 million between 2013 and 2018 — two years after the referendum that had sealed independence for this former region of Sudan. It provided for a unity government, Machar's return to the vice-presidency, a new constitution, elections, and, crucially, the merging of rival forces into a single national army. The unity government was indeed formed in 2020, but the most decisive provisions — constitutional reform, cantonment, and the training and deployment of unified forces — were never completed. Each side kept its own men, its own weapons, and its own chain of loyalty.

The breaking point came after fighting in Nasir, in Upper Nile, in early March 2025. The government blamed Machar and several SPLM-IO officials for a White Army attack on a government garrison. General Majur Dak and a number of soldiers were killed as they were being evacuated by a UN helicopter. Placed under house arrest in March 2025, Machar was subsequently prosecuted, among other things for treason and crimes against humanity. The secretary-general's November 2025 report³ had already noted that his trial, along with the removal of opposition officials, had upended the power-sharing arrangement. The SPLM-IO disputes the charges and denounces what it calls an attempt at political elimination. The detention of its leader has accelerated defections — and pushed the military option firmly back to the centre of the game.

A sharp rise in the number of victims

This is not, then, a battle between two stable armies facing off along a front line. The government is trying to retake areas held or influenced by the SPLA-IO and its allies ; local commanders are defending their own turf, negotiating their allegiance, or switching sides ; ordinary people are caught between military operations, reprisals and community mobilisation. It is this fragmentation that allows a local confrontation to spread without any single actor ever formally declaring a new civil war.

The first quarter of 2026 gives a sense of the scale of the escalation. In its quarterly report on violence affecting civilians⁴, the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) recorded 1 388 civilian casualties: 767 killed, 457 wounded, 93 abducted and 71 victims of conflict-related sexual violence. Compared with the previous three months, the overall number of casualties rose by 67 %, and the number of people killed by 89 %. These figures remain incomplete in a territory where access for observers and aid workers is frequently obstructed.

A communication sent to the government in April 2026 by UN experts⁵ sets out the geography of this violence in detail. Between January and February, more than 263 000 people are believed to have been displaced across Jonglei, Lakes and Upper Nile. At least sixteen health facilities are believed to have been looted or partly destroyed in Jonglei. The document also records the destruction or contamination of water points, the burning of homes and churches, and orders given to civilians and aid organisations alike to evacuate several counties ahead of military operations. It cites an authenticated recording of a senior military officer instructing his men to “leave no one alive” and to destroy homes, livestock and civilian property.

Weapons still flowing in despite the embargo

Alongside the violence, weapons are piling up. The final report of the Security Council's Panel of Experts, dated 4 May 2026⁶, documents a significant transfer of weapons, ammunition and new military equipment to the SSPDF in 2025. Rifles seized from government soldiers in Upper Nile bore manufacturing marks from 2024, suggesting they entered the country in 2025 in breach of the arms embargo. The Security Council has since renewed that embargo until 31 May 2027.

A further supply of weaponry has arrived from neighbouring Sudan. After the Rapid Support Forces seized Sudan's Heglig oil zone in December 2025, Sudanese army soldiers crossed the border bringing rifles, machine guns, mortars, artillery, T-72 tanks and armoured vehicles. Officially placed under SSPDF guard, this equipment is believed to have subsequently been used in operations in Jonglei and Upper Nile.

The contrast is stark: brand-new weapons are entering the country even as many soldiers go months without pay or food. The regular army has, as a result, become more dependent on allied formations such as the Agwelek, who keep their own commanders and their own loyalties while nominally fighting under SSPDF authority. One officer summed up the logic to UN experts: “Sometimes you have to make war in order to make peace.” In this system, pay, looting and the protection of one's own group have become the real tools of recruitment.

War is also undermining the country's main economic asset. South Sudan depends almost entirely on oil, exported through pipelines that run across Sudanese territory. Fighting, damage to infrastructure and disruptions to production are eating into state revenue. Meanwhile, a share of that revenue continues to disappear into opaque channels linked to political and military figures. The economic crisis is not simply starving the state of resources — it is fuelling armed recruitment, looting and the diversion of humanitarian aid.

Elections on the calendar, but far from certain

The conflict also has a regional dimension. At Juba's request, Uganda has deployed troops to South Sudan in support of the government, including air support, as government forces stepped up bombing raids against areas associated with the opposition. Kampala had already played this role at the outset of the 2013 civil war. Its return reduces the risk of an immediate collapse of the government, but it also internationalises the confrontation and reinforces the opposition's conviction that the balance envisaged by the peace agreement has vanished.

After repeated postponements, the country's first national elections since independence have been set for 22 December 2026. But the vote itself risks becoming a new flashpoint. In an interview given on 23 July to ACI Africa, the Bishop of Tombura-Yambio, Edward Hiiboro Kussala, notes that civic education, voter registration and the training of election observers have barely begun. More importantly, several political figures still command their own armed groups. “How can you go to the polls with a rifle on your shoulder?” he asks. A defeat at the ballot box could then be read not as a peaceful transfer of power, but as an existential threat to an entire political and military network.

The African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD, the regional body bringing together countries from East Africa and the Horn of Africa) are calling for an end to hostilities and a return to dialogue, though so far without the means to enforce either⁷. The Church, for its part, is trying to keep less visible channels open. Hiiboro explains that religious leaders meet separately with rival camps in an effort to bring them closer together. He says he has also travelled into the bush on numerous occasions to persuade young rebels to lay down their arms.

These efforts are limited, but they are a reminder that the escalation can still be halted, and that it remains, in the end, the product of political choices. Yet every postponement of a negotiated settlement gives weapons more time to accumulate, and local wars more room to merge. “It will come, unless something happens to stop it” — the people of South Sudan need no one to tell them that conflict is close at hand. They can already hear it coming.

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This article was translated from French into English using AI and proofread by a human journalist.

¹«La situation au Soudan du Sud», rapport du Secrétaire général, 31 juillet 2026, PDF available here.

²«Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS)», 12 septembre 2018, PDF available here.

³«Rapport d'activité du Groupe d'experts sur le Soudan du Sud présenté en application de la résolution 2781 (2025)», Lettre datée du 25 novembre 2025, adressée au président du Conseil de sécurité par le Groupe d'experts sur le Soudan du Sud créé en application de la résolution 2206 (2015) du Conseil de sécurité, PDF available here.

⁴«Brief on Violence Affecting Civilians», Human Rights Division, United Nations Mission in South Sudan, janvier-mars 2026, PDF available here.

⁵April, 1^st, 2026, available here.

⁶«Letter dated 21 April 2026 from the Panel of Experts on South Sudan established pursuant to Security Council resolution 2206 (2015) addressed to the President of the Security Council», 4 mai 2026 PDF available here.

⁷«The Chairperson of the African Union Commission Calls for De-escalation and Respect for the Revitalized Peace Agreement in South Sudan», Union africaine, 27 janvier 2026, available here, et «Report of the Executive Secretary of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) to the 43^rd Extraordinary Summit of IGAD Heads of State and Government on the Situation in the Republic of South Sudan», Igad, available here.

Gabon. France's stance ten years ago is under scrutiny

Caroline Chauvet Abalo, Michael Pauron — 2026-09-05T10:05:19Z

On 31 August 2016, protests against Ali Bongo's re-election were brutally suppressed. At the time, the French government considered this to be an internal matter and felt that it should not intervene. However, given the lack of any legal proceedings against those who instigated the violence, the presence of French nationals within the ranks of the Republican Guard – a force that took part in the crackdown – and suspicions that the French Foreign Ministry (Quai d'Orsay) obstructed justice, Paris has kept its true position shrouded in ambiguity.

Gildas Ngomba still carries a deep bitterness over the events of 31 August 2016 in Libreville: that year, he says, France “decided to play it quiet, to watch, to let things happen… despite the people out on the streets.” Ten years on, Gabon was living through one of the darkest episodes in its history, and France's conduct at the time, under the socialist president François Hollande, still raises questions today.

That day, the results of the 27 August presidential election, announced by the interior ministry, gave victory to the incumbent, Ali Bongo, with 49.80 % of the vote against 48.23 % for his main rival, Jean Ping. The wafer-thin margin was disputed by the opposition, which mobilised its supporters. The Bongo regime wobbled, and unleashed a fierce crackdown to cling to power.

Large numbers of protesters fell back on Jean Ping's campaign headquarters. The five-storey building stood by the seafront, close to the French military base where between 300 and 400 troops were stationed. Several prominent figures — the politicians Zacharie Myboto, Bertrand Zibi and René Ndemezo Obiang among them — were inside the building, though Ping himself had already left. The first wounded were being treated there. In the middle of the night, security forces broke down the doors. Ping's supporters soon heard the “thwack-thwack” of helicopter blades and were blinded by its searchlight. Point-blank gunfire shattered windows, tore through walls and left many casualties. “When I saw people starting to fall, I couldn't believe it. Killing people inside a private compound because they'd voted the wrong way… it was unbelievable. We never imagined anything like that,” recalls Blanche Simonny-Abegue, who was then part of Ping's communications team and now coordinates the Gabonese branch of the Tournons la Page coalition.

In the early hours of 1 September, the attackers — identified as belonging to the Republican Guard (GR) — cleared out. After sunrise, gendarmes loaded survivors onto trucks. Dozens of people were taken into custody. Several of them, including some interviewed by Afrique XXI, say they were subjected to unlawful detention and torture — a claim corroborated by Emmanuel Altit, one of the victims' lawyers. Civil society groups put the death toll at at least thirty. The names of these “martyrs” resurface every year at the 31 August commemorations, even printed on participants' T-shirts.

A long-standing ally to the Bongos

Ever since Omar Bongo took power in 1967, France has kept close ties with the Bongo family, which became a pillar of the “Françafrique” network. In 2008, President Nicolas Sarkozy travelled to Gabon for the patriarch's funeral — a potent symbol as his son Ali prepared to take the reins.

By 2016, when the election was held, the socialist François Hollande had been in power for more than four years, and Paris's stance looked more ambiguous. It made several statements casting doubt on the credibility of the vote, yet ultimately came to terms with Ali Bongo's disputed victory and said nothing about the crackdown that followed.

On 1 September, at the Ambassadors' Conference in Paris, the day after the assault on Ping's headquarters, foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters that “doubt has set in” over the vote's credibility¹. On 28 August 2016, the Socialist Party had already declared²: “For more than half a century, the Bongo family has governed Gabon. A change of power would be a sign of good faith, and an example to follow.” During the protests, the French embassy helped people who were in danger, offering protection or assistance in leaving the country, several witnesses recall, among them MP Jean Gaspard Ntoutoume Ayi.

Ntoutoume Ayi, an opponent of Ali Bongo in 2016, recalls that “France considered it a Gabon-on-Gabon crisis and left it to the European Union to act.” That was the line taken by Jean-Marc Ayrault too. Also on 1 September, he insisted that “this is an internal Gabonese matter,” ruling out any French intervention.

François Hollande's “schizophrenic” stance

On 24 September 2016, the Constitutional Court upheld Ali Bongo's re-election, adjusting the figures slightly to 50.66 % against 47.24 %. Paris ultimately accepted these disputed results — even though European observers had themselves denounced a lack of transparency and “irregularities”³ — and imposed no sanctions over the 31 August massacre. Its position did not shift even under pressure from the European Parliament, which a year later — Emmanuel Macron having just succeeded Hollande — called on France to “bring the whole of its political and economic weight to bear on the Gabonese government […] given its strong historical ties with Gabon”⁴. This inconsistency was noted by the researcher Matthieu Fau-Nougaret, who, questioned in 2017 by the channel Public Sénat⁵ about Hollande's Africa policy, judged that his presidency had been marked by a “schizophrenic” positioning.

