Several news outlets have falsely reported that Somaliland’s government called for the extradition of Ilhan Omar, basing their stories on a post from an X account that does not represent the state despite its claims to the contrary.

Fox News, the New York Post, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s the National News Desk and the Independent ran stories on the US representative. The reports centred on a post by @RepOfSomaliland in reaction to claims by JD Vance that Omar had committed immigration fraud, which echoed prior allegations against the Somali-born Minnesota Democrat that she has vehemently denied.

“Deportation?” the post read. “Please you’re just sending the princess back to her kingdom. Extradition? Say the word …”

The account is not an official government channel, and Somaliland’s own foreign ministry had said so publicly in December. It said: “Ministry has begun identifying social media accounts that are NOT official Government of Somaliland channels,” adding that they were not authorized to speak on its behalf.

In a statement to the Guardian on Monday, Somaliland’s ministry of foreign affairs said: “We kindly advise that any news or statements be referenced solely from official and authorized channels to ensure the accuracy and reliability of information.”

Somaliland is a self-declared republic in the Horn of Africa that broke away from Somalia in 1991 after the collapse of the Somali state. Though it has maintained relative stability in a turbulent region, it remains unrecognised by the international community, with Israel being a notable recent exception. Somalia continues to claim it as part of its territory.

Fox News later issued a quiet correction, acknowledging the account was not a verified government outlet. “The post has been corrected to note that the RepofSomaliland X account is not a verified government account,” the rightwing news outlet said, revising its headline to: “Pro-Somaliland account backs extraditing Ilhan Omar after Vance fraud claim.”

The post was a reaction to an interview the vice-president gave to conservative influencer Benny Johnson on 28 March. In the interview, Vance claimed that Omar had “definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America”.

Vance said he had discussed potential legal action with Stephen Miller, the White House immigration adviser, adding: “We’re trying to figure out what the legal remedies are – how do you go after her, how do you investigate her, how do you build a case necessary to get some justice for the American people?”

Johnson pressed Vance specifically on whether Omar’s alleged offenses were grounds for deportation or denaturalization. Omar’s chief of staff, Connor McNutt, dismissed Vance’s accusations as “a ridiculous lie and desperate attempt to distract”, adding a pointed reference to Vance’s past admission that he was willing to “create stories” to redirect media attention.

It is not the first time Omar has found herself at the centre of a viral misinformation story with a Somali aspect. In early 2024, a mistranslated clip of a speech she gave in Minneapolis spread rapidly online, with rightwing figures accusing her of declaring herself “Somalian first”.

The reports spread against a backdrop of escalating rhetoric from the White House targeting Minnesota’s Somali community and Somalia. Just days before Vance’s interview, Trump described Somalia as a “crooked, disgusting country”. The following day he boasted of getting Minnesota “back from Somalia”.

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) condemned the remarks, with Jaylani Hussein, the executive director, warning that portraying an entire people as intellectually inferior “is not just political rhetoric – it is dehumanization”.

Omar, who arrived in the US as a refugee aged 12 and became a citizen at 17, warned in a Guardian interview in December that Trump’s rhetoric was fueling a climate of political violence with real consequences. “We’ve had people incarcerated for threatening to kill me,” she said. She added that her concern extended from herself to anyone “who looks like me in Minneapolis”.

In January, a man sprayed Omar with liquid from a syringe as she addressed constituents at a Minneapolis town hall, hours after Trump had again targeted her with xenophobic remarks. Federal prosecutors subsequently charged Anthony Kazmierczak, 55, with assault.

Authorities in Congo-Brazzaville have applied to Interpol for an international arrest warrant against Jean-Guy Blaise Mayolas, the president of the country’s football federation, Fecofoot, after he was convicted of embezzling $1.1m in Fifa funds.

Mayolas is on the run with his wife and son after they were all sentenced to life imprisonment this month for embezzling funds provided by world football’s governing body as part of its Covid-19 relief plan in February 2021. As the Guardian revealed last year, that included almost $500,000 earmarked for the Congo women’s team.

Mayolas and his family were tried in absentia and are believed to have fled the country weeks before the hearing. Investigators suspect he may be hiding in Cameroon or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The authorities and partner police forces in the region have been alerted and officials are working with financial intelligence units, including Tracfin, the French financial intelligence unit, to freeze assets linked to the case.

Mayolas and his family members were convicted of money laundering, forgery, use of forged documents and embezzlement on 10 March by the court in Brazzaville, along with Fecofoot’s general secretary, Badji Mombo Wantete, and treasurer, Raoul Kanda. Wantete and Kanda were each sentenced to five years in prison.

Fifa opened disciplinary proceedings against Mayolas, Wantete and Kanda last week for alleged financial misconduct. The charges under consideration include conflict of interest, forgery and improper acceptance of gifts after Fifa’s ethics committee received information and documents during a review.

It has been alleged Mayolas, since being elected as president of Fecofoot in 2018, used a series of shell companies to embezzle funding from Fifa. According to a declaration signed by the presidents of every women’s club in the country’s top flight that was sent to the Congolese authorities in March, $20,000 of the $500,000 Fifa sent to Fecofoot in 2021 as part of its Covid-19 relief plan was paid out.

Mayolas denied all the allegations before his disappearance, describing them as a conspiracy. Wantete also rejected the accusations. In 2015, they received six-month bans from Fifa for ethics violations related to gifts and benefits.

Mayolas was suspended by the country’s sports ministry last year after being investigated for fraud. Fifa stepped in and banned Congo from international football for “third-party interference”, meaning that in March they had to forfeit World Cup qualifiers against Tanzania and Zambia, who were awarded 3-0 victories.

Congo were reinstated when Fecofoot was permitted to resume control of its headquarters in Brazzaville, although Mayolas and Wantete were prevented from travelling to Fifa’s congress in Paraguay and arrested a few days later.

An unusual weather pattern unleashed severe thunderstorms across parts of the Middle East last week, battering countries including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The Arabian peninsula – typically dominated by arid desert climates – received up to 150mm of rain in just a few days.

The deluge was caused by an abnormally strong jet stream, which helped form a deep area of low pressure to develop north of Saudi Arabia. This, in turn, drew moist tropical air from the Indian Ocean and triggered intense storms.

In Oman, hailstones as large as tennis balls fell during Wednesday evening’s storms, alongside torrential rain. Doha, Qatar’s capital, experienced flooding the same day.

Further thunderstorms developed on Thursday evening, with a more organised line crossing the UAE and hitting densely populated areas such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Gusts of up to 80mph, large hail and intense lightning were reported, as heavy rainfall caused widespread flooding.

While thunderstorms are not rare in the region – Dubai endured extreme flooding from a storm system in April 2024 – the multiday nature of last week’s deluge is more commonly seen in the US and central Europe in spring and summer.

A weather station on Jebel Yanas in northern UAE recorded 244mm of rainfall, with many others exceeding 100mm in just a few days, far surpassing typical annual totals of 60-100mm. The event reflects a broader global trend of storms bringing more intense rainfall as the climate warms.

Attention is shifting to the Mediterranean, where a developing low-pressure system south-east of Italy is expected to bring heavy rain and thunderstorms to Greece, Turkey and other countries in south-east Europe this week.

Rainfall totals could reach in places on Tuesday and Wednesday, raising the risk of flooding, while 60-80mph gusts may affect parts of northern Africa, including Libya, which was hit by Storm Samuel, a similar system this month.

Activists and lawyers in Africa are calling for urgent action to protect women, girls and boys as digital violence surges across the continent.

A massive rise in internet users, coupled with huge numbers of people aged under 30, has fuelled an increase in gendered online violence across the continent, according to experts, by giving perpetrators new tools to control and silence women and girls, and influence boys.

“Unfortunately the world offline is not safe, equal and inclusive. But the world online is proliferating that to such an extent that it’s creating a foundation for a very, very unequal future,” said Ayesha Mago, global advocacy director at the Sexual Violence Research Initiative, a global network looking at violence against women.

“In Africa, internet access is growing exponentially and more than 70% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is under 30. We know that young people generally face higher rates of online violence and very often are bigger users of any tech,” she said.

Digital violence against women and girls has devastating effects such as mental health problems, withdrawal from public and economic life, physical attacks on LGBTQI+ people in countries that criminalise homosexuality, and femicide.

While there is very little pan-African research, one study across five countries in sub-Saharan Africa showed that 28% of women had experienced online violence. As internet access expands, this number is expected to rise. Only 38% of people on the continent are internet users, according to the International Telecommunication Union – and among women the figure falls to 31%.

Studies, research and anecdotal evidence at a national level paint a horrifying picture of extreme levels of violence and a toxic online environment with dire real-life consequences.

Extensive research conducted in Ethiopia over the past four years by the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) found that gendered abuse is so endemic online it has become normalised. One Ethiopian woman interviewed by CIR said “no platform feels safe”. The researchers found that while men are attacked online for ideas and opinions, women receive misogynistic abuse related to their appearance and role in society. Threats and intimidation also migrate offline, putting woman at risk of physical attack. At least three women have fled Ethiopia in fear of their lives after a campaign of online and offline abuse.

In Uganda, in 2021, the National Survey on Violence in Uganda revealed that half of the women (49%) reported having been subjected to online harassment.

In South Africa, upcoming research by Equimundo and UN Women found that exposure to harmful content translated into men being 2.6 times more likely to perpetrate violence and 1.8 times more likely to believe misogynistic views.

Primary targets on the continent include women in the political arena, along with human rights activists, journalists and women with a public profile. A 2021 report by the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the African Parliamentary Union looking at the experiences of 137 female parliamentarians across 50 African countries found that 46% had been the target of sexist attacks online and 42% said they had received threats of death, rape, beating, or abduction, often through social media.

A UN Women report in Kenya found that name-calling, blackmail using negative images of women in politics, and other messages were posted online with the aim of spreading fear, and undermining women’s credibility to participate in elections. In focus groups women reported living in fear of being raped while on the campaign trail or during meetings that would run late into the night.

In Tunisia, research conducted between 2019 and 2023 revealed more than 70% of political commentary involving women contained violent or abusive language. Women were frequently dehumanised and called animals, such as cow, goat or sheep, and attacks disproportionately targeted sexuality, morality, age and physical appearance. Black women in politics were singled out, with people questioning whether they belonged to the nation.

Globally, nearly two in every five women will experience tech-facilitated violence while 85% of women who are online have witnessed or encountered online abuse. Fewer than 40% of countries have laws protecting women from cyber harassment or cyber stalking, leaving 44% of the world’s women and girls – 1.8 billion – without access to legal protection.

According to Mago, about 17 countries in Africa have introduced legislation looking at cybercrime. She highlighted South Africa’s Domestic Violence Amendment Act, which has been touted as a good example in the region, with specific provisions that allow courts to order digital platforms to take down abusive content. “Most [laws] don’t acknowledge the gendered nature of abuse,” she said. Instead the law needs to explicitly address online gendered violence. “It is also worth flagging that legislation is a tool for oppression and protection. Unfortunately we found that sometimes laws [relating to digital violence] can be used to prosecute specific groups of people.”

