The bomb went off at dusk just as everyone was preparing for evening prayer. I was only a few blocks away from its epicenter and felt the reverberation to my core. A car bomb had been driven into Mogadishu’s Hotel Ambassador in Somalia as a precursor to a sustained attack by al-Shabaab gunmen that would last for …
Africa’s most populous country is launching a long-overdue national program for its millions of small-scale family farmers: a soil test kit linked to the digital cloud. The program by the government of Nigeria follows decades of declining soil health and mounting malnutrition. Known as “Soil Doctor”, the test will enable farmers to quickly analyze the …
The memory of 1976 is one of violence and courage and smoke and dust of course, but it is now a collectively owned memory, one that – if taken seriously – implicates us all as we chart the future. The ANC would like to claim 1976 as its struggle but we know this is only …
As a child, my friend Fola was good at math and excelled in the sciences and he wanted to be an engineer. But losing both his parents before the age of 15 changed everything. He was forced to adapt to a new and limited scope of opportunities available to him, both academically and financially. As …
Southern Africa is undergoing the worst drought in more than three decades. More than 30 million people in South Africa, Malawi, and my home country Zimbabwe are facing hunger. While this year's drought is largely attributed to the El Nino effect, rains have been increasingly erratic over the past two decades. This could be the …