Afrique XXI was unable to reach the former ambassador, Dominique Renaux, but diplomats recall a period that was distinctly “intense.” The embassy's first counsellor, Hugues Nordi, was even threatened with death in a satirical newspaper, which accused him of plotting a coup with Jean Ping⁶. A senior foreign ministry official maintains that “at the Quai d'Orsay, the leaning was rather towards a transparent count, which could have put Jean Ping in power.” That reading seems to be borne out by Ayrault's 1 September statement, in which he also called for “election results to be released polling station by polling station,” insisting that “the results of this vote must be perfectly clear and transparent.”

But the same official also says he understood that “the intelligence services wanted the status quo — in other words, Ali Bongo.” That, de facto, was the line the Élysée ultimately took. In an interview with Le Monde in November 2016⁷, Jean Ping accused Paris of nothing less than “torpedoing Europe's position on the election results.”

One thing is certain: as the assault on the opposition leader's headquarters unfolded before the eyes of French troops, France did not so much as flinch.

“Paris could not have been unaware of the preparations”

Jean-Yves Le Drian — the man behind French military operations in the Sahel (Serval in 2013, later folded into Barkhane, which ran until 2022) — was defence minister at the time. In 2013 he had relied on Ali Bongo⁸ and on the French Forces in Gabon (EFG) to intervene in the Central African Republic after the fall of François Bozizé. Later, in 2019, after the Gabonese president suffered a stroke, Le Drian defended the regime before the French National Assembly⁹, even as the opposition — increasingly backed by public opinion turning against the Bongo clan — argued he was no longer fit to govern and demanded early elections. Under Hollande's presidency, Le Drian had grown so central to French policy on Africa that, as one diplomat told Libération
in 2015, “for many African heads of state, whoever sees Le Drian sees Hollande.”

The victims of 31 August 2016 today blame France for this hands-off approach. For Emmanuel Altit, the lawyer who in December 2016 filed a complaint before the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor on behalf of Jean Ping, Gabonese civil society figures and victims of the crackdown, “the French authorities could not have been unaware of the preparations for, and the attack on, Jean Ping's headquarters […]. Gabonese citizens could not escape the French surveillance apparatus.” In other words: could French intervention have prevented a massacre? The ICC proceedings, for their part, never led to a formal investigation.

Several witnesses further allege that French nationals were directly or indirectly involved in the attack on the opposition leader's headquarters. Speaking to Afrique XXI, they say the helicopter pilot was a “white” man — which, in itself, says nothing about nationality. But Republican Guard aircraft were indeed sometimes flown by former French officers working for Gabon, according to various sources — GR members, technicians — interviewed at the time. Others (sometimes the same people who saw the pilot) say they recognised French accents among the troops who carried out the assault. “I live and work alongside French people, I know the difference between accents very well, and during the attack on the headquarters I clearly heard people from France,” testifies Blanche Simonny-Abegue. “At one point I heard them say: 'We've come to secure you…'”

Former French soldiers serving the Republican Guard

Between 2016 and 2018, victims filed complaints in France. Afrique XXI has seen some of these, which name several French nationals (all presumed innocent): “Alain Grandjean,” described in the documents as the number two of Gabonese intelligence, who commanded Republican Guard units and was on board the helicopter during the assault; “Stéphane Chiron,” identified as an adviser at Gabon's defence ministry who allegedly co-ran the crisis command post and attended some interrogations; “Georgie Christine,” a member of the presidential security detail accused of overseeing the commando that attacked Ping's headquarters; “Jacques Tropin” and “Franck Couedel.” The status of these French soldiers or ex-soldiers remains unclear. Online research shows that Christine, Tropin and Grandjean served the Gabonese state within the Republican Guard after leaving the Foreign Legion or the regular army¹⁰. The status of a certain “Franck Couedel,” and whether he was in Libreville at the time, could not be verified. The complaint also names Frédéric Bongo. Ali Bongo's half-brother, who holds dual French-Gabonese nationality, was then head of the special services, the presidency's powerful intelligence arm.

In a letter sent to François Hollande¹¹ at the end of 2016, members of the Gabonese diaspora asked the French president to open an inquiry into the responsibility of two officers, including Stéphane Chiron. Asked about the status of these soldiers at the time, the armed forces ministry said it was not its place to comment “on personnel who are, or may have been, under contract with the Gabonese Republican Guard.”

In 2017, a judicial investigation was opened, and by June the investigating judge had settled on the charge of “crime against humanity.” The inquiry — covering allegations of “false imprisonment and arbitrary detention committed as part of an organised group, torture and acts of barbarity committed as part of an organised group, attempted murder, and crimes against humanity committed in Gabon during the 2016 post-election crisis” — was handed to the Central Office for the Fight against Crimes against Humanity and Hate Crimes (OCLCH).

In July 2020, the OCLCH asked the Quai d'Orsay for all its documents relating to Gabon's post-election crisis, including its correspondence with the French embassy. But of the 315 documents available, only 35 were handed over to the OCLCH, according to reporting by Marianne in March 2026¹². In 2024, a senior Quai d'Orsay official denounced this obstruction and reported it to prosecutors. Speaking to Afrique XXI, he explains he did so over what he calls “a refusal to hand over documents,” under Article 40 of the French Code of Criminal Procedure, which requires any official aware of a crime to report it to the public prosecutor.

Oligui Nguema in no hurry to deliver justice

Internal documents implicate Christophe Bigot, the Quai d'Orsay's Africa director, and Nicolas Roche, then chief of staff to minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, in deciding which documents were passed on to investigators. In an email seen by Afrique XXI, Bigot instructed his team that only documents concerning French victims should be handed over — an “interpretation,” the whistleblowing official says, denouncing it in his report to prosecutors alongside what he calls internal “pressure” “to limit the scope of the documents to be transmitted.” The Quai d'Orsay eventually sent a second batch of documents — 81 this time.

Christophe Bigot told Afrique XXI that “all of this was done by the book.” In his view, “it falls to the foreign ministry to search through all available documents for those that answer the justice system's requests,” adding that “the selection is made on the basis of all the opinions gathered, and after deliberation, in line with the procedures in force.”

The foreign ministry, for its part, said it “does not comment on an ongoing judicial investigation [the OCLCH inquiry is still under way, ed.] and cooperates fully with the judicial authorities, providing all information required and responding to formal requests, as it is bound to do.”

In Gabon, some are still fighting to see the dead of 2016 honoured, and to move past their own trauma. Aïcha Tsoumbou, who founded the Association Réconciliation, is one of them. But this former nurse, who was at Ping's headquarters on 31 August 2016, is regularly threatened and has been detained by police on several occasions¹³. Gabon's new authorities, in power since the August 2023 coup, evidently have little appetite for reopening the case: the current president, Brice Oligui Nguema, comes from the Republican Guard himself — the very body that bore heavy responsibility for the massacre.

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This article was translated from French into English using AI and proofread by a human journalist.

¹«Gabon. La France demande des résultats bureau par bureau», Reuters, 1er septembre 2016, as carried by Impact SN.

²«Élection présidentielle au Gabon : le Parti socialiste espère que la démocratie l'emportera», Parti socialiste, 28 août 2016, available here.

³Action extérieure de l'Union européenne, «La Mission a présenté sa Déclaration préliminaire à Libreville», 30 août 2016.

⁴«Résolution du Parlement européen du 14 septembre 2017 sur la répression de l'opposition au Gabon (2017/2830(RSP))», 14 septembre 2017, available here.

⁵Marie Wolfrom, «Hollande et l'Afrique: des guerres et la fin d'une certaine Françafrique», Public Sénat, 12 janvier 2017.

⁶Africa Intelligence, «Hugues Nordi en crise – diplomatique – avec Libreville», 2 janvier 2016.

⁷Christophe Châtelot, «Jean Ping : “Les Français ont torpillé la position de l'Europe sur les résultats de l'élection”», Le Monde, 9 novembre 2016.

⁸«Gabon: Jean-Yves Le Drian évoque la Centrafrique avec Ali Bongo», AFP, 22 novembre 2013.

⁹According to the websites Mondafrique and Africa Radio, the minister's remarks were tidied up in the official transcript. According to them, Jean-Yves Le Drian actually said: “So President Bongo suffered a stroke, he is recovering in Morocco, and we can hope he will be able to resume his normal activities. He was elected, the National Assembly was elected, there is a government, the institutions are functioning — that is the reality.” The video has since been removed from the National Assembly's website. The official transcript (available here) was somewhat softened: “We note that the institutions are functioning, in keeping with the Constitution, and that is what matters. The Government governs, the new National Assembly resulting from the legislative elections has been installed.”

¹⁰Their profiles can be found here, here and here.

¹¹Griffin Ondo Nzuey, «Violences postélectorales : deux officiers français mis en cause par le Diagau», Gabon Review, 25 décembre 2016.

¹²Maël Jouan, «Le Quai d'Orsay a entravé une enquête pour crimes contre l'humanité au Gabon», Marianne, 05 mars 2026.

¹³Jocksy Andrew Ondo-Louemba, «Gabon, une militante des droits de l'homme battue par les militaires», Mondafrique, September 2024.

Back to the Future in Madagascar

Marine Jeannin — 2026-08-28T04:00:00Z

Since the coup d'état in October 2025, Russian mercenaries have been providing close protection for Colonel Michaël Randrianirina. This marked a strong comeback orchestrated by Moscow from as early as 2018, driven by a combination of nostalgia for the Soviet era, economic and geostrategic interests, and France's withdrawal.

It is not every day that a sitting head of state simply vanishes.

That is what happened on 11 October 2025 to President Andry Rajoelina, who was evacuated by France after three weeks of protests led by the urban youth of Antananarivo, gathered under the Gen Z banner. The Malagasy army eventually sided with the protesters, under the impetus of Capsat, the elite unit commanded by Colonel Michaël Randrianirina — the same unit that had brought Andry Rajoelina to power in 2009.

Taking advantage of the uncertainty that followed the ousted president's disappearance, Michaël Randrianirina seized power. French diplomats saw him as a novice vulnerable to foreign influence, while several observers pointed out, on the contrary, that he was a strategist well versed in military, ethnic and religious dynamics.

Very quickly, the new president surrounded himself with a praetorian guard of Russian mercenaries. Since then, the authorities have frequently announced alleged coup attempts. “The Russians are the guarantors of his physical security,” says researcher Olivier Vallée, a leading expert on the country. “But his real political risks remain in the streets, with Gen Z and those known as the ‘4 Mi' — people without family, without money, without a home and without work.” Within weeks, Antananarivo had become a regular stop for Russian envoys. Colonel Randrianirina travelled to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin on 19 February 2026, shortly before travelling to Paris.

The Ratsiraka precedent

Antananarivo is no stranger to closer ties with Moscow. The Big Island first moved into the Soviet orbit in 1975, when naval lieutenant commander Didier Ratsiraka came to power following the assassination — still unresolved to this day — of his predecessor, Colonel Richard Ratsimandrava. Ratsiraka espoused “scientific socialism”, nationalised the subsidiaries of Western companies and expelled the French from their military base in the north, which was immediately taken over by the Russians without ever becoming operational. Hundreds of young Malagasy went to study in the USSR and Czechoslovakia, forming a Russian-speaking and Russophile elite. Its influence still runs discreetly through today's networks, fuelling nostalgia among part of the population for that relationship of the past.

The interlude came to an end in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR. For nearly thirty years, the Russian embassy in Antananarivo operated at a low level, on the remnants of that former friendship.

Russia's real return did not begin with the 2025 coup, but with the 2018 presidential election. That year, Russian tycoon Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner paramilitary group, acquired a majority stake in Ferrum Mining, a shell company registered in St Petersburg a few months earlier which was preparing to become a partner of the Malagasy state-owned company Kraoma in the extraction of chrome — a fiasco that ended with Ferrum Mining pulling out of the operation, leaving behind unpaid wages and substantial debts. That same year, Wagner deployed a team of political advisers to the island to protect the investment. Thirty Russian agents openly carried out disinformation and intimidation campaigns against rival candidates, using bundles of cash, and even financed the leader of an apocalyptic sect in an effort to divide the opposition vote.