The African Union Convention on Ending Violence against Women and Girls was introduced in 2024 and includes digital violence, but according to Sibongile Ndashe, executive director of the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa, it is “regressive”.

She said: “We’ve spent a lot of time trying to push back on it because we feel that the convention is not doing what it’s supposed to do in terms of setting out rights, required state obligations and providing clarity [around technology-facilitated gender based violence].”

It is not just legislation that is needed, however. “People do not understand their rights,” said Mago. “There is a general lack of awareness that there are laws or specific actions online that are not allowed and that you can get protection from.”

Digital literacy is poor, she added, as is law enforcement. People believe online violence isn’t real and underestimate its effects, and platforms do not pay attention to local languages, contexts and cultures.

“Platforms need to be accountable for the harm that is taking place on them,” said Mago. “And they need to put user safety over profit, and that is definitely not happening anywhere in the world.”

A South African town is divided over changing its name from the colonial-era Graaff-Reinet to Robert Sobukwe, after the anti-apartheid activist, in a debate that has inflamed racial tensions.

Petitions have been signed, rival marches held and a formal letter of complaint sent to the sports, arts and culture minister, Gayton McKenzie, who approved the name change on 6 February.

On one side are people who feel a deep attachment to Graaff-Reinet, many regardless of the fact it was named after Cornelis Jacob van de Graaff, the Dutch governor of the Cape Colony when the town was founded in 1786, and his wife, Hester Cornelia Reynet.

On the other are those who insist that renaming the town after Sobukwe, who was born and buried there, is a necessary part of the “transformation” of South Africa away from colonialism and white-minority apartheid rule.

Sobukwe left the African National Congress (ANC) liberation movement to found the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959, amid disagreements about the ANC allowing white members. On 21 March 1960, Sobukwe led protests against laws requiring Black people to carry pass books. Police opened fire on a march, killing 69 people in what became known as the Sharpeville massacre.

Between 2000 and 2024, more than 1,500 placenames were changed in South Africa, according to an official database. They include more than 400 post offices, 144 rivers and seven airports, while the city of Port Elizabeth became Gqeberha in 2021.

The department of sports, arts and culture said in a statement announcing 21 name changes, including Graaff-Reinet: “The mission … [is] to redress, correct and transform the geographical naming system in order to advance restorative justice, including addressing the colonial and apartheid-era naming legacy.”

A survey carried out in December 2023 found 83.6% of the town’s residents opposed the name change, including 92.9% of Coloured people and 98.5% of white people. A third of Black residents backed the name change. Of the 367 randomly selected representative respondents, 54% were Coloured, 27.2% Black and 18.8% white.

“Many residents felt that changing the name would erase part of their identity as ‘Graaff-Reinetters’,” the Stellenbosch University geography professor Ronnie Donaldson wrote of his findings.

Laughton Hoffman, who runs a non-profit supporting young people, expressed concern about the name change harming tourism in the town, which has a population of about 51,000 and whose centre is filled with elegant, whitewashed Cape Dutch buildings.

“We are not emotional about the Dutch … Out of the grief of the past [the name Graaff-Reinet] became a benefit for the people and for the economy of the town,” said Hoffman, sporting a bright pink “Hands Off Graaff-Reinet” T-shirt.

Hoffman is Coloured and Khoi-San – indigenous South Africans who the apartheid government lumped together as Coloured with mixed-race people and the descendants of enslaved people from other parts of Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Hoffman said his community had been “oppressed” since the end of apartheid by governments led by the black-dominated ANC. “We have been marginalised for 32 years as a cultural group,” he said.

Coloured researchers attribute much of this resentment felt by parts of their community to animosity between Coloured and Black communities fostered by apartheid. Coloured people were allowed slightly better houses and jobs, forcing them to distance themselves from Black people to access those benefits.

Meanwhile, Derek Light, a lawyer who wrote the complaint letter demanding that the culture minister McKenzie reverse his decision, argued that the public consultation on the name change did not follow legal procedure. “It was a faux process,” he said.

Light, who is white, lamented the tensions the name change had caused in the town. “We were living in peace and harmony,” he said. “It’s not without fault; we also have poverty and unemployment and things like that. But we don’t have racial issues amongst our people.”

Black members of the Robert Sobukwe Steering Committee, a group supporting the name change, rejected this. “We have always had racial problems,” said Athe Singeni. “It was very subtle.”

Her mother, Nomandla, said they would not be deterred, even after Sobukwe’s grave was vandalised by unknown people earlier this month. “We as Black people, we have a history that has been erased,” she said. “We’ve got leaders who contributed and laid down their lives for the freedom that we enjoy today. It is time to honour them.”

Further up the hill in uMasizakhe, a former Black township, a group enjoying home-brewed alcohol expressed their support for the name change. “I’m happy to change this name, Graaff-Reinet,” said Mzoxolo Nkhomo, a 59-year-old jobseeker. “Because Sobukwe is our fighter. Sobukwe made us free.”

Across the road, the Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe Museum and Learning Centre was shuttered, a statue of the politician covered up. It had never been officially opened due to family disagreements, said his grandson Mangaliso Tsepo Sobukwe.

Placename changes had been instrumentalised by politicians, Sobukwe said. “It is interesting that the ANC would be seen championing the honouring of Sobukwe, because they … [have been] suppressing his legacy.”

Sobukwe expected the backlash to the renaming, but added: “Going forward, I’m happy that my grandfather’s been honoured, more than anything else.”

John Mahama knows a thing or two about beating the establishment. On Wednesday, less than two years after completing a remarkable comeback as Ghana’s president with a landslide defeat of the ruling party candidate, he rallied the world to ratify a landmark vote against transatlantic chattel slavery, despite major opposition from the same western entities that drove it for centuries.

The resolution to declare the practice as “the gravest crime against humanity” passed with a decisive majority at the UN general assembly and has been largely welcomed across Africa. Yet the details of the tally reveal a world still deeply divided on the gravity of the sin of enslaving more than 15 million people as chattel over the course of 400 years.

Thus, the 123 states who voted for it were just as noteworthy as those that did not. Most of the assembly was in support including Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, most of Latin America, all former victims, as well as the Arab world, who themselves have the dark history of trans-Saharan slavery under their belt. Russia called it a “long overdue recognition”.

Perhaps because of their history of subjugation of Indigenous people and perpetuation of chattel slavery, the western bloc of Australia, Canada, the UK and the EU states all abstained in the vote, electing to postpone their day of atonement.

The three states to publicly vote against the resolution were Argentina, where two-thirds of the value of all imports arriving at the port of Buenos Aires between 1580 and 1640 were enslaved Africans; Israel and the US, where 11 states seceded rather than obey the Emancipation Proclamation freeing enslaved Africans.

The US ambassador to UN economic and social council, Dan Negrea, took pains to point out the unrelated claim that Donald Trump “has done more for Black Americans than any other president” and stressed that Washington “does not recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred”.

Human rights advocates believe the collective objection to a resolution that is not legally binding is because its opponents know it opens the door to reparation payments and acknowledgments. Before the vote, there was palpable fear in the room. Representatives of EU states spoke against what they considered retroactive application of international law, but there was also an unspoken desire to censor the past.

The Vatican’s permanent observer to the UN, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, mentioned examples of papal condemnations of slavery in a speech before the vote and called the resolution a “partial narrative”. Ironically, he skipped the mention of a more impactful papal action: it was Pope Nicholas V’s edicts in 1452 and 1455 approving enslavement of non-Christians in Africa by the Portuguese that facilitated transatlantic slavery.

Inevitably, questions are being asked about what happens next. But after securing such a historic win in the face of heavyweight opposition, Ghana and the African Union (will feel energised to continue this long fight. On Wednesday, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called for “far bolder action”.

All eyes will now be on the African Union, which has called 2026-36 its “decade of reparations” and named Mahama as its reparations’ champion, to find creative ways to extract reparatory justice even in the face of stonewalling from the west.

The resolution itself was the product of collective action. It took months of consultations with a host of bodies across the continent and diaspora to produce the resolution. Some of those who worked on it say that same communality is being used to determine the next steps and nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.

Already, an African Union committee of experts is working on a framework for reparatory justice and engaging descendants of enslaved people all over the world. It is an uphill battle but Mahama, who is in line to be the union chair in 2027, is confident he can be victorious a third time.

“We travel this long road, each step guided by a desire to be better and to do better, each step bringing us closer to the kind of world we would want to leave for our children,” said Mahama in his speech at the UN general assembly.

On the second floor of the Reina Sofía, in the very spot where Picasso’s Guernica was first exhibited when it arrived in the Madrid museum 34 years ago, there now hangs a smaller, near-namesake of the Spanish artist’s most famous work.

While African Guernica, which was drawn by the late South African artist Dumile Feni in 1967, may lack the scale of Picasso’s masterpiece, its depth, anger and unnerving juxtaposition of man and beast, light and dark, and innocence and cruelty, are every bit as disturbing.

Across its now-yellowing paper, a three-legged man with a grotesque mask for a face wields a stick, a cow with an engorged udder suckles a baby, and birds peck at scraps as shadowy figures loom in the background.

While the Spanish painter’s fury sprang from the Nazi bombing of the Basque market town from which his painting takes its name, Feni’s rage, rendered in charcoal and pencil, was the product of living under apartheid in South Africa.

The drawing is the centrepiece of the first in a new series of annual exhibitions at the museum called History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme. The aim, according to the Reina Sofía’s director, Manuel Segade, is to “take works from different cultural and geographical frameworks and put them alongside Guernica” – hence African Guernica’s pride of place on the wall exactly opposite Picasso’s canvas. As well as allowing for re-readings of the museum’s famous work, Segade said, the initiative would also attempt to correct old biases.

“Just as western art has relegated women to one side when it comes to the history of art, so has the history of art been constructed according to racist parameters that have condemned African art to handicrafts or to savagery,” he said.

African Guernica, which has never before been exhibited outside South Africa and which is on loan from the University of Fort Hare, offers a compelling departure point.

Feni, who died in New York in 1991 after spending almost a quarter of a century in exile, had no formal artistic training but was a compulsive drawer from childhood who was fascinated by indigenous African art, from rock painting to mask-making.

When he moved to Johannesburg at the end of his teens, he discovered a vibrant, urban cultural scene that thrived despite the brutal and racist apartheid regime. Once there, he would have been exposed to the works of European artists such as Goya and Bosch – and to those of Picasso, who was profoundly influenced by African art.

“It’s important to remember that Picasso’s Guernica itself could not have existed without African sculpture,” said Tamar Garb, a professor of art at University College London, who is the curator of the exhibition.

“Picasso’s invention of stylisation and simplification and the formalisation of work in the early 20th century via cubism was very, very much a product of, let’s say, looking at, and valuing, African sculptural practices, which he collected and came to know.”

