Africa Follow

Toyi-toying youth, burning tyres, barricades, teargas, stun grenades, rubber bullets, running battles with the police — these scenes from apartheid’s battlefields were rerun in the townships of Cape Town, South Africa, over the last week.

Niger Some 2,500 people marched through the streets of Niger’s capital, Niamey, last week to demand that the government does more to relieve the food crisis.

"The problems of Africa are very complex. Aid just gets swallowed up in corruption." That argument, from the Daily Telegraph, has been repeated in various forms in the last week.

Africa needs to break immediately from the most destructive circuits of global capital, and its leaders are on the wrong side.

Every G7 or G8 summit has been punctuated by statements on "debt relief". They all turned out to be broken promises. The statement on debt issued in London on 5 February this year by G7 finance ministers dashed hopes and expectations raised by an impassioned plea made by Nelson Mandela to the same ministers the day before. Yet, chancellor Gordon Brown hailed the statement as "a breakthrough" and said, "It is the richest countries hearing the voices of the poor."

Sixty years ago, on 8 May 1945, millions of people celebrated VE (Victory in Europe) Day. There was genuine enthusiasm that the Nazis were gone at last. But in North Africa things looked rather different.

An extraordinary event has taken place in one of Africa’s most significant historic sites.

The presidential election in Togo, west Africa, has unleashed protests, strikes and riots. At least 20 people have been killed in the fighting.

Around 300 people gathered in Glasgow last Saturday for a conference on "Voices from Africa, Voices of Resistance".

I hear that Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s finance minister, has appeared in the British press calling for people to vote Labour because of the party’s commitment to tackling world poverty.

The two-week strike by miners at the Harmony gold mines in South Africa (Socialist Worker, 9 April) has won important concessions.

Kenyan socialist Mary Oredi and Charlie Kimber look back at a crucial moment in African history, when Portuguese forces attacked the African city of Mombasa