But their initial candidate, incumbent President Hery Rajaonarimampianina, lost ground during the campaign. The Russians then switched their support to his rival, Andry Rajoelina, who won and, once elected, enabled Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner's chief, to retain his stake in the chrome business. The operation was documented by French-Malagasy journalist Gaëlle Borgia in an investigation co-written with Michael Schwirtz for The New York Times, which earned the US newspaper the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2020.¹ The Russians also forged lasting ties at this time with a man who was already a member of parliament, Siteny Randrianasoloniaiko.

Judo passion

Seven years later, Siteny Randrianasoloniaiko has become the linchpin of Russian influence in Madagascar. Now president of the National Assembly and self-appointed protector of the new regime, the man Malagasy people call “Behozatse” (“the muscular one”) has instrumentalised the networks he built at the head of the African Judo Federation, a sport of which Vladimir Putin is himself a keen practitioner and long-standing supporter, to maintain a direct diplomatic channel with the Kremlin.

He is not Moscow's only gateway into the state apparatus: several business figures who financed Andry Rajoelina's rise are now working with Michaël Randrianirina, including a French businessman of Indian origin Shemir Sokataly, who is based in Mozambique. Even closer to the centre of power is Briand Andrianirina, the president's elder brother and owner of the RealTV network, who is married to presidential chief of staff Onitiana Realy. Their nephew, Koufaly Daya, identified as one of the financiers of the October 2025 coup, has gained increasing political visibility through this proximity, amid suspicions of gold trafficking and a public stance as an anti-corruption whistleblower.

But it is above all the new Malagasy ambassador to Moscow, appointed in early May 2026, who embodies this rapprochement: Ny Hasina Andriamanjato is the son of the founder of the Antoko'ny Kongresi'ny Fahaleovantenan'i Madagasikara (AKFM, Party of the Congress for the Independence of Madagascar), a communist party that played an important role in the struggle for independence and became known as a pro-Soviet movement.² The post had been vacant since 2018. In a twist of irony, Moscow even invited members of the Independent National Electoral Commission (Ceni) to the Russian school of democracy, Africa Intelligence revealed.³ In May, a delegation of six Ceni officials travelled to Russia for training organised by their Russian counterparts.

From mercenaries to businessmen

“Madagascar fits the Russians' usual targets,” researcher Thierry Vircoulon sums up: “weak governance, a non-democratic regime, a desire to free itself from the former colonial power's grip, and tempting natural resources.” On the ground, the Russian presence has followed the Kremlin's familiar trajectory in Africa. After the first wave of military personnel began to deploy, a second, more diffuse wave emerged, made up of entrepreneurs and communications specialists who came “with wives and children to carve out a share of the Malagasy cake,” according to a Malagasy diplomat.

In the mining sector, two names repeatedly come up: Vadim Druzhinin and Evgeny Plekhanov, who head a network of companies affiliated with the “Alpha” brand.

Registered in Antananarivo, Mahajanga and Toliara, these companies are vying to build and operate the country's first gold refinery, a flagship project championed by Mines Minister Carl Andriamparany. Plekhanov was also sentenced in absentia in 2016 by a commercial court in Antananarivo to twelve months in prison for misappropriation of property and failure to comply with a court ruling — a characterisation he disputes, saying he has never been convicted of fraud.

The appetite for Madagascar's mineral wealth may not stop at gold and chrome, since the country is a historic producer of graphite, a critical mineral that has become strategically important with the rise of electric batteries, as well as gemstones and rare earths.

Another, more discreet signal comes from American-Belarusian businessman Alexander Zingman, a familiar figure in Russian networks in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe, who has been trying since late 2025 to establish the alternative financial system A7 in Madagascar, backed by the Russian bank Promsvyazbank and its A7A5 cryptocurrency, pegged to the rouble. Representatives of Russia's Alabuga industrial complex in Tatarstan, where Shahed drones used in the war against Ukraine are assembled, have also travelled to Madagascar to sign cooperation agreements, according to expert David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, cited by Voice of America.⁴ The “Alabuga Start” programme, which mainly targets young African women with misleading promises of employment, is the subject of an Interpol investigation. No case of a Malagasy person being recruited has so far been documented.

A channel under surveillance

At least as much as its mineral resources, it is Madagascar's position on the maritime routes of the western Indian Ocean that is whetting Moscow's appetite. In December 2025, a Russian delegation of around forty people, led by Ambassador Andrey Andreev, had already met with the president in an episode dubbed the “Russian jet affair”.

At the end of April 2026, another delegation visited the Secren naval shipyard in Diego-Suarez, heir to the former French naval arsenal transferred to the Malagasy authorities in 1973.

Diego-Suarez, at the northern tip of the island, offers the ability to project naval power along the major routes between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Washington has also identified the strategic importance of the site: according to the US think tank Critical Threats Project, three senior State Department officials discussed a US military presence at the same base with Randrianirina in early January 2026, following initial contacts established in Dubai. Russian access to the base was also reportedly discussed.

And what about France?

The former colonial power remains one of the Big Island's main economic partners, behind China, and French companies, or companies run by French nationals, continue to play an important role in the local economy. But French diplomats are walking on eggshells. On 28 April 2026, Antananarivo declared Colonel Pierre Couve, France's interior security attaché at the embassy since 2022, persona non grata and expelled him. He was suspected of communicating via WhatsApp with members of Gen Z as part of an investigation into an attempted assassination of the president and a planned coup. Another Frenchman, former military officer Guy Baret, was also charged in the case. The French embassy denied rumours of a list of ten French nationals allegedly suspected of involvement, describing them as “false”.

Paris replaced outgoing ambassador Arnaud Guillois with a diplomat experienced in Russian influence operations: Jean-Marc Grosgurin, who held the same post in the Central African Republic between 2020 and 2023. The CAR is one of the most advanced laboratories of Wagner's strategy on the continent. French researcher Roland Marchal noted, at the end of Grosgurin's mission, that he had had to “manage France's thousand and one misadventures amid an accumulation of provoked incidents and imaginary conspiracies”.

A limited Moscow fever

In Madagascar, political figures are now openly displaying their allegiance to Russia: former Defence Minister Léon Jean Richard Rakotonirina has launched an openly pro-Russian — and pro-BRICS — party, the Réveil patriotique de Madagascar uni, and chairs the Friends of Russia association, praised by Ambassador Andreev as a key player in bilateral cooperation. But the initial admiration of part of the public for a “providential” Russia is already fading: military parades, operas and ballets are failing to draw crowds, and commemorations of the 1945 victory over Nazism do not resonate with many people on the Big Island.

The Moscow fever has not taken hold of the entire state apparatus either. The Justice Ministry, headed by Fanirisoa Ernaivo, and the Foreign Ministry, entrusted to career diplomat Alice N'Diaye, remain resistant for the time being, several sources say. And if Colonel Randrianirina has turned towards Moscow, it is also, and perhaps above all, by default. After an unsuccessful first contact with the Americans, caught up in the diplomatic reorganisation of the Trump era, and a failed attempt to recruit Moroccan bodyguards, possibly torpedoed by Paris, Russia was the only option available.

Moscow no longer has the same arsenal of attractions in Madagascar that it possessed during the Soviet era. A Russian cultural institute is reportedly being considered. But large-scale scholarship programmes are no longer on the agenda, and Russia cannot compete with China, which continues to host contingents of Malagasy students and officers every year. “No one wants to go and study in Russia today,” says Olivier Vallée. “It lost its prestige after the Brezhnev years.”

If the strategy is working for now, it is above all because the field has been left open: occupied elsewhere or tired of a Malagasy potential that has never really been transformed into lasting profits, the major foreign powers have one after another distanced themselves. All that remained was for someone to move in.

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This article was translated from French into English using AI and proofread by a human journalist.

¹Gaelle Borgia, Michael Schwirtz, “How Russia Meddles Abroad for Profit : Cash, Trolls and a Cult Leader”, The New York Times, 11^th november 2019.

²In the 1980s, however, Richard Andriamanjato and his son left the original AKFM – then led by Gisèle Rabesahala – to found the AKFM-Fanavaozana, distance themselves from Moscow and join the opposition.

³Laure Verneau, ‘Madagascar: Electoral Commission officials undergoing training in Moscow', Africa Intelligence, 22 May 2026.

⁴Matthew Kupfer, Salem Solomon, « Expert : Several African governments unaware of young workers in Russian drone factories », Voice of America, 18 décembre 2024.

DR Congo. The dangers of pushing through a new political order

Erik Kennes — 2026-07-01T09:21:41Z

In this article, the researcher questions Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi's determination to impose a new constitution against the backdrop of the war raging in the east of the country. In the absence of a clear consensus and legitimacy, the researcher fears that this plan could lead to a resurgence of violence.

The current war in East Congo has been going on for four and a half years. It is the sixth or seventh Rwandan aggression of the DRC, whereby each time local grievances in the DRC are manipulated by Kigali to implement its own security and economic agenda. This is as long as the previous and more comprehensive 1998-2002 war, and it has basically the same causes, putting a Rwandan expansionist military strategy against an ineffective management of the state and its army in the DRC. It seems that Mobutu, Joseph Kabila, and Felix Tshisekedi all seem to consider an efficient army as a potential threat to their personal power.

President Tshisekedi maintains consistently an anti-Kagame stance, earning him some popularity all over the country. His failure to make this a reality on the ground however creates doubts about his real intentions or at least about the realism of his strategy. Some observers say that President Tshisekedi takes advantage from the ongoing war to implement his personal political agenda - which unfortunately may throw the country into even deeper instability.

A new constitution in times of war?

Tshisekedi indeed wants to modify or to replace the current constitution, allegedly for technical flaws in the current text, dispositions allowing foreigners to appropriate DRC natural resources, or problems with decentralization of prohibiting efficient governance. None of these arguments currently justify a constitutional overhaul in a situation of war with the Rwanda-supported M23/AFC movement. The real objective is clearly the abolition of the limits to presidential mandates, which would allow the current president to remain indefinitely in power.

The regime in power goes ahead. A law proposal to organize a referendum is currently being approved in the DRC parliament, and it includes a procedure for constitutional modification or replacement starting with the preliminary creation of a consultative commission. This would be followed by the transformation of the current parliament into a constituent assembly which would approve the new constitutional text before submitting it to a referendum.

Legitimacy problems

Obviously, every people has the right to modify the constitutional rules. However, the adoption of a new constitution or substantially new constitutional order requires legitimacy, a broad consensus, and a climate of peace.

The current Parliament, which according to the law on referenda would become a constituent assembly, lacks the necessary legitimacy to engage in a reform as fundamental as the re-writing of the DRC Constitution. The 2023 legislative and presidential elections were indeed widely recognized as fraudulent and marred with many irregularities: the many fake votes falsified the result – which were never published in detail. The composition of the National Assembly reflects internal political arrangements among the political elite rather than the popular vote. The coalition in power is also dominated by members of the President's community of origin and support, reducing its representativeness in a country where balanced representation has always been key to its legitimacy. The many protests from civil society and the political opposition demonstrate that a consensus is lacking. The powerful Catholic Church, in its most recent statement dating from 19 June, reject this project fearing the permanent division of the country – with two different constitutions in government-controlled and M23-controlled areas – and even a civil war. The protestant churches declared the organization of a national and inclusive dialogue a necessary condition to introduce constitutional changes – which is refused by President Tshisekedi.

Instead, a state and party-led propaganda machine is currently trying to force through the reform in public opinion, with the help of imposed academic conferences, infiltrated WhatsApp networks, evangelic preachers turning a legal debate into an act of faith, media control, and repression of dissident opinions. A worrying evolution is the mobilization of violent party militias to intimidate opponents to a change, labeling these “traitors working for Kagame.” Violence is used not only against peaceful demonstrations but also targets the Catholic Church. The national police reportedly even cooperate with these militias.

What is at stake?