Although there could be an odd circularity to an African artist using European modernism to reinforce or recalibrate his relationship to African art, Garb said the exhibition was concerned with dialogue rather than influence.

“We don’t even know if it was [Feni] who gave it the name African Guernica,” she said. “That name was likely given to the work by a gallerist or an early commentator. [But] the fact is that he was happy to use the name and to exhibit it with that name, so he embraced that.”

Even so, said the curator, it would be a mistake to view the two Guernicas as sharing a common theme. Picasso’s Guernica, said Garb, was an “anti-war cri de coeur”, while Feni’s Guernica is a reaction to a different kind of violence: “It’s the violence, the slow violence, and the actual violence of racist tyranny. So you could see it as a product of a very violent society that dehumanises the majority of its population, but it’s not an equivalent to the kind of bombardment of war. And I think that that difference is also important to stress.”

Five other works by Feni are also on show, including the 53-metre-long scroll titled, You Wouldn’t Know God if He Spat in Your Eye, which he worked on during his years in London. Opposite it is his huge 1987 charcoal drawing Hector Pieterson, a stylised and haunting rendering of a famous photograph of a 13-year-old boy lying cradled in the arms of a man after being shot dead by South Africa’s apartheid-era police.

Despite the traditional cosmologies of African Guernica, the inevitable comparisons to Picasso – and the fact that Feni was known in 1960s Johannesburg as “the Goya of the townships” – Garb argues that the artist occupies a unique place in 20th-century art.

“This is a modern artist using drawing materials – charcoal, pencil and conté crayon – at a scale almost unheard of globally at that time,” she said. “If you look at drawing practices globally in the 1960s, there are very, very few artists – I can think of hardly anyone – who works at the epic and monumental scale.”

“There are chapters in our shared history that I know have left some painful marks,” King Charles said during a state banquet to welcome the Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, to the UK, in a year in which the monarch is expected to come under renewed pressure to make a formal apology for transatlantic slavery and colonialism.

But while demands grow from African and Caribbean nations for the UK to further reparative justice, Nigeria and the UK are looking to the future of global trade.

Tinubu’s state visit last week is being celebrated as a return to the world stage for Africa’s largest economy. Tinubu is the first Nigerian president to receive a UK state visit in 37 years, and only the second African leader in history to be received at Windsor Castle, after Liberia’s William Tubman in 1962.

This new chapter in the two countries’ relationship, which is rooted in colonial history, promises to help the UK’s ailing steel industry while furthering Nigeria’s ambition to become a regional superpower.

At the state banquet, the king told Tinubu: “The many dynamic connections between our two nations have deep roots and yet I do not pretend that those roots are without a shadow … I do not seek to offer words that dissolve the past, for no words can.

“But I do believe, as I know you believe, Mr President, that history is not merely a record of what was done to us: it is a lesson in how we go forward together to continue building a future rooted in hope and growth for all, and worthy of those who bore the pains of the past.”

A deal in which the UK guarantees a £746m loan to refurbish two of Nigeria’s trading ports is one way cooperation between Nigeria and the UK can build a new future, independent of the debate about reparative justice. The issue of reparations is expected be discussed at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting this year.

Nigeria also wants to diversify global partnerships and shift from its economic dependency on oil. It aims to be the dominant maritime hub for west and central Africa, which is rich in strategic mineral resources and has huge potential for consumer market growth.

However, Lagos’s seaports are creaking – which is where UK financing comes in. As part of the ports deal, Nigeria will direct at least £236m in contracts to British suppliers, including £70m for the loss-making British Steel, which the UK government took control of last year.

In one of its biggest-ever contracts, British Steel will supply 120,000 tonnes of steel billets to Nigeria.

Meanwhile, cooperation, investment and partnerships in the fintech, creative and higher education sectors have been announced.

Nigeria’s Zenith Bank is opening a Manchester branch, while the Fidelity Bank and fintech companies LemFi, Kuda and Moniepoint are expanding their UK operations.

There will also be state cooperation on customs and irregular migration. Nigeria and the EU are also strengthening ties.

At the banquet, King Charles said the UK was “blessed that so many people of Nigerian heritage … are now at the heart of British life through excelling at the highest levels” . About 270,000 people, or 0.5% of the population of England and Wales, recorded their ethnic group as Nigerian in the last census.

Among the guests at the banquet were the England rugby captain Maro Itoje and his wife, Mimi, the Olympic 400m gold medallist Christine Ohuruogu, the former Lioness and football pundit Eni Aluko, and the UK’s first black female Michelin-starred chef, Adejoké Bakare.

For the first time in living memory, canapes were provided before the dinner to offer sustenance to Muslim guests who were unable to take part in iftar – the breaking of their fast – at sunset. Tinubu is the first Muslim leader to make a state visit to the UK during Ramadan since 1928.

A prayer room was also set up in the castle for guests breaking their fast, and a mocktail offered that took inspiration from the classic Nigerian drink, the Chapman – usually a mix of Sprite, Fanta, cucumber, grenadine syrup andangostura aromatic bitters.

The royal household’s version, called crimson bloom, used zobo, a popular west African beverage made of dried hibiscus flowers – known as sorrel in the Caribbean – mixed with English rose soda, a homemade hibiscus and ginger syrup, lemon and a hint of spice.

At the banquet, the king quoted Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba proverbs, toasted in pidgin and described Nigeria as “an economic powerhouse, a cultural force and an influential diplomatic voice”.

But while the visit and the agreements that followed were welcomed in Nigeria as a vote of confidence for the country’s status and investability, the Nigerian government faces pressure to prove the country is getting a good deal.

Analysts want to see the deals fully materialise and for the government to ensure foreign investment does not leave the country in a dependent, indebted position – or disadvantage domestic industry – and lead to growth across society.

Nigerian officials say the conditions are attractive, but after a history of African nations being exploited through western debt, a £746m British loan will invite some domestic scepticism.

Britain colonised Nigeria over 100 years, beginning with the annexation of Lagos in 1860. Nigerians trained in the UK in law, medicine, administration and technology after independence in 1961, growing what had been a small, prewar community of students and seamen.

The Royal Niger Company – later absorbed into the consumer goods company Unilever – was central to colonisation in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Palm oil harvested by Nigerian workers was essential for soap and lubricating Britain’s industrial machinery.

Finished cotton wax-print material was exported from Manchester to Nigeria in the colonial era and still influences styles today. Cotton was at the heart of the most painful era in a relationship between nations defined all too often by extraction. An estimated 3.5 million enslaved people were shipped from Nigeria to the Americas to grow cash crops such as cotton, coffee, sugar and tobacco during the transatlantic trade alone.

The British multinational company Shell finally divested from its onshore Nigerian oil operation last year, almost 90 years after it obtained a licence.

The Benin bronzes, thousands of treasures looted by the British military in 1897, are at the centre of restitution campaigns.

Nigeria-UK trade grew 11.4% to £8.1bn in the past year, with the UK £3.4bn in surplus.

Nonetheless, the visit of Tinubu and the first lady, Oluremi Tinubu, highlighted the strategic importance of Nigeria after domestic overhauls intended to stabilise the Nigerian economy in an evolving global order.

At least 28 civilians have been killed in two separate drone strikes in Sudan, according to health workers, as the country’s brutal civil war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces approaches its fourth year.

A strike hit a market in the town of Saraf Omra in North Darfur state on Wednesday, killing “22 people, including an infant, and injuring 17 more”, a health worker at the local clinic told AFP.

“The drone hit a parked oil truck, which caught fire along with part of the market,” said Hamid Suleiman, a vendor at the market, which serves a remote area close to the border with Chad. It was not immediately clear which side sent the drone.

Another strike hit a truck carrying civilians on a highway in an army-controlled area of North Kordofan, about 500 miles east of Darfur. The road, which runs east to west through the state capital, El Obeid, and onwards to Darfur, has been the subject of numerous drone attacks from the army and the RSF.

“Six bodies arrived at the hospital yesterday, three of them charred, in addition to 10 wounded,” a source at the hospital in the town of El Rahad told AFP, blaming the RSF for the attack.

Civil war broke out in Sudan’s capital Khartoum on 15 April 2023, when a power struggle between the army and RSF spiralled into open conflict.

Since then, more than 11.6 million people have been displaced, out of a population of about 51 million, in what aid organisations have described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Huge swathes of the country are at risk of famine.

Estimates of the number of people killed in the civil war range from tens of thousands to more than 400,000. Over 10,000 people are believed to have been massacred by the RSF in El Fasher over two days in October 2025.

Meanwhile, the number of civilians killed in drone strikes has increased this year, according to the UN, particularly in the Kordofan region. More than 500 were killed by drones between 1 January and 15 March, Marta Hurtado, the spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights, said earlier this week.

On 20 March, a drone strike on a hospital in East Darfur killed 64 people and wounded 89, according to the World Health Organization. The Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese group that documents civil war atrocities, said it was an army drone.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this story.

• The US is making its offer of security guarantees for a peace deal in Ukraine conditional on Kyiv ceding all of the country’s eastern region of Donbas to Russia, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Reuters in an interview. With the US focused on its own conflict with Iran, president Donald Trump is applying pressure to Ukraine in an effort to bring a quick end to the four-year war triggered by Russia’s 2022 invasion, Zelenskyy said. “The Middle East definitely has an impact on President Trump, and I think on his next steps. President Trump, unfortunately, in my opinion, still chooses a strategy of putting more pressure on the Ukrainian side,” he told Reuters. “I would very much like the American side to understand that the eastern part of our country is part of our security guarantees,” he said.

• Russia sought to blackmail the US by offering to stop sharing military intelligence with Iran if, in return, Washington would cut off Ukraine from its intelligence data, Zelenskyy said on Wednesday. Zelenskyy, who said on Monday that Ukraine’s military intelligence has “irrefutable” evidence that Russia was continuing to provide intelligence to Iran, told Reuters he had seen the data but provided no further details. “I have reports from our intelligence services showing that Russia is doing this and saying: ‘I will not pass on intelligence to Iran if America stops passing intelligence to Ukraine.’ Isn’t that blackmail? Absolutely,” Zelenskyy said.

• Russian attacks killed two people in Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv and the region around it and a strike on the Danube port of Izamil damaged port facilities and energy infrastructure, officials said. Prosecutors in Kharkiv region, in a statement on Telegram early on Thursday, said a woman injured in an attack on the city of Kharkiv had died of her injuries in hospital. They said nine people were injured in strikes on two districts of the city, a frequent target of Russian forces, 30 km (18 km) from the border. Prosecutors also said a Russian drone killed a man in his car in a district closer to the border.

• Ukrainian drone strikes killed two people on Wednesday in Russia’s border region of Belgorod, the regional governor said. Vyacheslav Gladkov, writing on Telegram, said drones killed an 18-year-old man aboard a motorcycle in a village near the border and a woman in her car in the town of Graivoron, also near the border. Belgorod has been a frequent target of Ukrainian forces during the four-year war pitting Kyiv against Moscow. Ukrainian shelling of a public building in the city of Belgorod killed four people last week.