The implications of this operation may not be underestimated. The current constitution (art. 219) prohibits any modification in wartime or when there is a state of emergency; we have both at present. This disrespect of the constitution does not seem to be of concern to the authorities. More importantly, its replacement, or the modification of its key elements, implies abolishing the constitutional order introduced in 2006, approved by referendum. It also means terminating the political compromise on which it was founded, without reflecting it: the agreements of Sun City and Pretoria concluded between the parties who waged a four-year war in 1998-2002, and by a broad representation of the unarmed political opposition and civil society.

This provided a large support to the 2006 constitution which was drafted by a group of DRC constitutional experts1. One of its key objectives was to resolve the DRC legitimacy crisis since 1960 and to block any return to a Mobutu-like dictatorship. Its art. 220 thus includes a prohibition to touch on the number and duration of presidential mandates, which were fixed at two terms of five years. It includes a system of checks and balances and provisions to integrate and respect minorities. The 2006 constitution ensured political stability until today, even if it must be admitted that both the Kabila and Tshisekedi regimes hollowed out many of its provisions. In sum: this is not the time for an insufficiently representative regime to impose a new constitution when the country is territorially and politically divided.

“Genuine nationalists” vs. “traitors”

To justify the abolition of the 2006 constitution, the current coalition in power considers the entire 1997-2018 period (regimes of Kabila father and son) as dominated by Kigali and thus illegitimate2. They argue that foreigners wrote the constitution and that Joseph Kabila is either Rwandan or at least subservient to Rwandan national interests. Kabila is suspected of supporting financially and politically the M23/AFC movement and was therefore condemned to death by a military tribunal, without tangible proof. The activities of his political party are prohibited and several of its leading officials were arrested. Criticism of the president is prohibited, and a service of digital surveillance identifies and arrests critics on the social media. An important number of military officers, mostly of Katangese origin and supposedly related to Kabila, have been arrested, causing a de-structuring of the government army. Many opposition leaders are in exile. Opponents to the constitutional change are depicted by UDPS militants as “traitors” and “working for Kigali.”

In contrast, the coalition in power portrays itself as genuine Congolese nationalists who redirect the country to its own roots, beyond any foreign influence. This implies a return to the situation in 1997 when Mobutu was forced to abandon power. In fact, the regime currently includes several references to practices reminiscent of the Mobutu regime.

More importantly, the current regime is heading back to the exclusion of the Tutsi population as existed by the end of the Mobutu regime, preparing the area for a new round of violence. Although the persecution of the Tutsis – cited as justification for the attack on Kigali – is not yet institutionalised or systemic, it represents a future threat implied by the stance of the Tshisekedi regime, which constantly refers to ‘true Congolese'. This is intimately tied to the fundamental division in the DRC between the Lingala-speaking West vs. the Swahili – speaking East: with the succession of Kabila by Tshisekedi, the balance tilted over from the East back to the West.

UDPS is beyond current constitutional order

The plan to introduce a new constitution can partly be explained by the history of the UDPS party. The UDPS was created in 1982 by a group of MPs3 and led by the charismatic Etienne Tshisekedi, father of the current president. Under the Mobutu regime it was the biggest, most representative, and most efficient opposition party against his dictatorial rule- but it failed to overtake power. The regime of Laurent Kabila which had come to power with military means, marginalized the UDPS and, during the 2001-2002 negotiations to end the war as well as during the 2003-2006 transition, the UDPS kept itself outside the negotiation process and missed several opportunities to influence the outcome. The party, because of the struggle it has been waging since 1982 first against Mobutu and then again against Laurent Kabila, always considered itself as legitimately entitled to power beyond any negotiation with other members of the political elite. The party also prided itself on its non-violence and refusal to engage in armed struggle. This means that they do not consider themselves as bound either by the 2002 political compromise nor by the constitutional process. They appealed to the population to vote against the 2006 constitution during the December 2005 referendum.

UDPS is no longer what it was

The ruling coalition also has an internal legitimacy problem. Even if the party claims it is legitimately entitled to power, the President ensured that it has limited impact on his own personal rule. The UDPS is currently led on behalf of the presidential family by a contested secretary general who uses party militia rather than experienced party officials to rule and to impose his views. Many long standing and experienced UDPS officials feel betrayed for their many years in struggle for ideals which are no longer respected and replaced by scandals of corruption and embezzlement. At the same time, the prospect of being able to remain in power may silence dissident voices inside the UDPS while many hope still to benefit from “their” regime.

Tshisekedi seems to be convinced that he can push through his political agenda in wartime thanks to the strong support from the USA which took painful sanctions against Rwanda's government army and leading officers from Rwanda and the M23 for failing to respect the peace agreement undersigned by both the Rwandan and the RDC presidents and imposed by Washington. These sanctions indeed seem to influence a withdrawal of support from Rwanda for the M23.

However, it is not certain that the USA will reap the expected benefits from its unilateral support for Tshisekedi. Its strategic partnership with the RDC includes a maximum of guarantees for the US to secure stable supply lines in CRMs, and the DRC is clearly willing to offer the USA maximum possible entrance into the DRC mining sector. However, the DRC mining sector is still dominated by Chinese interests, and Tshisekedi, in the hypothesis that he recovers East Congo, may easily reveal himself to be a much less trusted partner than expected: his many diplomatic reversals on the international scene are ill-reputed. The US support seems to be founded on a very shallow and short-term understanding of the complexity of the ongoing conflict.

It must be underlined that Tshisekedi does not respect the Washington peace agreement either. He still seems to believe in a military victory over the M23 movement, thanks to the use of drones, foreign mercenaries and the many armed groups which were outlawed before the war but are now officially part of a reserve force of the national FARDC army and known as patriots or wazalendo. The FDLR plays a key role in the government's offensive operations. Even if the government would reintegrate East Congo into the national realm, it will be confronted with a huge problem of generalized instability because of the armed groups it will no longer be able to keep in line, all claiming their due for the patriotic struggle. The government is currently already incapable of managing the many violent armed groups in Ituri and even in the vicinity of Kinshasa with the Mobondo. Imposing a new constitution in a divided country against resistance may easily increase instability rather than containing it. The increasing use of violent party militias may powerfully ignite more conflict and countermobilization which will be difficult to contain in a country where loyalty is most often monetized. It is thus highly likely that the imposition of a new constitution and the monopolization of power by the ruling coalition will lead to more instability and more repression.

IF the DRC president – as seems likely – is unable or currently unwilling to recover the occupied territories, a constitutional referendum will only be held in the parts of the country controlled by Kinshasa. The M23/AFFC will declare its support for the 2006 constitution, and we will be heading for a partition of the DR Congo.

The need for a broad national consensus

Thisekedi does not seem to realize that a new constitutional order can only be introduced if founded on a broad national consensus and minimal stability all over the country. Therefore, the Catholic and Protestant Churches, representing a substantial part of the population, suggest organizing an inclusive national dialogue with all relevant actors to reach a consensus on the way forward for the country. The dialogue would not be a self-interested conference of the political elite but a channel to let the population heard and the fundamental problems which led to the war put on the table, but In August 2025, the presidential staff had reached an agreement on the dialogue but a presidential decision for its organization was never issued. This proposal was also endorsed by the mediator in the conflict appointed by the African Union, the Angolan President Joao Lourenço. Unfortunately, President Tshisekedi chooses to impose his project at the price of diplomatic isolation in the region. He snubbed the initiatives taken by the African Union and regional organizations to solve the conflict despite declarations to the contrary. Tshisekedi in the African context appears thus as unreliable and dependent on US support. At the same time, this relative isolation is parallelled by the loss of support for the militaristic and expansionist president Kagame.

It is time for President Tshisekedi to implement the real ideals of the UDPS party for which many Congolese offered their life, instead of cementing the power of a presidential family and its community. If not, we will probably be heading for new cycles of violence and repetitive struggles for power which prohibit the country from building further on its past achievements.

Ronnie Kasrils. “One cannot overestimate the bravery of the Soweto generation”

Victoria Brittain — 2026-06-16T04:00:00Z

Fifty years ago, hundreds of South Africans were murdered by the apartheid regime during the famous Soweto uprisings. For the former chief of ANC's military intelligence, this event inspired a whole generation of new fighters and led, twenty years later, to the fall of the racist regime in Pretoria.

On June 16 1976 in apartheid South Africa 10,000 schoolchildren walked out of schools in Soweto heading to Orlando Stadium for a rally protesting the new law replacing teaching in English with Afrikaans. The move to “the language of the oppressor,” which neither black students or teachers spoke fluently, if at all, doomed their education's future level.

A brutal police attack in response, with batons, teargas and live ammunition, killed 176 children in Soweto, with uncounted hundreds wounded that day, and ignited months of rebellion across South Africa with hundreds more killed by police. The photograph by Sam Nzima of dying 12 year old Hector Pieterson, carried by distraught Mbuyisa Makhubo and his Hector's sister, Antoinette, running from police, became the symbol of the rebellion seen across the world. June 16 is a public holiday in South Africa, known internationally as The Day of the African Child.

Ronnie Kasrils joined the liberation movement at the age of 21, in response to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre by the police killing 69 people, and he became active in sabotage actions by the ANC underground in Durban. He was a founding member of MK, the ANC's military wing, was trained in the Soviet Union, was in action in Angola, Mozambique and Swaziland from the late 1970s and became Head of Intelligence in 1983.

He was in the ANC's National Executive Committee and the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party. After the overthrow of apartheid he headed three ministries, including Defence and Intelligence. He is the author of several books on the the struggle for South Africa's freedom from apartheid, and has witnessed up close the price paid by so many heroic unknown people.

Victoria Brittain: Let's start with where you were and how you heard about the Soweto massacre of school children. What was your first thought and who did you want to talk to first?

Ronnie Kasrils: I was in London, in a Hampstead pub, debriefing a comrade from South Africa. He was reporting that things were buzzing back home. Unbelievably, the TV news came through about the rebellion, and that the Apartheid police had opened fire, resulting in a score or so of school children killed and injured, in the initial police response. Naturally this elevated our discussion ten-fold. Our initial concern was about the likely level of police response.

Immediately the conversation honed in on the extent of the resistance and likelihood of it spreading. I rushed to discuss with Joe Slovo and Yusuf Dadoo who I served under. They were glued to the BBC World Service which had more thorough updates of that day's events. They were as anxious and elated as I was. I distinctly recall the feeling that a dramatic turning point back home was underway, and that my life was bound to change again.

The ferment affected all Soweto, young and old, students and workers. It spread across the country, drawing in entire communities, particularly in Johannesburg, in Cape Town where many were killed, and many in the Cape among the so-called Coloured or mixed-race youth.

To underline the point that the uprising was not confined to school students, I want to point out that state pathologist reports show that in the two months following the 16 June killings, over 50 per cent of those killed were over 20 years old, and 20 per cent over 30. In that period three protest strikes took place. (Statement of the SACP, April 1977, African Communist, No. 70). The International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) calculated 619 were slaughtered between June 16 to the end of 1976.

Victoria Brittain: Were you then expecting this level of resistance from the school children to the law enforcing teaching only in Afrikaans?

Ronnie Kasrils.

Ronnie Kasrils: When something as dramatic as this happens, one is stunned by the magnitude, but in fact there had been signs of mounting challenges to apartheid rule. We had had reports from our underground structures of mounting resentment by high school students of that new law the previous year enforcing the Afrikaans language in black schools. It was clearly an ideological tool for submission – part of the Bantu Education policy designed to train Africans for inferiority and servitude. The English language was considered too liberal.

Along with other manifestations of protest, the demonstration of June 16 was called by a barely noticed South African Schools Movement (SASM), which had emerged to campaign against the Bantu Education Act. This national organisation had emerged alongside the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) popular among university students. The South African Students Organisation (SASO) too was formed in this environment of growing worker protests, including a militant strike wave in 1973. A radical group of students provided important research for the workers. The increase in strikes reflected the worsening economic conditions of the black population. An economic slump was underway following a boom in the late 1960s, with a rise in inflation particularly affecting black households, linked to the constraints of the apartheid system, a fall in the price of gold, and the rising defence budget.

A key factor was the collapse of Portuguese colonialism in 1974, and the huge significance of the liberation of Mozambique and Angola in 1975. Imagine then the rise in courage and anticipation that liberation was coming to South Africa, and the impact on those suffering oppression. In response, violent repression by the state intensified. The shooting of protesting strikers, and deaths in police custody, heightened the expectations of state violence. In fact, this was an everyday reality and underlines the courage it took to confront the police and the military.

Then came the forced retreat of the South African Defence Force (SADF) from Angola in January 1976, after Cuban forces had come to Angola's assistance, following the Apartheid regime's invasion the previous year, (supported by Washington) to prevent the MPLA coming to power. We all had dramatically heightened expectations that change was coming.

The signs were there that the apartheid system would be challenged by the black workers and masses, and in the liberation movement we always had an optimistic outlook. But to be frank, I can't say that the catalyst for a turning point at the level of high school students could have been forecast. The expectation of state violence was another matter. In a racist, settler colonialism system, such as apartheid, extreme state terror over the indigenous people supported by a fearful settler community, was always the norm, and we certainly were not naïve about that. This is exactly why armed struggle for change had been adopted at the time of the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. Soweto in 1976 demolished the myth that the apartheid security forces were able to destroy the people's fighting spirit.

Victoria Brittain: Looking back now, how do you assess that 1976 moment as a key marker in the long struggle to end apartheid. Where does it rank with, for instance, Kliptown and the Freedom Charter in 1955; Sharpeville in 1960; the Rivonia trial 1963/64; the Morogoro conference in Tanzania and the launch of Revolutionary People's War by MK 1969?

Ronnie Kasrils: You certainly cite key inflexion points that have transformed and shaped South Africa's history, both policy highlights and contextualised events, advances and setbacks, of enormous significance. Each one of these examples ushered in a new period in the national liberation struggle against white domination.

The Freedom Charter, based on grass roots demands and mobilisation, reflected the aspirations of an oppressed people for a non-racist, democratic country and is the root of our democratic Constitution. The Sharpeville massacre marked the parting from non-violent struggle and the turn to armed methods. The Rivonia arrests, trial and imprisonment of the Mandela leadership, aimed to smash the liberation movement, but saw its survival and recovery from exile. The strategy and tactics of the Morogoro Conference began the long process of that recovery, but faced enormous difficulties, particularly being far from the country and the people, and with an organised internal presence that had been crushed.

Hector Pieterson, shot dead, in the arms of Mbuyisa Makhubo, and Hector's sister, Antoinette, all three fleeing the apartheid police on 16 June 1976 in Soweto.

Sam Nzima

It was the Soweto Uprising which spread throughout the country, first as a student rebellion, but soon drawing in the involvement of the broader masses, particularly the working class and trade union movement, minority groups, grass roots communities and faith-based entities, providing the social forces of the People's War that the Morogoro strategy articulated, but failed to implement in the pre-Soweto period.

The immediate aftermath of the Soweto events was a flood of recruits, hundreds and then thousands, of overwhelmingly young people, primarily black African, but including mixed race and those of Indian descent, as well as some white youth, joining uMkhonto weSizwe (MK was the ANC's armed wing, jointly formed in 1961 by the ANC and SACP).(PSE NOTE this spelling of the name is Correct!) This coincided with the favourable conditions of Angolan and Mozambican independence, and the provisions of vital training bases in Angola, and further afield in the socialist countries. One cannot underestimate what this meant in terms of revitalising MK and enabling the ANC to enter the rising people's struggle within the country, with trained military-political cadres and organisers.

It is relevant to stress that it was heroic military operations, albeit at a low level of capacity, in unfavourable circumstances, which contributed to and reinforced what developed into an almost insurrectionary mass uprising. It was that political factor, the masses, united and politically led, inspired by armed actions, that was our primary strength, reinforced by armed struggle, a growing underground network and international solidarity – what we called The Four Pillars of Struggle. This dialectical interconnection forced the apartheid regime into negotiations at the insistence of big business and the Western powers. They feared a Red Revolution.

In retrospect then, I would assess what you refer to as “ the 1976 moment,” not only as a key marker in the long struggle to end apartheid, but as a main turning point at the time. I qualify that, as I said, with the fortuitous fact that it coincided with the liberation of our neighbouring countries, Angola and Mozambique.

That opened the way for the surge of the internal struggle reinforced by regional and international events. Bear in mind that 1975 saw the victory of the Vietnamese over US Imperialism; 1980 the independence of Zimbabwe; 1987-88 the victory of Cuban-Angolan forces over the Apartheid forces at Cuito Cuanavale; the subsequent independence of Namibia in 1990; the 1990-94 breakthrough in South Africa – legalisation of the liberation movement, release of Mandela, the first democratic election. Undoubtedly, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 also provided the South African and Western powers an incentive to proceed with their reforms, but there is no denying that South Africa broke politically free from apartheid rule.

We are now at another stage of struggle, a most complex one given both internal and international challenges, but June 16^th has a very particular relevance to the opening of a stage that was reached by previous sacrifice, and an ongoing struggle for full socio-economic liberation – the unfinished transformation.

Victoria Brittain: Much has been written/said by Mandela and others of the ANC old guard in Robben Island about the initial impact of the young arrivals in the Island after Soweto, and about the culture clash with Black Consciousness. Mandela would say later that,“To be perceived as a moderate was a novel and not altogether pleasant feeling.” But Mandela asked some of the leaders of the Black Consciousness movement like Saths Cooper of the BPC and Strini Moodley of SASO, to give lectures to the older men. Mandela saw it as the greatest test of his political skills to relate in Robben Island to these impatient, angry young men – and he was deeply impressed by the fortitude of so many of them who had been tortured by the police, as he never had.

Ronnie Kasrils: Don't get carried away by Mandela only mentioning the BCM names. The ANC/SACP had established protracted and significant political classes and had its own newer prison contingent bringing news and contributing to the education programme.

Victoria Brittain: Post Soweto, tens of thousands of youths fled South Africa wanting to join the ANC in exile and fight. As an MK leader, how did you deal with the impact of this incoming shift of experience and ideology in the camps in the following years? Were this new generation also then trained in the Soviet Union and East Germany, like yours?

Ronnie Kasrils: This was an exceptional challenge for the ANC and Communist Party, and the MK stalwarts of the 1960s. In the crushing of organised structures at home, which had been set to receive their re-infiltration, they had tackled the difficult task of organising the struggle from far off Tanzanian exile, in dogged attempts to re-enter the country, after training initially in Egypt and Algeria, but mainly in the Soviet Union. That generation had participated in the guerrilla incursions into Zimbabwe in 1967-68, been involved in the Morogoro Conference of 1969, kept the ANC alive through MK as a fighting force in the frontline states, survived the prolonged exigencies of camp life, and were ready to shoulder responsibilities and tasks of leading and training a new generation of recruits who knew very little about the earlier struggles.

South Africa was a very changed place at the time of the Soweto uprising, compared to 1960, when the economy had been in the doldrums, and the ANC publicly prominent. Considerable investment by Western countries following the Sharpeville crisis and absence of organised labour, had seen the modernisation of the economy, development of infrastructure, prosperity of the white community, and increased repression to control black labour and silence the voice of resistance. The formulation of the Bantustan system aimed to confine black aspirations and unity into ethnic “independent” statelets, while, as I said, Bantu Education was to prepare the youth for servitude.

A new generation was deprived of knowledge of black struggle and history, with the older generation generally silent and sullen owing to intimidation and the vast network of spies and informers. The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), strong on identity politics, raising pride and belief, and the incipient underground movement of the ANC-SACP, struggled from different ideological standpoints, to raise levels of awareness to some effect. It was material conditions, everyday indignity, injustice, persecution and repression, experienced at a race and class level, and sporadic efforts by ANC and SACP activists, the sacrifice of those on trial and imprisonment, that kept alive the historic spirit of freedom.

In the wake of the Soweto events, the question arises why the vast majority of youth who left the country, sought the ANC, rather than the BCM and PAC exiled structures? After all it had been black consciousness advocates, some extremely brave and outspoken such as Steve Biko, who had been publicly visible. Of course I do not minimise the role of ANC firebrands such as Winnie Mandela, Dorothy Nyembe, Harry Gwala, Lilian Ngoyi, Adelaide Sisulu, John Nkadimeng, Mac Maharaj, Joe Qabi, Jacob Zuma and others, who had been in and out of detention or under banning orders - the latter three released from Robben Island prior to 1976. They strongly influenced key younger activists in Soweto and around the country.

There were some who were partly drawn into liberation politics by making contacts with the ANC across the borders before June 1976, later to become leaders of the struggle, but most of that enormous recruitment were new to politics. They sought the ANC because it was the best organised in neighbouring Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, with organised leadership structures in Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania. It had the infrastructure, the logistics, the safe houses, the routes north, the experienced cadres.

Above all the ANC had a rear training base in newly independent Angola able to accommodate over time thousands of recruits. The Soviet Union, with its considerable resources and willingness, had been the main source of advanced training from the early 1960s, for all the liberation movements, and was ready and able to continue that assistance at a higher level. Cubans provided training on the spot in Angola, with specialised courses in Cuba itself. Of note was the GDR promptly stepping in to provide excellent guerrilla and underground training from 1975 onwards. An initial batch of pre- June 1976 recruits was speedily trained, with some units infiltrating the country to carry out operations in the immediate wake of the uprising.

The first question new recruits raised was whether the ANC could give them guns so that they could immediately return home to “ kill the boers”. The previous generation, seasoned in struggle, were instinctively able to respond to that, whether full time cadres or not, some simply family members. It was the level of political experience. Response was universal. The need to understand what the struggle was about, the need for political as well as armed preparation, who the enemy was, who our allies were, the protracted nature of the struggle, the relevance of the Freedom Charter etc. What was surprising was how quickly those youngsters caught on. There was impatience, but they readily adapted to the long haul, whilst some were earmarked for what we called “crash courses,” and a swift turn around, to strike the enemy with acts of armed propaganda. Examples were firing bazookas into police stations or planting bombs at enemy targets. ANC teaching, that the enemy was a system that needed to be destroyed and not a skin colour, sank in.

In time, significant targets such as the bombing of the SASOL oil refinery, sabotage at the Koeberg nuclear plant, and missiles fired at police stations, including the SADF military headquarters, rocked South Africa. As much as we relied on socialist countries to provide training and the weaponry to wage armed struggle, we had our own military and political instructors providing training as well. A political curriculum, centred on the history of the liberation struggle, international guerrilla struggles, colonialism and imperialism, and Marxism was received with enormous enthusiasm.

I don't wish to provide this account by glossing over problems related to the difficulties of infiltrating cadres back home, the errors and casualties we suffered, the vast network of informers employed by the enemy, the infiltration into our ranks of spies, the betrayals and setbacks.

Despite all this, victory was won because of the justice of the cause, the overwhelming involvement of the masses in South Africa, and international support. One cannot overestimate the bravery, audacity, sacrifice and commitment of the Soweto generation, which stormed the ramparts of the apartheid system and white supremacy.

Victoria Brittain: And in a later period, when so many of you long time exiles were finally able to return to a new South Africa with so many complexities and so many secrets of history to come to terms with, do you think the Soweto generation retained some group identity? Or had that been subsumed in the ANC? And has the passion for education, which the Afrikaans teaching law was meant to kill, but which instead lit a fire, remained strong with South African leadership up to this very different era?

Ronnie Kasrils: Undoubtedly, they are a proud generation, and rightly so. Within the liberation movement, and especially MK, they exhibited the remarkable esprit de corps universally present in all revolutionary movements. Solving the problems of the people remains their cherished cause. It is vital that the younger generation, to which the baton of freedom has been passed, is educated and motivated for the next phase of revolutionary challenge.