• Zimbabwe said on Wednesday that 15 of its citizens had been killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine, the latest African country to report recruits dying on the frontlines. Information minister Zhemu Soda told a press conference that the 15 had been deceived into enlisting, referring to it as human trafficking. He said one recruitment method used by traffickers targeting Zimbabweans was social media. An official at Russia’s embassy in Harare declined to comment.

• British prime minister Keir Starmer said on Wednesday he has given the military permission to board and detain Russian ships his government alleges are part of a network of vessels that enables Moscow to export oil despite western sanctions. The decision comes as other European nations have stepped up efforts to disrupt Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of tankers used by Moscow to fund its four-year war against Ukraine. Starmer said he approved more aggressive action against the vessels because Russian President Vladimir Putin was likely “rubbing his hands” at the sharp rise in oil prices driven by the US-Israel war against Iran.

• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a Putin ally, was greeted by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as he arrived on his first visit to the reclusive nation, the Korean Central news agency reported on Thursday. A ceremony welcoming Lukashenko took place on Kim Il Sung Square on 25 March, with Kim “gladly” meeting and “warmly” welcoming the Belarus leader, the report said. Lukashenko visited the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun – where the embalmed bodies of Kim’s father and grandfather lie in state – to pay his respects, flanked by top North Korean officials, the report said. Lukashenko laid a bouquet on behalf of Putin, it added.

The United Nations has voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.

The landmark resolution passed on Wednesday was backed by the African Union (AU) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.”

Voting in favour were 123 states, while Argentina, Israel and the US voted against. There were 52 abstentions, including the UK and members of the EU.

As the resolution went ahead in New York, the British MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy presented a petition to the House of Commons, pushing for a state apology by the UK for its key role in slavery and colonialism of Africans.

“So many of the intersecting global challenges we now face are rooted in the legacies of enslavement and empire: from geopolitical instability to racism, inequality, underdevelopment and climate breakdown,” the petition read. “To truly confront these issues, we must acknowledge where they come from.”

For four centuries, seven European nations including the UK enslaved and trafficked more than 15 million Africans across the Atlantic. The scale of the chattel slavery was such that 18th and 19th-century abolitionists coined the term “crime against humanity” to describe it. Historians have also linked wealth from enslavement to mass industrialisation in the west.

“When it’s framed as a trade, it distorts the reality,” said Jasmine Mickens, a postgraduate student of history and government at Harvard University. “It was not a consensual joint business enterprise.”

Ghana, which has been at the forefront of an effort across Africa and the Caribbean for reparatory justice, pushed for the terminology to be updated to reflect the lingering impact of chattel slavery.

Experts involved in drafting the resolution say it is an attempt to get “political recognition at the highest level” for one of the darkest eras in history.

“The main point is not to introduce a hierarchy of crimes,” said Kyeretwie Osei, the head of the economic, social and cultural council at the AU. “It is rather an attempt to properly situate that particular chapter in history … how it was so world-breaking in its impact that it essentially created the platform for every atrocity and crime against humanity that then followed.”

“[This] was the chattelisation of human beings which essentially reduces them to property that can be sold or inherited [and] the status of enslavement could be passed on through birth,” he added.

The UN first acknowledged that slavery was a crime in a 2001 conference against racism, xenophobia and related intolerance in Durban, South Africa.

Panashe Chigumadzi, a historian and rapporteur for the AU’s committee of experts on reparations for slavery, colonialism and apartheid, who drafted the framework, said that conference had had many limitations, including its framing of slavery as a “retroactive moral judgment rather than a continuous legal reality”.

“The AU framework … establishes that the inception of the trafficking in enslaved Africans during the so-called ‘age of discovery’ constituted the definitive break in world history, which inaugurated the break from localised feudal regimes to the modern world racial capitalist system,” she said. “This structurally transformed the fates of all peoples across the world through racialised regimes of labour, capital, property, territory and sovereignty that continue to determine relations of life and the land on which it is lived.”

While the resolution is not legally binding, it is now expected to pave the way for more progress in a fight that scholars and some politicians say has been hampered by the rise of rightwing movements in the west.

In recent years, the AU has been working to ensure the codifying of chattel slavery as a crime that requires not just apologies, but reparatory justice.

“Right now, the focus is on this particular moment [and] recognising that it is a culmination of many moments before this day,” Mickens said. “What people don’t seem to remember – due to all the efforts to erase history – is that black people, African people, have resisted the institution of child enslavement and the trafficking of Africans since the first hour the crime was committed on the shores of Africa.”

Before Wednesday’s vote, Mahama lamented the continuing erasure of Black history in the US through increasing censorship of teaching the “truth of slavery, segregation and racism” in schools.

“These policies are becoming a template for other governments as some private institutions,” he said at an event at the UN headquarters. “At the very least, they are slowly normalising the erasure.”

A Grammy-winning South African composer who wrote and performed the opening chant in Circle of Life for Disney’s The Lion King is suing a comedian for allegedly damaging his reputation by intentionally misrepresenting the song’s meaning on a podcast and in his standup routine.

Lebohang Morake’s lawsuit accuses the Zimbabwean comedian Learnmore Mwanyenyeka, known as Learnmore Jonasi, of intentionally mistranslating the chant, which launches the 1994 movie and is central to staged versions as well as Disney’s 2019 remake.

The dispute, which has gone viral as the two men challenge each other on social media, stems from statements Jonasi made in his standup routines and in a podcast interview, when he translated the song’s lyrics from Zulu and Xhosa, two of South Africa’s 12 national languages.

The lawsuit was filed this month in federal court in Los Angeles, where Morake, who performs as Lebo M, lives and where Jonasi has performed. It accuses Jonasi of intentionally mocking “the chant’s cultural significance with exaggerated imitations”.

Disney’s official translation of the opening phrase “Nants’ingonyama bagithi Baba” is: “All hail the king, we all bow in the presence of the king.”

“Hay! baba, sizongqoba,” the chant continues. It translates to “through you we will emerge victoriously”, according to Morake.

The lawsuit cites an episode of the podcast One54, whose Nigerian hosts sing the chant with incoherent and incorrect words. Jonasi corrects them, saying: “That’s not how you sing it, don’t mess up our language like that.”

He then sings the correct lyrics in Zulu. When asked, he says they translate to: “Look, there’s a lion. Oh my god.” The hosts burst out laughing, saying they thought the chant was something more “beautiful and majestic”.

Circle of Life, with music by Elton John and English-language lyrics by Tim Rice, came up in the broader context of Jonasi’s critique of The Lion King franchise as profiting off of simplistic narratives about the African continent for non-African audiences.

“The lions had American accents in Africa, and then you had the monkey with an accent,” Jonasi said.

Morake’s lawyers acknowledged in the complaint that “ingonyama” can literally translate to “lion” but say it’s used in the song as a royal metaphor, adding that Jonasi had intentionally misrepresented “an African vocal proclamation grounded in South African tradition”.

The lawsuit says Jonasi “received a standing ovation” for a similar joke he made about the song during a 12 March performance in Los Angeles. Such viral statements, it says, are interfering with Morake’s business relationships with Disney and his income from royalties, causing more than US$20m in actual damages. The lawsuit also seeks US$7m in punitive damages.

Disney didn’t respond to an emailed request from Associated Press for comment on Monday night. The Guardian also reached out for comment.

The complaint argues that Jonasi presented his translation “as authoritative fact, not comedy” so it shouldn’t get the first amendment protections afforded to parody and satire that make fun of other artistic works.

Jonasi doesn’t have an attorney publicly listed for the case, and a representative didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment on Monday night, but the comedian offered some thoughts in a video posted last week as he continues his US tour.

He said he was a “big fan” of Morake’s work and loves the song. When he learned that Morake was upset, he said, he wanted to create a video with the composer explaining the chant’s deeper meaning.

“Comedy always has a way of starting conversation,” Jonasi said in a video he posted on Instagram, which got more than 100,000 likes. “This is your chance to actually educate people, because now people are listening.”

But Jonasi said he had changed his mind about collaborating with Morake when he said the composer called him “self-hating” as they exchanged messages. He said Morake’s reaction ignored the rest of his work delving into a more nuanced critique of US renderings of African identity.

A second set of mountain gorilla twins has been born in Virunga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in what conservationists are celebrating as an “extraordinary” event for the endangered primates.

Just two months after tiny twin mountain gorillas were discovered by rangers in the Virunga massif, in eastern DRC, another rare twin birth has been found by park wardens. This time, an infant male and female have been spotted in the Baraka family, a troop of 19 mountain gorillas that roam the region’s high-altitude rainforests.

Park rangers have placed the young primates under additional monitoring to help them through the critical initial months, as the infants face significant challenges to becoming fully grown adults. Twins are extremely rare in mountain gorillas, accounting for less than 1% of births, and place extra demands on the mother.

The gorilla subspecies, found in only two isolated pockets of the Virunga massif and the Bwindi Impenetrable national park in south-west Uganda, has high rates of infant mortality, with about a quarter falling victim to disease, trauma or infanticide.

In January, Virunga national park announced that a female mountain gorilla called Mafuko had given birth to twins. The infant males are now 11 weeks old and said to be thriving, with other gorillas in the troop taking extra care of the mother to support her caregiving, according to rangers. Park authorities believe that twin births are more likely to happen when females are in particularly good physical condition.

Jacques Katutu, the head of gorilla monitoring at Virunga, said: “Two instances of twin births within three months is an extraordinary event and provides another vital indicator that dedicated conservation efforts, which have continued despite the current instability in eastern Congo, continue to support the growth of the endangered mountain gorilla population within Virunga national park.”

Specialist veterinary care has played a leading role in the revival of the subspecies. In Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC, organisations such as the Gorilla Doctors have prevented dozens of deaths by helping animals affected by human behaviour, such as by releasing gorillas accidentally caught in poachers’ traps. One study attributes half of the mountain gorillas’ population increase to the vets.

Barely 250 mountain gorillas were left in the 1970s, and many thought the animals faced extinction. Decades of intense conservation work helped population numbers surpass 1,000 in 2018, and conservation authorities have since downgraded the subspecies’ status from critically endangered to endangered.

The DRC section of the Virunga mountain range remains one of the most dangerous places in the world for wildlife rangers. Over the past 20 years, more than 220 rangers have been killed in the park, where rebel groups such as M23 and other militias, as well as bandits, operate with impunity.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage

A strike on a healthcare facility in Sudan has killed 64 people and wounded 89 more, the World Health Organization reported on Saturday.

The UN’s humanitarian office in Sudan had earlier said it was “appalled by the attack on a hospital in East Darfur yesterday, reportedly killing dozens, including children, and injuring more”.

Sudanese rights group the Emergency Lawyers, who document atrocities in the war between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, reported it was an army drone strike that hit the El-Daein teaching hospital.

The RSF dominates the vast western Darfur region, while the army is in control of Sudan’s east, centre and north.

The WHO’s surveillance system for attacks marked Friday’s incident as “confirmed” but did not give an exact location.

The attack involved “violence with heavy weapons” and affected a secondary health care facility, medical personnel, patients, supplies and storage, the record showed.

Though the WHO counts and verifies attacks on health care, it does not attribute blame, as it is not an investigative agency.

El-Daein, the RSF-controlled state capital of East Darfur, has been regularly attacked by the army, which is trying to push the paramilitary back towards its Darfur strongholds and away from Sudan’s central corridor.

Its most recent strike on the city’s market earlier this month set fire to oil barrels that burned for hours.

Near-daily drone strikes are now a hallmark of Sudan’s brutal war, killing dozens at a time, mostly in the southern Kordofan region.

The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, this month said he was “appalled” after more than 200 civilians were reported killed by drone attacks within an eight-day period.

“Parties to the conflict in Sudan continue to use increasingly powerful drones to deploy explosive weapons with wide-area impacts in populated areas,” he said.

To the repeated condemnation of the UN, hospitals have been a regular target throughout the war.

By December, more than 1,800 people had been killed in attacks on health facilities since the start of the war, including 173 health workers, according to the UN.

This year, a total of 12 attacks on health care in Sudan have been recorded, causing 178 deaths and 237 injuries.

Across the country, the war has killed tens of thousands and driven more than 11 million people from their homes.

It has fuelled what the UN describes as the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises, with more than 33 million people in need of humanitarian aid.

Madagascar’s military president has said new ministers will have to pass lie detector tests to root out corrupt candidates, after he dismissed the prime minister and cabinet without explanation earlier this month.

Michael Randrianirina came to power in a coup in October after weeks of youth-led protests under the banner “Gen Z Madagascar”. However, young people were quickly disenchanted by his choice of government officials, which they saw as being part of the old, corrupt elite.

Randrianirina told local media: “We have decided to use a polygraph. It is with this polygraph that the background integrity checks will be carried out.”

The president said a new cabinet would be announced early next week. “We will know who is corrupt and who can help us, who is going to betray the youth struggle,” he said.

Malagasy young people started protesting in September last year, first against water and power cuts, then demanding a complete overhaul of the political system. At least 22 people were killed in the first days of the protests, according to the UN.

On 11 October, the elite military unit Capsat, in which Randrianirina was a colonel, came out in support of protesters. The next day, the president, Andry Rajoelina, reportedly fled the country for Dubai on a French military plane.

Randrianirina was sworn in as interim president and has pledged to hold elections by late 2027. Gen Z activists have been pushing him to confirm the date, while criticising his appointments over their perceived ties to the previous regime.

Randrianirina fired the prime minister and cabinet on 9 March, then announced on Sunday that the anti-corruption chief Mamitiana Rajaonarison would be the new prime minister. He and Rajaonarison would only interview ministerial candidates who passed a lie detector test, he said on Thursday.

He said: “We’re not looking for someone who is 100% clean, but over 60%. That way, Madagascar will finally be able to develop.”

One of the managers of Gen Z Madagascar’s social media accounts expressed scepticism at the use of polygraphs. “It’s not even scientifically proven to work,” he said. “For me it’s just a joke and embarrassing.”

He added: “We agree that the previous ministers weren’t good. We still have hope for the new ministers, but in general I think this regime is already better than the regime of Andry Rajoelina.”

Madagascar is one of the world’s poorest countries, with a GDP per capita of just $545 (£408) in 2024, according to World Bank data. The island is rich in natural resources, including vanilla and precious gems, which campaigners say have been exploited by officials and corrupt businesspeople. The country ranked 148 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2025 corruption perceptions index.

Agence-France Presse and Associated Press contributed to this report

Some of the world’s poorest countries will lose out on UK aid that funds programmes such as schools and clinics, due to budget cuts set out by the foreign secretary.

The UK’s bilateral aid to Africa will be reduced by almost £900m by 2028-29 – a 56% cut – part of more than £6bn in cuts which are funding an increase in defence spending.

The 40% reduction to UK aid spending, which MPs voted to back last year, will mean all aid spending being cut to all G20 countries except Turkey, and the majority now focused on conflict zones, primarily Ukraine, Sudan and Palestine.

Spending will be protected this year for Lebanon, a decision signed off by officials on Wednesday night, because of the intensity of the current offensive from Israel. The overhaul means 70% of all support will be allocated to the most fragile and conflict-affected states by 2029.

Countries such as Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan will be among those facing cuts, though Yvette Cooper said they would still receive funding from multinational aid agencies. Countries such as Pakistan and Mozambique will have almost all their development aid cut, replaced by partnerships for investment.

The crisis reserve for humanitarian emergencies has also been cut, though by less than expected, from £85m to £75m.

“This for us is not an ideological step – it is a difficult choice in the face of international threats,” Cooper said.

The most significant impact will be felt across Africa, with bilateral overseas development aid due to fall from £818m in 2026 to £677m by 2029 – a drop of roughly 17% in just three years, which the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said was part of a pivot to multilateral contributions through the World Bank and African Development Bank.

The FCDO will also phase out all funding for bilateral programmes in G20 countries – apart from a small allocation to refugee hosting in Turkey. No direct aid will go to countries such as India, South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia.

The development minister, Jenny Chapman, said some of the poorest African nations that would feel the brunt of the cuts, such as Mozambique, Malawi and Sierra Leone, had expressed a preference for expertise partnerships with the UK, building stable financial systems and clean energy, rather than traditional aid programmes.

“I think the concern that happened a year ago around the cuts was that people thought we were doing this because we lost faith in the agenda, we were turning our backs on the world … that this was a values shift. It’s absolutely not,” she said.

“We’ve undertaken this task … in a very collaborative way with our global South partners. We’ve been very open about it. We’ve listened hard to what people have told us. We’ve been present. We’ve shown up just about everywhere we can, to have these conversations internationally.”

Cooper said her steps were being matched elsewhere in Europe, including in France, Germany and Sweden, but aid groups said the cuts were in fact steeper than in most of Europe.

Admitting she was having to make hard choices on aid, she said the UK still expected to be the fifth-biggest funder in the world, but in her statement she avoided spelling out the precise level of cuts, detail revealed only in the equality impact assessments.

The FCDO has said the changes will prioritise geopolitical security and conflict – as well as funding the bigger multinational agencies, such as the vaccine programme Gavi. Funding is also being protected for the British Council and the BBC World Service.

The UK has ringfenced £240m a year until 2029, alongside billions in loan guarantees for Ukraine, as well as protecting allocations for Palestine and Lebanon at current levels, with the latter explicitly funded to “reduce the drivers of irregular migration”.

The cuts will also see aid end to some major funders – including polio eradication and the Pandemic Fund – which the FCDO said would now be channelled through Gavi and the Global Fund.

The cost of housing asylum seekers in UK hotels – running at roughly £2bn a year – is taken from the aid budget. It means that by 2027-28, aid spending on overseas programmes is expected to reach its lowest since records began in 1970, at just 0.24% of gross national income.

Chapman said it was a wholesale overhaul of the way aid spending would now operate, after the decision to cut the aid budget despite a 0.7% target being legally enshrined. Cooper said it was the government’s intention to gradually return to the target when possible.

Adrian Lovett, UK executive director of the ONE Campaign, said: “Today’s figures lay bare the true scale of these cuts and the damage they will do. Slashing bilateral aid to Africa, where need is greatest, will have a devastating impact. These choices will leave millions without access to basic healthcare, education and urgent humanitarian support, and risk a resurgence of deadly diseases we’ve spent decades trying to fight.

“While FCDO officials have clearly worked to shield some priorities, they have been handed an impossible task. You simply cannot cut 40% from the aid budget without devastating consequences, and that will now play out in the world’s poorest countries.”

A woman with severe intellectual disabilities in Tanzania has had her conviction and death sentence quashed after spending more than a decade in prison awaiting execution.

Lemi Limbu, now in her early 30s, was convicted of the murder of her daughter in 2015. On 4 March, a court in Shinyanga, northern Tanzania, declared she can appeal. She will face a retrial, but a date has yet to be set.

Lawyers and activists have condemned her sentence, saying she should not be in prison at all. Limbu, who remains incarcerated, is a survivor of brutal and repeated sexual and domestic violence and has the developmental age of a child. Under Tanzanian and international law, Limbu should not be held criminally liable, given her intellectual disability.

“She was not supposed to be in prison in the first place,” said Anna Henga, executive director of Legal and Human Rights Centre, a Tanzanian human rights advocacy organisation. “I’m happy that [her conviction] has been quashed and the appeal has been allowed, but I’m sad because the court ordered a retrial, which is like starting again [after] the case has already taken more than 10 years. My worry is that it could take up to another 10 years if there are more delays.”

At her first trial, Limbu pleaded not guilty. Unable to read or write, she said she did not know the contents of a statement that police claimed she had made admitting to the murder.

Her original conviction in 2015 was nullified in 2019 due to procedural errors. In 2022, she was retried and sentenced to death a second time. The court did not allow evidence to be heard from medical professionals about her intellectual disabilities or history of abuse. A clinical psychologist who evaluated her had concluded she had a severe intellectual disability and the developmental age of a 10-year-old child or younger.

A second appeal was filed in 2022 and heard in February.

Growing up, Limbu lived in a household where her father beat her mother. She was repeatedly raped by men in her village and gave birth for the first time aged 15.

At about 18, she married an older man and had two more children. She suffered domestic violence until she fled to another village with her youngest child, Tabu, who was about a year old.

She later met Kijiji Nyamabu, an alcoholic, who told Limbu he would marry her – but he said he would never accept her baby daughter, Tabu, because he was not the biological father.

Shortly afterwards, Tabu was found strangled. There were no witnesses and Nyamabu had already fled by the time Limbu brought the authorities to her daughter’s body. She was arrested in August 2011. Nyamabu was never detained.

A coalition of 24 African and international human rights groups last year condemned Limbu’s sentence as part of an appeal to the African court on human and peoples’ rights to look at the plight of women on death row throughout Africa.

In July, four UN human rights experts wrote a letter to the government of Tanzania expressing concern about Limbu’s case.

In Tanzania, the death penalty is the mandatory sentence for murder, although no executions have been carried out since 1995. There are more than 500 people on death row in the country, according to Henga.

Rose Malle, who was wrongfully imprisoned on death row in Tanzania and now campaigns against capital punishment, said there are a number of innocent people facing the death penalty. “This situation is often caused by weaknesses within the justice system, starting from the stage of arrest, the investigation process, and even during the hearing of cases in court.”

Prof Sandra Babcock, a clinical professor of law and the faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, who is acting as a legal consultant in Limbu’s case, said: “Limbu has endured unimaginable suffering as a survivor of sexual violence living with intellectual disability. After spending more than a decade on death row, she should be released so that she can receive the care and support she needs.”

Jihadist violence rose sharply in Nigeria and Democratic Republic of Congo last year, even as global deaths from terrorism dropped to their lowest level in a decade, according to a new report.