Let us end with an example you have written about, illustrating the bravery, dignity and sacrifice of that Soweto generation and its links to earlier days: Nomkhosi Mini joined MK after the Soweto uprising and was assassinated by apartheid agents while on a secret mission to Maseru in Lesotho in 1985. She was the daughter of Vuyisile Mini, Port Elizabeth dockworkers' leader, singer, early MK leader and among the first ANC members to be hanged. In 1964 Mini, aged 44, sang freedom songs all night and as he walked to the gallows. He left an infant daughter, Nomkhosi.

Africa-France. Do you speak french army ?

Raphaël Granvaud — 2026-05-31T10:25:28Z

Security issues were barely discussed at the “Africa Forward” summit held in Kenya on 11–12 May 2026. Yet Kenya has become one of France's preferred partners in military cooperation. This relationship is no longer confined to the traditional Francophone “pré carré”. A closer look.

The official programme of the first Africa–France summit ever held in an English-speaking country, on 11–12 May 2026, did not include military issues. Yet it is easy to imagine that security matters were not entirely absent from informal discussions between certain heads of state. Moreover, the decision to hold the summit in a country such as Kenya was no coincidence, coming at a time when Nairobi and Paris have significantly deepened their military and security cooperation. This development has been presented as something new, although in reality it is not. France's military presence beyond its historic sphere of influence—the famous “pré carré”—has a long history.

To begin with, it is worth recalling that French military cooperation serves a variety of objectives, prioritised differently depending on the partner country: training military personnel at various levels of the hierarchy; providing assistance ranging from intelligence sharing to operational support in combat; promoting the French defence industry and, at times, other economic interests; or giving practical expression to strategic alliances decided by political authorities. Paris openly presents it as one of its main instruments of influence in Africa.

Arms sales and massacres

Since President Emmanuel Macron stopped there before the summit, let us begin with Egypt. Military cooperation between the two countries is longstanding, but its strengthening under the dictatorship of Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is a direct consequence of major French arms contracts signed in recent years: Gowind corvettes, multi-mission frigates, Dassault's first export contract for Rafale fighter jets in 2015, as well as armoured vehicles—even though some of those vehicles had already been used during the massacre that accompanied the military's seizure of power in July 2013, when nearly 1,000 people were killed.

The French embassy in Egypt is quite explicit on its webpage devoted to bilateral cooperation: “Initiated following the signing of the major arms contracts of 2015, the acceleration of Franco-Egyptian military cooperation took concrete form in 2017 with the creation of a High Military Committee.” Since then, “the defence relationship has become dense and military cooperation between the two countries has diversified”, resulting in “close and frequent relations between senior political and military authorities and, since 2023, the establishment of a bilateral strategic dialogue (DGRIS).”

Documents revealed in November 2021 showed that the French military hierarchy deliberately took advantage of the coup to promote French equipment and encourage political authorities to turn a blind eye to the new regime's ruthless repression. A few weeks later, Disclose also revealed the extent of France's involvement in Operation Sirli, a secret mission “launched in 2015 by the French army to provide aerial intelligence to the dictatorship of Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Under the pretext of counter-terrorism, this intelligence was used to conduct a campaign of systematic bombings against civilians suspected of smuggling in the Western Desert along the Libyan border.” This criminal cooperation continued with the approval of Presidents François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron despite warnings from certain French officers. Franco-Egyptian rapprochement also benefited from a convergence of interests in the Libyan civil war, with both countries, alongside the United Arab Emirates, supporting Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar's attempt to seize power.

Mixed results

Under Emmanuel Macron, efforts to promote French military equipment have not diminished and help explain attempts to strengthen ties with Angola. In 2018, the two countries signed a defence cooperation agreement. Already a customer of Airbus helicopters, Angola hinted that it might also purchase French warships. Yet cooperation struggled to gain momentum, to the point where there was even talk for a time of closing the defence mission attached to the French embassy in Luanda, before it was simply downsized. Among the programmes implemented were French-language training courses for members of the National Police and the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA), intended to prepare participants for peacekeeping operations or exercises conducted in French. Such limited arrangements exist in many other non-Francophone countries.

France has had little more success in Ethiopia, where relations appeared promising after Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018 and was controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. Emmanuel Macron's March 2019 tour of Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya provided an opportunity to strengthen security and economic cooperation and to sign a defence partnership agreement, accompanied by a substantial package of development aid. The objectives included rebuilding an Ethiopian navy and developing the country's air force.

However, by the time the agreement was ratified by the Ethiopian parliament in June 2021, the war in Tigray was raging and war crimes committed by Ethiopian forces had already been documented. At the time, Mediapart had “questioned, as early as January 2021, the nature of French defence cooperation with Ethiopia” and its future. The Ministry of the Armed Forces responded “only five months later, on 18 May, after eight written reminders”, the investigative outlet reported, falsely claiming that it had supplied no weapons to Addis Ababa.

Given the situation and the numerous atrocities committed by the Ethiopian army, France ultimately chose to suspend the military agreement in August 2021. It does not appear to have been reactivated to this day, despite Macron's return visit in December 2024 and another stop in the country on 13 May 2026 after the Nairobi summit. One possible reason is the geopolitics of the Horn of Africa and the contentious issue of Ethiopia's access to the sea, with France having other alliances to preserve in the region, notably with Egypt and Djibouti.

The Indian Ocean in focus

Further south, by contrast, economic and military ties between France and Kenya have continued to expand. President Uhuru Kenyatta had already hosted the “One Planet Summit”, dear to Macron, in March 2019. In 2023, the two countries signed a maritime cooperation agreement. As Africa Intelligence noted in May 2024, “since 2004 Paris has trained Kenyan officers at the Joint Defence College (CID) in Paris.”

At the end of 2025, a defence cooperation agreement was finally concluded, focused primarily on maritime cooperation and intelligence sharing. Peacekeeping training for participation in United Nations and African Union missions continues, as it does with other regional forces. It is provided by personnel from the French Forces in Djibouti, France's last major military base on the continent. Joint maritime exercises are also planned with the Armed Forces of the Southern Indian Ocean Zone (FAZSOI), based in Réunion and Mayotte, which also conduct exercises with South Africa.

It is worth noting that the cooperation agreement was substantially amended by Kenyan parliamentarians. French lawmakers enjoy no such privilege—and, with a few rare exceptions, do not even demand it. Kenyan public opinion has been deeply affected by unpunished abuses committed by British soldiers stationed in the country.

For Kenya, which ratified the defence agreement with France alongside four others—with the Czech Republic, China, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe—the objective is above all to diversify its partnerships at a time when British troops have a poor reputation and relations with the United States are seen as unpredictable. It may also be a way, as in Djibouti, to leverage a strategically important maritime position coveted by foreign military powers. Italy and Germany are likewise pursuing similar agreements.

The profitable business of the “war on terror”

Several years earlier, in 2010, France had already discreetly cooperated with Kenya to support its operations against Al-Shabaab in Somalia. The “war on terror” has in fact been a major driver of French rapprochement with certain countries during two distinct periods.

The first phase occurred under François Hollande. As Operation Serval in Mali evolved into Operation Barkhane in 2014, covering Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mauritania and Chad, signs of strategic overstretch were already apparent. Hollande nevertheless sought to expand the geographical scope of French military operations and offered French assistance to Nigeria as early as 2015. At the beginning of 2016, he travelled to Abuja and, according to Le Monde, “positioned himself as the military patron of the fight against Boko Haram”. The jihadist group also threatened Niger and Chad, where French troops were deployed, as well as Cameroon, another country within France's traditional sphere of influence. France provided Nigeria with aerial and satellite intelligence as well as training conducted by the Military Intelligence Directorate (DRM).

Later that April, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian travelled to Nigeria to sign a letter of intent paving the way for a future military cooperation agreement, which was also expected to include efforts to combat maritime insecurity in the Gulf of Guinea, an important oil-producing region. “France has considerable influence over all the Francophone countries in the region,” the Nigerian defence minister remarked in explaining the agreement. The initiative was also intended to address operational difficulties within the Multinational Joint Task Force, which brings together neighbouring states to fight Boko Haram and which France hoped to strengthen.

Naturally, arms sales were also part of the equation. “We are going to help them identify their needs and acquisition procedures,” a French source told AFP. “Nigerian forces have often struggled to procure equipment, notably because of their poor human-rights record and corruption problems,” observed defence journalist Laurent Lagneau on Opex360.com. France, which maintains a permanent maritime operation in the Gulf of Guinea under Operation Corymbe, later conducted several joint exercises with Nigeria and made the country its second-largest arms customer in the region after Senegal. Nevertheless, the defence partnership agreement never materialised.

Reconfiguring beyond the “pré carré”

The second phase began when France was forced to withdraw its troops from several sub-Saharan countries: Mali in 2022, Burkina Faso and Niger in 2023, and Senegal and Chad in 2025. Paris then sought to “reconfigure” its African military posture and place greater emphasis on military cooperation in order to compensate for the reduction of forces stationed on bases or deployed in overseas operations. It now offers its services to a broader range of countries threatened by jihadist insurgencies.

With Ghana, cooperation has remained limited to peacekeeping training and French-language instruction. With Nigeria, however, cooperation has been revived. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu and his French counterpart drew closer following the coups in the Sahel, both supporting ECOWAS plans for military intervention after the overthrow of Mohamed Bazoum in Niger in 2023. During an attempted coup in Benin in December 2025, France intervened militarily in coordination with Nigeria, whose forces bombarded the mutineers' camp using French intelligence.

The Nigerian president, evidently concerned about destabilisation in an already deteriorating security environment, has repeatedly appealed for assistance. In January 2026, French General Pascal Ianni, head of the Command for Africa (CPA), was dispatched to Abuja, followed in April by Macron's chief military adviser. Cooperation against Boko Haram in northern Nigeria remains largely coordinated with Britain and the United States and continues to be overshadowed by horrific war crimes committed by Nigerian forces. In the west, however, French special forces are conducting “coordinated operations along the border between Nigeria and Benin with Nigerian and Beninese forces. These operations specifically target leaders of Ansaru, a group affiliated with AQIM [Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb],” according to Africa Intelligence. Nigeria has also granted France overflight rights, enabling it to provide aerial intelligence.

A limited expansion

Although French military cooperation is expanding in non-Francophone countries, it still struggles to carve out a significant place alongside long-established military partnerships with other former colonial powers, as well as with the United States, Russia, China and, increasingly, Turkey. For now, this limited cooperation does not allow France to wield the same degree of influence, create the same forms of dependency, or interfere in conflicts and domestic political crises as it once did—or in some cases still does—in certain Francophone countries.

The difference is also visible in the distribution of military advisers across the continent. A handful are seconded to military academies in non-Francophone countries, but among the seventeen National Schools with Regional Vocational Purpose (ENVRs) overseen by the Directorate for Security and Defence Cooperation (DCSD) and established by France across Africa since the 1990s, not a single one is located outside the Francophone sphere.

To be sure, missile manufacturer MBDA and drone specialist Delair, supported by the semi-public French group Défense Conseil International (DCI), the Directorate General of Armaments (DGA) and the Directorate General for International Relations and Strategy (DGRIS), are jointly promoting the creation of a drone academy in Gaborone, Botswana's capital. According to Africa Intelligence, it would serve “both the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) and police and law-enforcement agencies from Botswana as well as neighbouring countries such as South Africa, Angola, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.” Yet for the time being, military cooperation remains one of the distinctive features of France's traditional “pré carré”.

Somaliland's hopes and fears after recognition by Israel

Théophile Simon — 2026-05-20T15:58:21Z

Tel Aviv's declaration in 2025 rekindled hopes in Hargeisa of an influx of foreign investment. On the ground, however, optimism is colliding with the territory's fragilities and the uncertainty created by the war in Iran.