Nigeria recorded the largest increase in terrorism deaths globally in 2025, with fatalities rising by 46% from 513 in 2024 to 750, placing it fourth in the Global Terrorism Index, behind Pakistan, Burkina Faso and Niger.

Africa’s most populous nation is grappling with a multifaceted security crisis as extremist groups such as Boko Haram and its offshoots attempt to carve out control of swathes of territory. Various ethnic militia and other criminal elements, including “bandit” groups, are also active, mostly in north and central Nigeria. Newer threats like terrorists from the Lakurawa group are also emerging.

In February, 162 people were massacred in Kwara state near the border with the Benin Republic, one of the deadliest single attacks in the country’s recent history.

On Wednesday the army said troops backed by air support had repelled a coordinated assault by Islamist insurgents on a military base in the north-eastern state of Borno, killing at least 80 fighters including senior commanders. The assault comes after multiple suicide bombings on Monday in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno, that killed at least 23 and left more than 100 wounded.

In the DRC, terrorism-related deaths rose by nearly 28% in 2025, increasing from 365 to 467 and pushing the central African state to eighth place on the index, its worst ranking. The rise was primarily driven by the IS-affiliated Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).

The rise in Nigeria and the DRC contrasts with the rest of the world. The index, produced by the Australian thinktank Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), recorded a global decline in deaths of 28% to 5,582, while total attacks fell by nearly 22%.

There was a 280% increase in deaths from terrorism in the west, with 57 deaths recorded in 2025. Twenty-eight people died in the US from terrorist attacks, the highest figure in the country since 2019. The rise, the index reveals, is increasingly driven by youth radicalisation and lone-wolf actors.

“Viewed in totality, these trends point to one sobering conclusion: a fracturing world order risks erasing the hard-fought gains made against terrorism over the past decade,” said Steve Killelea, IEP’s founder.

More than half of all deaths from terrorism worldwide in 2025 occurred in the Sahel, seen as the centre of global terrorism, despite a drop from the previous year. Burkina Faso, where the junta only controls about a third of the territory, recorded the largest decrease in terrorism deaths worldwide, with fatalities dropping by half in 2025. Civilian casualties fell by 84%.

Experts said the change suggests the al-Qaida affiliate Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM) is deliberately reducing attacks on civilians to win “hearts and minds” and consolidate its territorial gains with increasing sophistication.

Killelea said: “For JNIM, the change in tactics can perhaps best be explained by the ‘value v vulnerability’ trade-off. Military forces and political figures are considered high-value targets. As JNIM now controls more territory, it is better able to carry out attacks on higher value targets.”

The tactical shift fits into a pattern of jihadists launching coordinated and sophisticated assaults on military bases across the region, as counterinsurgency missions ramp up. JNIM, which launches drones frequently, has used them in more than 100 cases of drone violence in the last three years across the Sahel. According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), there have also been 16 drone incidents involving the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) since 2014.

“Ten [of the ISWAP incidents] involved drone attacks and the remainder were intelligence‑gathering or surveillance missions used to prepare ground offensives against military targets,” said Ladd Serwat, ACLED’s senior analyst for Africa.

The report also reveals a growing concentration of attacks in border regions, including the Central Sahel tri-border area, and the Lake Chad Basin.

A former Belgian diplomat , 93, should stand trial over alleged complicity in the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of what was then the newly independent Congolese state, a Brussels court has ruled.

Étienne Davignon, the only person still alive among 10 Belgians the Lumumba family accuses of involvement in the killing, is charged with participation in war crimes.

The decision, which follows a surprise referral by the Brussels prosecutor last June, can be appealed against. Davignon, a former vice-president of the European Commission, has denied the charges.

Lumumba’s grandson, Mehdi Lumumba, told Agence France-Presse on Tuesday that he was relieved to hear about the court’s decision. “Belgium is finally confronting its history,” he said.

Lumumba was tortured and assassinated by firing squad in January 1961, alongside his associates Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo. The murders were carried out by separatists in the Katanga region with the support of Belgian mercenaries.

Davignon had arrived in what was then Belgian Congo as a 28-year-old diplomatic intern on the eve of independence in 1960. The charges that the prosecutor outlined relate to his alleged role in Lumumba’s “unlawful detention and transfer” and denial of a fair trial, as well as “humiliating and degrading treatment”. A charge of intent to kill was dismissed.

Davignon, who went on to numerous senior political and business roles, was not present for the hearing at the Palais de Justice in Brussels, and his lawyers made no comment as they left.

Davignon’s lawyer has been contacted for comment.

His lawyer rejected claims of war crimes at a hearing behind closed doors in January and argued that reasonable time to judge the case had passed, according to sources cited in Belgian media.

A 2001 parliamentary inquiry concluded that Belgian ministers bore a moral responsibility for the events that led to the Congolese leader’s gruesome death. Belgium returned a gold-capped tooth to the Lumumba family in 2022 that one of the Belgians involved in the killing had kept as a macabre souvenir.

Belgium’s then prime minister, Alexander De Croo, reiterated his country’s “moral responsibility” for Lumumba’s murder at a ceremony to mark the return of the tooth.

“Belgian ministers, diplomats, officials and officers had perhaps no intention to have Patrice Lumumba assassinated,” he said. “No evidence has been found to support this.

“But they should have realised that his transfer to Katanga put his life in danger. They should have warned, they should have refused any assistance in transferring Patrice Lumumba to the place where he would be executed. Instead they chose not to see … not to act.”

Speaking to the Guardian in 2025, Christophe Marchand, who represents Lumumba’s family, said the case was unusual among former colonial powers.

“There are very few cases where a former colonial state accepts to address the colonial crimes and to consider that they have to be tried in that same colonial state, even if it’s a very long time after,” he said.

At least 23 people have been killed and more than 100 others injured in multiple suspected suicide bombings in the north-eastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, shattering its reputation as a relative oasis of calm in recent years as a long-running insurgency was pushed to the rural hinterlands.

Authorities said the explosions went off at the post office and market areas, as well as the entrance to the University of Maiduguri teaching hospital, on Monday evening during iftar, the breaking of fast in the month of Ramadan.

The post office and Monday market areas were regularly targeted by suicide bombers at the height of Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency, when Maiduguri was a conflict hotspot.

Ten years ago this month, 58 people were killed and more than 140 others injured in four separate suicide blasts including in both locations, in one of the deadliest days in the city’s history.

The latest explosions came on the heels of an attack at a military post on the outskirts of the city, the capital of Borno state, on Sunday night into Monday morning. While no group has yet claimed responsibility for the incident, Nigerian authorities said the reported bombings had been carried out by “suspected Boko Haram terrorist suicide bombers” using improvised explosive devices.

“The cowardly attacks targeted crowded public areas in an attempt by the terrorists to inflict mass casualties and create panic within the metropolis,” Sani Uba, a military spokesperson, said in a statement.

More than 2 million people have been displaced and hundreds of thousands killed in the region by Boko Haram and its offshoots, including the Islamic West Africa Province (ISWAP), as they battle the Nigerian state in an attempt to establish an Islamic caliphate.

Boko Haram was founded in 2002, but intensified attacks after the extrajudicial killing of its then leader, Mohammed Yusuf, in July 2009. During the regime of his successor, the more aggressive Abubakar Shekau, the sect splintered, with ISWAP becoming the more dominant faction and regularly engaging in lethal turf war with its rivals.

Most of the resulting terrorist activity has occurred in rural hinterlands outside Maiduguri, the birthplace of the insurgency. Until a Christmas Eve bombing at a mosque killed at least five people and wounded dozens more last year, there had not been a major attack since 2021 in the city. The mosque attack happened a day before airstrikes by the US in conjunction with Nigeria against Islamic State militants in the north-west.

Last April, the Borno governor, Babagana Zulum, raised the alarm that the jihadists were staging a comeback. Many fear that his warning, which led to a spat with federal authorities, was not properly heeded.

On Tuesday morning, President Bola Tinubu, who is on a state visit to the UK, announced that he had directed security chiefs to relocate to Maiduguri “to take charge of the situation” and “locate them, confront them and completely defeat them”.

In 1845 British citizens and companies were already legally prohibited from owning or buying enslaved people overseas, yet that year 385 captives were “transferred” to a British mining company in Brazil named St John d’El Rey.

Despite a global campaign waged by the UK against slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, the move was not technically illegal because the enslaved people were not sold but “rented” – a practice permitted overseas under the 1843 Slave Trade Act.

There was a maximum term of 14 years, after which they should all have been freed – but that did not happen. The British ambassador to Brazil became aware of the case but, citing a lack of evidence, looked the other way.

It was only more than 30 years later, when it was brought to light by a Brazilian abolitionist, that the 123 survivors were finally freed in 1879. The vast majority, however, had died in captivity.

The case is one of the most notorious examples of British involvement in illegal enslavement in Brazil, said historian Joseph Mulhern – and a stark symbol of how, even after the UK Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British citizens and companies profited from slavery in Latin America’s biggest country for another half century.

“These connections [between the UK and Brazilian slavery] are very much overlooked,” said Mulhern, who recently published the book British Entanglement with Brazilian Slavery – Commerce, Credit and Complicity in Another Empire, c. 1822–1888.

Britons learn about the country’s involvement with slavery “almost as a self-congratulatory narrative”, said Mulhern, as if the country had been a “self-appointed moral arbiter in the demise of the slave trade and slavery – despite the fact that the UK was one of the biggest countries involved in the slave trade.”

In 1831 after intense pressure from the UK, Brazil banned the trafficking of enslaved Africans. For about five years, the new law was enforced, but it was later widely ignored, which is why it became known as a law “for the English to see” – giving rise to an expression still used to refer to measures taken merely for appearances.

In his book, Mulhern shows that the disregard for the law was made possible by British merchants in Brazil who, by supplying goods and long-term credit, enabled a new class of traffickers to emerge and operate illegally. British “officials in Brazil and their superiors in London were all too aware of the intricate connections between British commercial interests and the Brazilian slave trade,” he wrote.

The trade only effectively ended in 1850 with a new law – ironically, also under pressure from the UK – but only after about 750,000 Africans had been illegally brought to Brazil since 1831.

Earlier phases of Mulhern’s research at Durham University’s department of history revealed how British banks profited from slavery in Brazil.

British financial institutions treated enslaved people as “collateral assets” for loans and mortgages. When debtors defaulted, the banks forced auctions to recover their capital – at one such sale in Rio de Janeiro in 1878, a 22-year-old mother, Caetana, was separated from her three-year-old son, Pio.

The book also includes a rare “census”, compiled at the request of Britain’s Foreign Office in 1848 and 1849, listing all “subjects” who owned enslaved people in Brazil.

Despite under-reporting, the document recorded 3,445 enslaved people held by British interests, more than half belonging to mining companies such as St John d’El Rey, which would only close more than a century later, in 1985.

The scandal of the rented enslaved people was exposed by the prominent Brazilian abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco, and is regarded as one of the trigger events that would ultimately lead Brazil to abolish slavery in 1888 – the last country in the Americas to do so.

Although the majority of enslaved people held by Britons were owned by companies, many small traders were also involved, including the owner of a pub.

“Even some of the very poorest British immigrants owned enslaved people,” said Mulhern, who in the book debunks a myth widely circulated at the time that Britons were “benevolent masters”.

“An analysis of the treatment of those enslaved, including illegal enslavement, acts of physical violence and sexual assault, quickly dispels that myth,” he wrote.

Countries in Africa, where farmers depend heavily on imported fertiliser and a large share of household income goes on food, are particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions caused by the war in the Middle East, experts have said.

The conflict has drastically disrupted trade through the strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane not just for oil and gas but also for fertiliser, which is produced in vast quantities in the Gulf.

African countries rank among the most reliant on fertiliser imports by sea from the Middle East. A new report by the UN’s trade and development agency (Unctad) says 54% of Sudan’s fertiliser arrives in this way. The figures for Somalia and Kenya are 30% and 26% respectively.

About one-third of seaborne trade in fertiliser, a vital agricultural input for productivity improvement, is transported through the strait of Hormuz.

A lot of the world’s fertiliser is produced in the Gulf, which has an abundance of cheap fossil gas – critical in the manufacture of nitrogen-based fertilisers such as urea – and produces high amounts of sulphur, a by-product used to make phosphate fertilisers.

Fertiliser prices have soared since the war started last month, and Unctad says that may increase food costs and intensify cost-of-living pressures, particularly for the most vulnerable people. Rising oil and gas prices will have the same impact.

African economies are highly vulnerable and face heightened uncertainty during big shocks, according to Unctad. Reasons include reliance on foreign markets, volatile commodity exports, high debt and weak infrastructure.

Governments across Africa are already struggling with budgetary pressures and are therefore particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.

“Any disruptions, any shocks really affect all of us,” said Jervin Naidoo, political analyst at Oxford Economics Africa, an advisory firm.

XN Iraki, professor of business and economics at the University of Nairobi, said the impact of higher oil prices would be felt “acutely” in Africa because most people on the continent work in the informal sector, where there is “uncertain income”.

Rama Yade, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, said on X that rising oil prices pose “serious economic challenges” for many governments on the continent. Governments may be forced to increase subsidies or pass on the cost to consumers, “which could trigger social and political pressure”, she said.

African countries are bracing themselves for the potential shocks. Kenya’s energy minister, Opiyo Wandayi, recently said the country had scheduled imports of petroleum products for delivery until the end of April. He added that the ministry would “continue taking necessary actions to ensure there is uninterrupted supply”.

In Tanzania, the president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, has directed the country’s energy ministry to strengthen its strategic fuel reserves.

Ethiopia has introduced a special fuel subsidy to cushion people from the economic shock of surging global oil prices, while Zambia has warned fuel retailers against hoarding the product.

Naidoo, the political analyst, said that while some countries have mechanisms such as subsidies to cushion people against high oil prices, they may not be enough to mitigate the effects in the long term.

The continent faced similar shocks in 2022 when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted supply chains.

On the other end of the supply chain, rising crude prices may mean higher revenues for oil exporters such as Nigeria, Algeria and Angola, as other countries turn to them.

On the African supply side, the war is affecting African exports to the Middle East or through it by air and sea. Last week, Kenya’s agriculture minister, Mutahi Kagwe, said the conflict has disrupted the export of meat, tea and other food products to the Middle East.

On a humid afternoon in Lagos, a shoot for a comedy skit is under way on a set that looks more like a small film production.

Dozens of people mill about: lighting assistants, a sound engineer, a makeup artist and even a content creator recording unscripted behind-the-scenes footage. At the centre is Broda Shaggi, born Samuel Animashaun Perry, who is issuing instructions, rehearsing lines and performing caricatures.

Behind the punchlines and viral memes lies a lot of hard work, according to Olufemi Oguntamu, the chief executive of Penzaarville Africa, a Lagos-based media agency that manages Broda Shaggi.

“He shoots like he’s doing a movie,” Oguntamu said. “He gets buses to take the crew around. They use drones. They use big cameras. It’s serious business now … people don’t understand how difficult it is to keep up creating content every day because it has to be new content.”

Broda Shaggi’s comedy career began at the University of Lagos, when he started uploading skits to social media platforms. He has since amassed 11.9 million followers on Instagram, released music and crossed over into film and television work.

The 32-year-old is one of the most popular figures in an ecosystem of Nigerian social media creators that includes skit-makers, YouTubers, TikTokers, podcasters, streamers and more who are building audiences across Africa and the diaspora.

• A Broda Shaggi skit making fun of Nigerians who use highfalutin English

• A skit critiquing people who overreact during breakups

According to the 2026 Africa Creator Economy Report, the sector is valued at $3.1bn (£2.3bn) and projected to grow nearly six-fold to $17.8bn by 2030. In Nigeria, however, one of the key countries driving this growth, many influencers say their fame is yet to translate to financial comfort.

Beneath the headline numbers lies a sad reality. More than half of Africa’s creators earn less than $100 a month. Platforms make less money from advertising than in other parts of the world, which translates into lower payments to creators, meaning many rely on family, friends and brand partnerships for their income.

More than a third view their jobs as hobbies, in part because of severe operational challenges such as unstable power supply and access to funding.

“In Nigeria, public capital is not readily available to digital creators … it doesn’t exist,” said David Adeleke, the chief executive of the newsletter Communique, which co-authored the Africa Creator Economy Report. “A lot of the public capital that we find goes to filmmakers and infrastructure players, people building physical spaces.”

Adeleke suggested a policy like the UAE’s renewable 10-year golden visa, which allows creators to live and work tax-free. “One of the biggest problems that Nigerian creators have is the shortage of monetisation systems. We need policies that specifically focus on encouraging international companies to come into Nigeria to enable local creators to monetise their content globally.”

• A skit in which Broda Shaggi plays a malfunctioning AI-powered humanoid robot

Some creators in Kenya have been pushing for their government or startups to spend at least 10% of their digital advertising budget on creators and creator platforms.

The Nigerian government is hoping the creative economy can help to diversify its oil-dependent revenues. There is no specific creator tax, but those who earn more than 50m naira (£27,360) a year are taxed up to 25% as part of a bracket for freelancers and remote workers.

This January, the third African Creators Summit drew thousands of content creators, including some from outside Nigeria, to Lagos. Speakers called for more supportive policies from government for the emerging sector, instead of taxing it first.

There was also talk of dismantling bureaucracy and updating existing legislation for federal agencies that regulate the sector. Some also accuse the government of wanting to censor online content under the guise of combatting misinformation and disinformation.

Beyond monetisation, creators face intellectual property theft and AI cloning. Experts say coordination between regulators and global tech firms to protect creators is key. Government officials say they are willing to engage industry players but are uncertain about whom, due to the existence of several creator unions.

Baba Agba, an adviser with the ministry of art, culture, tourism and creative economy, said at the summit: “The sector needs to come together and say, this is what we want … and they need to want to work with us, too.”

Oguntamu agrees. “I’ve seen a lot [of unions], but none has weight … maybe that’s why we’re not being taken seriously yet by the government. Because we don’t have one voice.”

He said meetings with government would need to focus on providing an “enabling environment” – including bringing internet data costs down – to be considered productive.

“As long as we have [that] enabling environment, every creator can thrive,” he said. “A lot of content creators who are big now resort to only shooting interior content because, when they go outside, every [street urchin] wants a piece of them … if you are abroad and you are shooting content, it’s so different.”

A sacred artefact looted by French colonial authorities more than a century ago has been returned to Côte d’Ivoire in one of the most significant cultural restitutions to a former French colony in years.

The Djidji Ayôkwé, a talking drum confiscated in 1916 by French administrators, landed at 8.45am on Friday at the airport in Port Bouët on the outskirts of the economic capital, Abidjan. It was handed over to Ivorian officials in Paris earlier this month after being removed from the Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac Museum.

Aboussou Guy Mobio, the chief of the Adjamé-Bingerville community, said: “After a long stay away from this land, it is returning to its own people and it is an honour for us and a relief to welcome it,. This is the missing piece of the puzzle that is returning today … Receiving this sacred instrument is a relief, but it is also another form of connection with our ancestors who were very close to this instrument.”

Talking drums are hourglass-shaped pressure drums designed to mimic the tone, pitch and rhythm of human speech. The 4-metre Djidji Ayôkwé, which weighs 430kg, held cultural and political significance to the Ebrié people – after whom the lagoon in Abidjan is named – as a symbol of resistance. Before and during colonial times, it was used to send messages over several miles to announce deaths or celebrations – and in some cases, alert villages about coming danger. After villagers resisted forced labour on a road in one incident in 1916, colonial authorities seized it and took it away to France.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, promised to return the drum in 2021, but it took four years of discussions and lobbying for the French parliament to ratify and approve the decision.

“I feel deep emotion. We are indeed experiencing a moment of justice and remembrance,” Françoise Remarck, the minister of culture and Francophonie in Côte d’Ivoire, said in her speech on Friday. She thanked President Alassane Ouattara and Macron for what she called “a historic day”.

Then she addressed the drum, saying: “Djidji Ayôkwé, today your return is a message for our youth who have chosen to reclaim their history, and for the communities … a symbol of social cohesion, peace and dialogue … 13 March is just one step.”

As a forklift operator rolled the wooden crate holding the drum from the aircraft, a cultural troupe broke into the traditional tchaman dance. Another ceremony is expected to herald the permanent installation of the drum at the Musée des Civilisations de Côte d’Ivoire in the Plateau administrative district, at a later date believed to be in April. In readiness for the exhibition to the public, Unesco has donated $100,000 (£75,400) through its Abidjan office for research and training at the museum.

Sylvie Memel Kassi, a former director of the museum and founder of the TAPA Foundation for Arts and Culture, said the drum’s return to Ivorian soil paved the way for more restitution. “We are studying eight other objects,” she said, referring to the Ivorian and French authorities.

The government of Eswatini announced on Thursday it received four more “third country” deportees from the United States, as part of the Trump administration’s multimillion-dollar deal with the small African nation.

Now, a total of 19 deportees from the US have been sent to Eswatini when they hail from other countries, amid the Trump administration’s continued anti-immigrant crackdown and changes to immigration policy.

A system for monitoring people moved around by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in the form of a flight tracker, run by the advocacy group Human Rights First, tracked the deportation flight to Eswatini. The flight apparently took off from Phoenix, Arizona, and landed in Eswatini in southern Africa at around 11pm ET on Wednesday night, according to the ICE flight monitor.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of ICE, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.

Two of the deportees sent to Eswatini on Wednesday night were from Somalia, one was from Sudan and one was from Tanzania, the government said. No identities or other details about them was disclosed by the authorities.