A convoy of tinted SUVs cuts through the dusty alleyways of Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, before disappearing behind the gates of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Clad in immaculate business suits, four Australian businessmen step out of the vehicles and make their way into the building with its green, white and red colonnades — the colours of the flag of this self-proclaimed state in western Somalia.

At the beginning of April, Foreign Minister Abdirahman Bakal welcomes his guests with a broad smile. “What are your impressions of the country?” he asks, taking his seat in a reception room reserved for visitors. “Very positive. It was important for us to come and see things on the ground. We'll be conveying a positive message to our shareholders,” one of the Australians replies. “They can rest easy. Somaliland is a haven of peace and stability. It's the safest place in the entire Horn of Africa,” the minister says.

The investors have travelled from Perth on behalf of the Australian mining company EAU Mining, which specialises in industrial minerals. Outside the ministry, the company's chief executive, James Durrant, explains that he undertook the trip after Israel became, on 26 December 2025, the first country in the world to recognise Somaliland's independence, proclaimed in 1991. “It's a powerful signal, suggesting that Somaliland could soon enter the international stage. We are closely monitoring the signs of broader recognition and will take the plunge once they become sufficiently aligned,” he says before climbing back into the convoy.

“Somaliland's time has finally come”

Somaliland's authorities hope that Israel's recognition will trigger a double ripple effect, both diplomatic and economic. More than three decades after seceding from Somalia following horrific massacres orchestrated by Mogadishu, “Somaliland's time has finally come,” proclaims Mohamed Abdirahman, the foreign minister's right-hand man. “It is time for the world to acknowledge that we have built a genuine nation and to recognise our right to self-determination.”

Other countries are indeed tempted to follow Tel Aviv's lead, despite the principle of the inviolability of borders. Seeking access to the sea, Ethiopia came close in 2024 to concluding an agreement with Hargeisa over a 19-kilometre coastal strip on the Gulf of Aden, before backing down under pressure from Mogadishu. The United Arab Emirates, long involved in developing the major port of Berbera — where they also maintain a military base — are also following the matter closely.

On the streets of Berbera, Somaliland's main port city (April 2026).

Theophile Simon

But the cornerstone of broader recognition lies in Washington, where part of the Republican establishment is lobbying the White House on Somaliland's behalf. The powerful Texas senator Ted Cruz, who is very close to Israel, is one of Hargeisa's most vocal advocates. During a Senate meeting on 23 April, the politician stressed the “growing strategic relevance of Somaliland” and asserted that Donald Trump could recognise the self-proclaimed state before the end of his term. At the same time, a group of lawmakers in the House of Representatives introduced a bill in March instructing the Treasury Department to identify the legal obstacles preventing Somaliland from accessing the US financial system. In their sights is integration into the Swift international transfer network, which is essential for dollar-denominated transactions.

A five-star hotel inaugurated in August 2025

“Our banks cannot raise money on international markets, which condemns them to charging prohibitively high interest rates for local businesses. Access to the Swift system would, in that respect, be more decisive than diplomatic recognition,” notes Musa Dhaqaale, a Somaliland economist.

Drawn by the momentum, a handful of foreign companies travelled to Hargeisa last winter. Alongside EAU Mining, Malaysia's offshore Golden Touch Investment Bank, which acts as an intermediary for Asian investors, visited in February. Two Israeli firms — VisiRight, which specialises in surveillance technologies, and Amore Capital, a consultancy — have also announced plans to establish themselves in Somaliland. Contacted for comment, Somaliland's Ministry of Commerce says other foreign companies have expressed interest, without specifying either their identities or sectors of activity. The economic boom hoped for after Israeli recognition has yet to materialise.

At a market in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland (April 2026).

Theophile Simon

The potential, however, is there. Seen from the ground, Somaliland offers a surprisingly flattering business card for foreign investors. Hargeisa bears the hallmarks of a prosperous African city, with cafés animated by an elegant, connected youth. Here, female students take selfies to mark the opening of a Nutella waffle restaurant; there, a new steel-and-glass shopping centre is preparing to open its boutiques and travel agencies. Power cuts are rare, the streets well maintained and the markets well stocked. Its airport offers direct connections to major regional hubs such as Dubai, Jeddah and Addis Ababa. Towering above it all, the country's first five-star hotel, inaugurated in the summer of 2025, stands atop a hill.

“We are a functioning democracy”

At the end of a flawless ribbon of asphalt, around 150 kilometres to the north, rises the port of Berbera and its three ultra-modern quay cranes. Built by DP World, the terminal ultimately aims to compete with Djibouti in supplying Ethiopia, the demographic giant of the region. Beyond the greenery of the Golis mountain range, the high plateau of the Burao region reveals a pastoral landscape: a patchwork of semi-arid expanses dotted with pale specks of goat, camel and cattle herds. Pending the expansion of the Berbera–Addis Ababa corridor, the economy remains heavily dependent on livestock exports to the Arabian Peninsula, as well as remittances from the diaspora.

The camel market in Hargeisa (April 2026).

Theophile Simon

Aerial view of the port of Berbera, in western Somalia, built by the Emirati company DP World.

Theophile Simon

Yet despite lacking international recognition and meaningful access to development aid, Somaliland's GDP per capita is around 50 per cent higher than that of the rest of Somalia, while its poverty rate is roughly half as high. Above all, it has managed to build a political system that is both stable and democratic, despite persistent tensions between the Isaaq clan, dominant demographically and territorially, and the other major groups — the Dir in the west and the Darod in the east.

“We are a functioning democracy, the most advanced in the entire region. Since the secession of 1991, we have held six presidential elections and witnessed six peaceful transfers of power,” says lawyer Guleid Jama, a leading advocate for fundamental rights. He is not, however, naïve. “Our Constitution, dating from 2001, is relatively progressive. But our Penal Code still rests on the Mussolinian legacy of Italian colonialism, which regularly leads the police to obstruct the work of journalists and political opponents,” he continues.

Marwo Sucaad, one of the leading opponents of the current government, at the headquarters of her party, Kaah, in Hargeisa (April 2026).

Theophile Simon

Marwo Sucaad, a figure within the opposition Kaah (“Harmony”) Alliance for Equality and Development party, agrees. “Our governments are democratically elected, without a shadow of a doubt. The 2024 campaign was dynamic, and turnout was high,” she says from the party headquarters, a bright red building tucked away in the suburbs of Hargeisa. “There is still progress to be made: corruption exists, and women remain largely excluded from power. But what democracy can truly claim to be perfect?”

“Israel wants to establish a forward operating post here”

Could Israel's arrival in the Horn of Africa jeopardise these advances? The recognition of the Jewish state, welcomed with scenes of jubilation in the streets of Hargeisa, appears to be a double-edged sword. Barely two months later, Tel Aviv entered into conflict with Iran, the effects of which threaten to spread as far as the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

On the set of Somaliland's leading television channel, MMTV, debates are now tinged with anxiety. “Now that we are allied with Israel, could the war reach us here?” journalist Suleiman Sahanzao asked in early April during an interview with Abdirisak Ali, a Somaliland political scientist who spent most of his career in the Gulf. “We have nothing to fear from this conflict. Since the attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel has gained the upper hand over its enemies to the point of becoming the dominant power in the Middle East. This alliance will allow us to develop, much like Saudi Arabia benefited from US protection after the Second World War,” the expert replied confidently.

Attention is turning to Berbera, where Israel is reportedly considering establishing a forward operating post to monitor the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Houthis in Yemen. The project has been confirmed neither by Tel Aviv nor Hargeisa, but on 12 March Bloomberg reported that Israeli officials had already conducted reconnaissance missions along a coastal area west of Berbera that could host a military “base or facility”. A Somaliland minister also told the outlet that Hargeisa would “certainly conduct an assessment” regarding the possibility of hosting such an Israeli presence.

Questioned at the end of March, Mohamed Abdirahman from the Foreign Ministry accused Bloomberg of having “lacked clarity”, without denying the report. “We are still at the stage of establishing diplomatic contacts,” he merely replied on the sidelines of the Australians' visit. A source very close to the circles of power was more direct. “It's an open secret: Israel wants to establish a forward operating post here. But in the current context of crisis in the Middle East, the government cannot yet openly admit it. Our ministers, unused to having foreign journalists turn up in their offices, got ahead of themselves a little,” he said on condition of anonymity.

“We are on the brink of another war”

In Yemen, the Houthis declared as early as 28 December that Berbera had become a “legitimate target”. It is a threat that Hargeisa has little capacity to deter. Its army, mainly equipped with tanks and rocket launchers seized from Mogadishu at the end of the civil war in the 1980s, has no air defence capabilities. “Somaliland is preparing for this kind of situation. Our generals are working day and night to guarantee the country's security,” Mohamed Abdirahman nevertheless insists.

Left and right: Somaliland Coast Guard vessels at the entrance to the port of Berbera (April 2026).

Theophile Simon

With limited resources, these teams must monitor nearly 1,000 km of coastline facing Yemen (April 2026).

Theophile Simon

For Marwo Sucaad of the Kaah party, the real danger lies in a resurgence of the simmering conflict with Mogadishu. “The eastern region remains disputed. Somalia, which enjoys the support of the Turks, the Chinese, the Egyptians and the Saudis, could resume hostilities in retaliation for Israeli recognition. We are on the brink of another war,” the politician warns, recalling that the jihadists of Al-Shabaab announced on 27 December that they would “fight” any Israeli attempt to “use” Somaliland.

Somaliland's “haven of peace” will need more than recognition from Tel Aviv to take off. “Only Washington can keep Somalia's backers in line. That is therefore the only protection that matters,” concludes Marwo Sucaad. Somaliland's government appears to share this analysis. Far less evasive on the American question than on the Israeli file, it told AFP at the end of February that it was prepared to offer the United States “exclusive access” to its mineral resources, as well as access to “military bases”. Emissaries from the US military visited Hargeisa and Berbera in June and again in November 2025. Nothing, however, suggests that Washington is eager to deploy troops there, given that the United States already maintains a base in Djibouti and cooperates with Mogadishu in counterterrorism operations.

A cruel lack of funding

Somaliland's subsoil is believed to contain oil, gas, lithium, rare earths and various metals. Several foreign companies have already positioned themselves accordingly: the British firm Genel Energy has been prospecting for hydrocarbons since 2012; Taiwan's Chang Development Company and Saudi Arabia's Kilomass are interested in lithium. EAU Mining may soon follow suit. Yet beyond these geological indications, few deposits have, at this stage, been formally confirmed.

Ahmed Guelleh is one of the wealthiest men in the Horn of Africa. He has built an empire in the agri-food sector (April 2026).

Theophile Simon

Businessman Ahmed Guelleh, founder of the country's largest food-processing factory, urges Somaliland not to place all its hopes in international recognition and the mining sector. “That is not how we will create the thousands of industrial jobs our youth need,” he says emphatically from a warehouse stacked with pallets of Coca-Cola bottled in his factory north of Hargeisa. “We need to direct our efforts towards manufacturing, technology and agriculture. Once that economic foundation is in place, international recognition will follow naturally.”

But Somaliland starts with serious handicaps in these areas: energy is extremely expensive because it is entirely generated from fuel oil, the workforce is poorly trained and access to water is constrained by the arid climate. In February, twenty-five Somaliland engineers travelled to Israel to train in irrigation techniques. They returned both impressed and discouraged. “Their infrastructure is remarkable, but we do not have the first penny needed to reproduce that model,” laments an engineer from the Ministry of Water, whose annual budget amounts to just under €2 million. In a territory facing heavy structural constraints, recognition alone will not be enough to remove the obstacles to development.

Niger–Libya–Chad. At the tri-border, a fragile coexistence

Ahatane Ag, Amaury Hauchard — 2026-05-15T10:04:43Z

This desert region has been a place of trade and transit since time immemorial. But the war in Libya, the coup in Niger, and shifting regional security alliances are reshuffling the deck. Between attempts at official customs control, smuggling, and the movements of rebel groups, this report—filed in December 2025—dives into the heart of a kind of Bermuda Triangle where calm hangs by a thread. Photograph: Michele Cattani.

Mahamat Nour Youssoufa is 42 years old and wears a long, clay-colored wool coat. From Kanem, a region in central Chad where he was born and raised, he headed north in 2013 when he heard about the discovery of gold. It was the time of the great rush; the Tibesti mountains became the must-go destination for an entire generation of unemployed youth. The gold is alluvial—just a metal detector and a bit of savings are enough to survive independently for several days in the desert. With four friends, all in their late twenties, Mahamat Nour Youssouf set off at full speed.

We meet twelve years later in Zouar, at the end of December 2025. He says he hasn't changed much. He runs a hand over his moustache, adjusts his turban. Gold? He has moved on. For nine years, he dug at the bottom of a shaft in Kouri Bougoudi before turning his back on it, deciding that life was worth more than a collapse. “There were many dangers—on the Chadian side, the Libyan side, the Nigerien side—too many problems, too many worries…” he says.

So he left the pits behind and turned to trade—anything his single-cab Hilux can carry, those pickup trucks nicknamed “Talibans” in this part of the desert. But his specialty is fuel, one of the most lucrative trades.

Like all those interviewed for this investigation, the transporter describes the geographical triangle between Niger, Libya and Chad as an informal trading space, a network of back routes along which goods and people circulate. The populations living on either side of these vast borders have known the tracks and secondary routes since time immemorial.

The Three Borders (Chad, Niger, Libya), a highly coveted region.

Mahamat Nour Youssouf explains: “We used to go up to Sebha [in Libya], buy goods there, then head back down to Tibesti [in Chad]. It was as simple as that. Sometimes we went to Niger, to Dirkou or Chirfa, and then came back. It also depended on taxes, customs clearance, and the various checkpoints. But it brings in more than gold, that's for sure,” he says.

Southern Libya has long suffered from relatively weak control by both the official authorities in Tripoli and the parallel authorities in Benghazi, and has always been a place for the informal export of fuel to Niger and Chad. But everything has changed over the past year, Mahamat Nour Youssouf says: geopolitical balances are no longer what they used to be.

“Haftar's grip is tightening”

Control by the forces of the Libyan National Army (LNA) under General Khalifa Haftar is stronger today than it was before, all interviewees report. “Haftar's grip is tightening,” confirms a traditional Chadian leader.

“Now it's Haftar's men who control the checkpoints. There are no longer, as before, as many Nigerien or Chadian rebels on the Libyan side of the border,” explains Abdoul Kader, a former member of the Patriotic Front for Liberation (FPL), an armed group created after the 2023 coup in Niger to fight the military regime in Niamey.

Chadian soldiers are patrolling the market in Arkenya, in the Tibesti region of northern Chad.

“Before, we were stationed about 150 kilometres north of Kouri Bougoudi, at ‘Passage Y'. At the checkpoint there were fighters from FACT [the Front for Change and Concord in Chad, created by Mahamat Mahadi Ali, which was behind the death of President Idriss Déby Itno in 2021] and the FPL. We held the checkpoint together—it was a mandatory crossing point for all trucks heading to Niger or Chad,” Abdoul Kader recalls. “Traders, especially those transporting fuel, paid a toll, and we used the funds to pay part of our fighters' salaries.”

These checkpoints are informal control posts set up along paved roads, often staffed by several armed men, a small hut, and a taxation system whose rates vary according to the mood of the day. They have gradually been dismantled in favour of official LNA checkpoints.

“Checkpoints have been set up by the LNA between Sebha, Gatrun and the Chadian border. At each one, you pay—it's very expensive now. The Libyan authorities [the LNA] have also put a stop to exports to neighbouring countries, so fuel prices have surged in Chad and Niger,” says Ali Akhlit Khadra, a Chadian trader accustomed to travelling between Zouar and Sebha.

The Benghazi authorities allow foodstuffs through but now prohibit the informal trade in fuel to Chad and Niger. So how can fuel be obtained? Although Chad, Niger and Libya are all oil-producing countries, petrol and diesel are in critically short supply in their northern regions.

Smuggled fuel from Niger

On the informal highways of the Sahara, one can see pickup trucks every day loaded with dozens of jerrycans of fuel stacked in pyramids and tied down with rope. They sometimes travel thousands of kilometres in search of a higher resale price. In Kouri Bougoudi, at the end of 2025, a litre of petrol sold for 2,000 CFA francs—around three euros.

“It's Niger that has taken over fuel supply at the moment,” says a Nigerien researcher who requested anonymity.

Five different sources told Afrique XXI that tankers have in recent months brought fuel into northern Niger, notably to Chirfa and Dirkou. Two supply routes exist: one official, via the Nigerien Petroleum Company (Sonidep), which supplies Dirkou's stations from Agadez under military escort; the other unofficial, via tankers from the Zinder refinery (Soraz), partly owned by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which, unable to export its oil to Benin, sells it in the desert.

A fuel dealer sits on fuel tanks at the Kouri Bougoudi market, the largest artisanal gold mining site in the Sahara, on the border between Chad and Libya.

“Here, fuel is sold on a first-come, first-served basis. One tanker has to empty before another can take its place. To buy fuel from the tankers, you must have either a drum or five 60-litre jerrycans,” says a witness in Chirfa in early 2026, describing this illegal trade.

In addition to this tightening on the Libyan side, a joint force has been established between the Chadian army and General Haftar's forces to better control the border between the two countries. Its commander was installed at the end of February at the gold-mining site of Kouri Bougoudi. According to Chadian state television, twenty-two vehicles were supplied by Libya and “logistical support” by Chad.

“Trenches on the Chadian side of the border”

On the Chadian side, alongside this joint force, the army has deployed several special operations (OPS) in the Tibesti region, ensuring relatively strong territorial control: bases have been set up since 2022 in Tanoua, Miski, Wour, Kouri 35, and Kouri 60, in addition to existing units in the region's two main towns, Zouar and Bardaï.

An elite Chadian officer, deployed for three and a half years in Kouri Bougoudi, explains: “Now we've dug trenches along the border on the Chadian side, we've deployed OPS in all sensitive areas of Tibesti, and the only place without our men along the Libyan border is where there are mines near Aozou—but it's impossible to pass there,” he says.

“Before, with Toyotas, smugglers crossed the border at night, whether for trafficking or kidnapping people for their gold. But it must be said that since the president's visit [Mahamat Idriss Déby] in 2023 and the implementation of OPS led by General Allifa (Weddeye, now governor of Tibesti), things have improved significantly,” he adds.

When Afrique XXI asks this officer about the continued existence of smugglers between the three countries, he replies: “These are the habits of the desert. There are checkpoints, customs, but some get through, some don't. Of course smuggling exists—it always has.”

An “intelligent policy” to encourage trade

A former customs officer on the Libya–Chad border explains: “When you live in northern Niger or northern Chad, it's easier to go and buy goods in Libya than in Niamey or N'Djamena, and there's an entire ecosystem specific to this region.”

He prefers to remain anonymous—let's call him Mr X. He describes a commercial system unique to Tibesti. “For each type of goods, sometimes you can clear only 50% at the border to encourage trade,” he says.

View of the market in Zouar, in the Tibesti region (northern Chad).

A cigarette vendor at the Zouar market (northern Chad). Manufactured in Dubai, the cigarettes are transported by truck across the desert between Libya and Chad.

At the Kouri Bougoudi border post—the main commercial crossing between north-western Chad and Libya—negotiations have taken place between Chadian customs authorities and Libyan and Chadian traders' unions to establish what Mr X calls an “intelligent policy” to encourage trade and reduce smuggling.

The case of cigarettes is telling. “In mid-2025, we agreed on lower customs duties per shipment of cigarettes. It varies, but to give an idea, at one point we went from 75,000 francs to 25,000 francs in taxes per carton. Before, traders preferred smuggling to declaring goods at customs. With this system, everyone wins: they no longer need to take bypass routes, and the state collects tax revenue,” the former customs officer says.

“There are armed groups and abusive taxation”

“On cigarettes alone, we made tens of millions of francs in tax revenue in just a few weeks after these negotiations—money we were completely missing out on before,” he adds. “People in N'Djamena and abroad say we're smuggling or trafficking, but it's just trade,” says Mahamat Nour Youssouf.

On the Nigerien side, however, the situation has deteriorated. A transporter used to travelling to Libya says that “transporting goods to Niger has become very dangerous for two reasons: on the Libyan side, Haftar's men seize any fuel shipments destined for Kawar [in Niger], and in Niger there are armed groups and abusive taxation.”

A vehicle is transporting cans of gasoline to the Kouri Bougoudi gold mining site in northern Chad.

Today, south-western Libya and north-western Chad are relatively controlled by the forces present—the LNA and the Chadian army—but north-eastern Niger, by contrast, “has become the no-man's-land that south-western Libya was ten years ago,” Mr X summarises.

The Nigerien army patrols the area but cannot cover the entire Agadez region—over 650,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of Afghanistan—even though it has checkpoints along the road linking Agadez to the border (Dao Timmi, Madama, Seguidine, Dirkou, Chirfa).

A proliferation of rebels

In such a largely desert area, armed robbery is a constant risk. On 21 January, four armed Zaghawa attacked a Toubou fuel transporter in the Djado gold zone. The man was killed, his fuel stolen, and his vehicle destroyed with a rocket launcher.

On the 22^nd, according to several local sources, gold mine operators in Djado formed a “pursuit committee” to hunt down the attackers. They were located at Tefiyan 140, a mining site, and killed by the committee members, who posted photos of the bodies on social media.

Several rebel groups from all three countries now have rear bases in north-eastern Niger, according to officials from each: the CCMSR (Chadian), FACT (Chadian), MPLJ (Nigerien), and the “Revolutionaries of the South” (Libyan). Some collaborate occasionally on armed actions—for example, CCMSR fighters have been hired by other militias, according to one member interviewed. Others allow their fighters to work at the Djado mining sites.

Several factors explain this redeployment to Niger. According to a Chadian CCMSR rebel, “before, we could work with Haftar's men in southern Libya, but now it's complicated.” Others point to stronger territorial control by the LNA and the Chadian army in their respective regions.

Kidnappings and assassinations

One of these groups has been particularly active in recent weeks: the “Revolutionaries of the South,” led by Mahamat Wardougou, known as Kochi. According to one of its commanders, this Tripoli-backed group—composed mainly of Teda fighters—has imposed a blockade on smuggling routes for fuel, weapons and drugs between Libya, Niger and Chad.

At the end of January, it kidnapped around ten LNA fighters. On 22 February, it claimed responsibility for the assassination of an LNA officer in Gatrun. In the days that followed, the LNA, supported by the Chad–Libya joint force, launched an offensive against Wardougou's fighters on the Nigerien side of the border.

According to multiple sources, clashes began along the Niger–Libya border on the night of 24–25 February and extended up to 130 kilometres into Nigerien territory, particularly in the Emilulu area. A counteroffensive by the rebels followed, with further fighting on 26 and 27 February.

Rock formations near Bardai, in the Tibesti region (northern Chad).

“It was a joint base of the CCMSR and the Revolutionaries of the South that was attacked and destroyed by Haftar's men, supported by Chadian soldiers. They arrested several CCMSR fighters and Hassan Wardougou, the brother of our commander-in-chief Mahamat Wardougou,” explains a senior member of the Revolutionaries of the South.

In an already weakly controlled area, these clashes are alarming. “It's true that Haftar has more resources than the Revolutionaries of the South, but he won't win this war easily because Wardougou knows the terrain and controls smuggling in this part of the Sahara,” says a former Nigerien rebel.

“Already, the Revolutionaries of the South are supported by the Tripoli government—perhaps even by Algeria—and by many Toubous from Libya, Niger and Chad,” he continues. “This war will create serious security problems.”

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This article was translated from french (here) with AI, but reread by the english journalist Victoria Brittain.