In the past year, the Trump administration has struck “third country” deals with numerous countries around the globe. The deals allow countries, often after payment from the US, to accept deported immigrants who are not their citizens.

A recent congressional investigation found that the Trump administration paid more than $32m to five foreign governments to accept a number of deportees.

“The Administration is conducting questionable deals by making direct payments primarily to corrupt and unstable foreign governments with track records of public corruption, human rights abuses and human trafficking,” the investigation, carried out by Senate foreign relations committee Democrats, reads.

Previous deportees to Eswatini, who arrived in July and October of last year, included nationals of Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and Yemen. A lawyer for some of that earlier group, Alma David, told Reuters a Cambodian man, Pheap Rom, was due to be repatriated to his country of origin. Rom would be the second person to be released from Eswatini custody after another man was sent back to Jamaica last year.

The Trump administration paid the small southern African country $5.1m to receive the deportees.

“In line with this agreement,” the Eswatini government said in a statement, “the nation has received another cohort of four third-country nationals from the United States.”

Eswatini is one of several African countries involved in third-country deportation deals with the US. Three men sent there last July filed a claim against Eswatini’s government with the African Union’s human rights body. They said their continued detention was an unlawful violation of their rights, the Guardian reported. The Eswatini high court last month threw out a case filed by local human rights lawyers that challenged it, though an appeal has been lodged.

Despite having served their sentences for crimes on US soil, the remainder of the third-country deportees sent to Eswatini last year were still in prison.

Reuters contributed reporting

A flagship health project in Africa, which UK ministers said would play a vital role in protecting Britain from future pandemic threats, is being axed due to aid cuts, the Guardian can reveal.

The Global Health Workforce Programme (GHWP) which supported development and training for healthcare staff in six African countries, will close at the end of the month, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said.

“That is a genuinely historic decision, and the UK now risks ceding ground in global health that we will struggle to recover,” said Ben Simms, chief executive of Global Health Partnerships, which ran the programme.

Since its launch, the GHWP has been highlighted by ministers and officials as an effort to boost global pandemic preparedness by strengthening national health systems, and a way to meet the UK’s moral obligations to invest in countries from which it recruits large numbers of staff for the NHS and social care.

Similar programmes have run since 2008. The current scheme involved projects in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Malawi and Somaliland. Its current three-year contract was due to end this month, but had been expected to be renewed, as with previous iterations.

Renewing funding in 2023, under Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, then health minister Will Quince said: “This funding aims to make a real difference in strengthening the performance of health systems in each of the participating countries, which will have a knock-on effect on boosting global pandemic preparedness and reducing health inequalities. The pandemic showed us that patients in the UK are not safe unless the world as a whole is resilient against health threats.”

In one project, the Power for the People Africa Trust is funded through the programme to train staff to tackle gender-based violence and reduce linked teenage pregnancies and HIV infections in Kenya’s Homa Bay county.

Caren Okombo of the trust said gains would reverse if funding stopped, adding: “New HIV infections in Homa Bay today: at some point these infections would cross borders. They would get to [Britain’s] population as well. So stopping them from where they start is something that should be of importance to a country like Britain.”

However, the Labour government announced last year that it would reduce overseas aid funding from 0.5% to 0.3% of GDP in order to boost military spending. That followed an earlier cut under Boris Johnson’s premiership from 0.7%.

The GHWP cut was revealed in a written answer to a parliamentary question asked by former development minister Sir Andrew Mitchell.

FCDO minister Chris Elmore said the GHWP would close at the end of March.

He said: “The UK should be proud of the progress made in international development this century. But the world has changed, and so must we. With less money, we must make choices and focus on greater impact.”

Elmore said efforts were being made “to ensure the sustainability of projects beyond the programme’s lifetime” and that the government “remains committed to international development and will continue to support countries to build resilient, sustainable health systems”.

A review by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) published this week found that the system for allocating official development assistance budgets in recent years was “not always based on shared strategic priorities or evidence of value for money”.

In a statement, Global Health Partnerships said: “We understand the fiscal pressures that the government faces, but we are clear that cutting investment in health workforce development in low- and middle-income countries has real human consequences – and ultimately costs more in the long run.”

Partnerships could not survive on goodwill alone, they added. “They require sustained investment and institutional commitment and once that thread is cut, it is very difficult to pick it back up.”

The FCDO was approached for comment.

The rapid expansion of AI-powered mass-surveillance systems across Africa is violating citizens’ right to privacy and having a chilling effect on society, according to experts on human rights and emerging technologies.

At least $2bn (£1.5bn) has been spent by 11 African governments on Chinese-built surveillance technology that recognises faces and monitors movements, according to a new report by the Institute of Development Studies, which warns that national security is being used to justify implementing these systems with little regulation.

Chinese companies often sell the technology in packages that include CCTV systems, facial recognition, biometric data collection and cameras that track vehicle movements and are presented as a tool to help rapidly urbanising countries modernise their cities and reduce crime.

But researchers from the African Digital Rights Network, who co-authored the report, said there was no real evidence of these systems reducing crime and warned that they allow governments to monitor human rights activists and political opponents, arrest protesters and lead journalists to self-censor.

Wairagala Wakabi, executive director of the Kampala-based policy body Cipesa and co-author of the report, said: “This large-scale and invasive AI-enabled surveillance of public spaces is not ‘legal, necessary or proportionate’ to the legitimate aim of providing security. History shows us that this is the latest tool used by governments to invade the privacy of citizens and stifle freedom of movement and expression.”

Nigeria has spent the most on infrastructure, investing $470m on 10,000 smart cameras by last year. Egypt has installed 6,000, while Algeria and Uganda have about 5,000 each.

An average of $240m was spent by the 11 countries with the investment often funded by loans from Chinese banks.

The report emphasises that a lack of regulation or legal framework on storing and using the data on individuals is a concern, given the rapid rollout of this technology but Bulelani Jili, an assistant professor at Georgetown University, said even the introduction of laws could be dangerous.

Surveillance of online activity has often been used to crack down on dissent and has been legalised through laws that can criminalise ordinary people for their posts online. Jili said focusing on the introduction of laws could simply allow governments to claim the systems had been legitimised.

“The real challenge, therefore, is not simply whether surveillance is regulated, but how societies negotiate the balance between security, accountability and civil liberties once these technologies become deeply institutionalised,” he said.

He said there had already been concerns about facial recognition being used to monitor activists in Uganda and that surveillance systems were used to crack down on gen Z-led protests in Kenya.

This could pose a danger to anyone deemed a threat to governments in the future, he warned.

“Historically marginalised communities, political activists, journalists and minority groups can be disproportionately affected when these technologies become embedded in policing and intelligence practices,” said Jili.

Yosr Jouini, who authored the report’s section on Algeria, said the systems were originally introduced in connection to “smart city” projects that promised to tackle crime and manage traffic but in reality often became mainly a tool of the security forces.

“The narrative is framed only through a security lens, which dismisses any other concern and does not provide enough mechanisms for citizens to ensure their rights are protected,” she said.

She highlighted how street protests in 2019 and 2021 played a key role in political change but the expansion of surveillance systems could make people hesitant about protesting in the future.

“We know a lot of protesters have been arrested when participating in public space gatherings. We don’t know for sure if it was based on the cameras but there’s a chilling effect – because it could happen – on people’s willingness to participate in public gatherings.”

At least 17 people, most of them schoolgirls, were killed on Wednesday when an explosive-laden drone blamed on Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces struck a secondary school and a health care centre.

At least 10 people were wounded in the strike in the village of Shukeiri in the White Nile province, according to Dr Musa al-Majeri, director of Douiem Hospital, the nearest major medical facility to the village.

Al-Majeri said three girls suffered serious injuries; two of them underwent surgeries at the hospital while the third was evacuated to the capital, Khartoum.

The war-tracking Sudan Doctors Network reported the strike first, saying those killed included two teachers and a health care worker. The group said there was no military presence in the village.

Both the medical group and al-Majeri blamed the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces for the strike. The RSF did not respond to a request for comment.

“This horrific crime represents a continuation of the violations committed by the RSF in the White Nile,” said Dr Razan Al-Mahdi, a spokeswoman for the medical group, adding that the paramilitaries attacked several civilian facilities in the past two days, including a student dormitory and a power station.

The strike in Shukeiri was the latest deadly attack in Sudan’s nearly three-year war.

Sudan slid into chaos in April 2023 when a power struggle between the military and the RSF exploded into open fighting in Khartoum and elsewhere in the country.

The devastating war has killed more than 40,000 people, according to UN figures, but aid groups say that the true number could be many times higher.

The fighting has centered in the Kordofan region, where deadly attacks, mostly by drones, were reported daily.

The war has been marked by atrocities including mass killings, gang rapes and other crimes, investigated by the International Criminal Court as potential war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The most recent atrocities happened in October when the RSF and its Janjweed allies overran the Darfur city of el-Fasher . The RSF attack there bore “hallmarks of genocide ,” according to UN-commissioned experts.

At least 6,000 people were killed in three days in October in el-Fasher, the UN’s Human Rights Office said.

At least three people were killed in a drone attack in Goma early on Wednesday morning, a spokesperson for the M23 rebel group has said.

The attack happened at about 4am in a residential neighbourhood in the city, which has been under M23 occupation since January 2025.

Lawrence Kanyuka, the spokesperson of the Congo River Alliance group of rebels that includes M23, condemned the attack and accused the government of being behind it.

“A drone attack is currently being carried out against the city of Goma by the terrorist regime of Kinshasa, well beyond the front lines,” he said on X. “This act of aggression constitutes an intolerable provocation targeting a densely populated urban area and deliberately endangering thousands of innocent civilians.”

The government has not commented on the attack and no one has claimed responsibility.

Images on social media show responders putting out fire on the upper floor of a two-storey house with a damaged roof.

Goma, the capital of North Kivu province and the largest city in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the site of deadly fighting last January when M23 rebels stormed the city in an attempt to make territorial gains in the region. Up to 2,000 people were killed.

The Rwanda-backed M23 is one of more than 100 armed groups fighting Congolese forces in the mineral-rich eastern DRC. It says its objective is to safeguard the interests of the Congolese Tutsi and other minorities, including protecting them against Hutu rebel groups who escaped to the DRC after taking part in the 1994 Rwanda genocide that targeted Tutsis.

M23 occupies large swathes of eastern DRC and has established parallel governments in the territories it controls.

Fighting has continued in the region despite a US-brokered peace agreement signed in December between the Congolese and Rwandan governments.

Last week, the US imposed sanctions ‌on the Rwandan army and four of its senior officials, accusing them of “supporting, training, and fighting” alongside M23.

Wednesday’s drone attack signals shifting dynamics in the conflict through the increasing use of drone warfare by both parties.

Two weeks ago an army drone attack in Rubaya, an important M23-controlled coltan mining town, killed the group’s military spokesperson, Willy Ngoma, and several other leaders.

Last week, M23 claimed responsibility for a drone attack targeting Kisangani airport in Tshopo province in the country’s east.