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Kigali in talks to house migrant deportees from US, but rights groups worry such deals further endanger the vulnerable.

The image came from a video that showed humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Trump falsely presented the photo as evidence of mass killings of white South Africans.

Warning: This article contains photos of multiple bruised and injured elderly people and a bathroom with bloodstains.In South Africa, there is a phenomenon you have likely heard of called farm murders...

We Built This City is a limited series of photo essays by The Continent on African cities. This week, we are in Algiers with Fethi Sahraoui.

Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the ven­ture cap­it­al­ist who has become a fun­draiser for Don­ald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African dia­spora fam­ily in Ten­nessee. Peter Thiel spent years of child­hood in South Africa and Nam­i­bia, where his father was involved in uranium min­ing as part of the apartheid regime’s clandes­tine drive to acquire nuc­lear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African soft­ware developer and tech journ­al­ist liv­ing near Johan­nes­burg, has been iden­ti­fied by two teams of forensic lin­guists as the ori­gin­ator of the QAnon con­spir­acy, which helped shape Trump’s Maga move­ment. (Furber denies being “Q”.) In short, four of Maga’s most influ­en­tial voices are fiftyso­mething white men with form­at­ive exper­i­ences in apartheid South Africa. This prob­ably isn’t a coin­cid­ence. I say that as a fiftyso­mething white man whose form­at­ive exper­i­ences include child­hood vis­its to my exten­ded fam­ily in apartheid South Africa. (My par­ents left Johan­nes­burg before I was born.) We’d swim in my grand­par­ents’ pool while the maid and her grand­chil­dren lived in the gar­age. These exper­i­ences were so shock­ing, so dif­fer­ent from any­thing I exper­i­enced grow­ing up in Europe, that they are my sharpest child­hood memor­ies. So what con­nects these men’s south­ern African back­grounds with Maga today? South­ern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme ver­sion of some of the main themes of Amer­ican life today. First, there was tre­mend­ous inequal­ity. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was “known for con­di­tions not far removed from inden­tured ser­vitude,” writes Thiel’s bio­grapher Max Chafkin. “White man­agers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new med­ical and dental centre in Swakop­mund and mem­ber­ship in the com­pany coun­try club.” The mine’s black migrant work­ers lived in work camps. To whites of a cer­tain mind­set, this inequal­ity wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Cer­tain people were equipped to suc­ceed in cap­it­al­ism, while oth­ers weren’t. That was simply the way it was, and it was point­less to try to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s con­tem­por­ar­ies at Stan­ford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid “works” and was “eco­nom­ic­ally sound”. His spokes­man has denied that he ever sup­por­ted apartheid. The white South African night­mare in the 1980s, hanging over everything, was that one day Black people would rise up and mas­sacre whites. Like the US, South Africa was a viol­ent soci­ety and becom­ing more viol­ent in the ’80s. Musk’s teen­age recol­lec­tions of see­ing murders on trains may not be entirely fac­tual, but do evoke the atmo­sphere of the era. In 2023 he warned about poten­tial “gen­o­cide of white people in South Africa”. Trump’s claim last week about “Amer­ican girls being raped and sod­om­ised and murdered by sav­age crim­inal ali­ens” preyed on sim­ilar white fears. The final com­mon­al­ity between many white South Afric­ans who exper­i­enced the end of apartheid and today’s Amer­ican right: a con­tempt for gov­ern­ment. The apartheid regime and then the African National Con­gress left mil­lions of South Afric­ans without elec­tri­city, dig­nity, safety or decent school­ing. That exper­i­ence can encour­age anti-gov­ern­ment liber­tari­an­ism. Furber has said that the first online mes­sage of what would become QAnon — “Open your eyes. Many in our govt wor­ship Satan” — made per­fect sense to him. If you’re a liber­tarian who believes that inequal­ity is nat­ural and lives in fear of race war, you will be drawn towards a cer­tain type of Amer­ican polit­ics. You cer­tainly won’t want gov­ern­ment or insti­tu­tions to try to inter­vene against racism. In 1995, a year after the ANC began attempt­ing that in South Africa, Thiel and Sacks, who met at Stan­ford, pub­lished The Diversity Myth in the US. It’s a flu­ent defence of “west­ern civil­isa­tion” against “mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism” (or what the right now calls “woke”), writ­ten by two white twentyso­methings who are sure that racism isn’t the prob­lem. Indeed, they explain: “There are almost no real racists . . . in Amer­ica’s younger gen­er­a­tion.” Three dec­ades later, this duo and Musk, with whom they united in Sil­icon Val­ley’s “PayPal mafia”, are back­ing a white Repub­lican ticket that peddles made-up stor­ies about Black immig­rants from Haiti eat­ing pets. The oppos­ing Demo­crats are field­ing a Black pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate for the third time in five elec­tions. The racial aspect of polit­ics is almost as plain as it was in South Africa. Obvi­ously, Musk et al incurred many other influ­ences besides apartheid, ran­ging from sci­ence­fic­tion to the bil­lion­aire’s fear of the tax bill. Still, an old, white South African mind­set lives on in Trump­ism.

 A Kenyan with a gay pride flag at a protest in Nairobi. The US anti-abortion lobby group C-Fam and the Christian group ADF will be at a conference in the city this month. Photograph: EPA-EFE Advocates for sexual, reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights in Africa are bracing themselves for an influx of some of the most powerful, ultra-conservative campaigners from the US, Poland, Switzerland and the Netherlands over the coming months. The prominent campaigners, who all oppose abortion, transgender and LGBTQ+ rights, and are against sexuality education, are due to speak at a series of conferences focused on African “family values” and “national sovereignty”. Austin Ruse, a former Breitbart columnist and president of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam); Bettina Roska, a legal officer based in Geneva at the US conservative Christian advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF); and the Dutch founder of Christian Council International, Henk Jan van Schothorst, are among the most notable figures in the global anti-rights movement scheduled to address the Pan-African Conference on Family Values in Nairobi on 12-17 May. Also appearing will be MPs from Uganda and Malawi, Kenyan lawyers and the Africa campaigns director for CitizenGO, Ann Kioko, who calls herself “the most feared” anti-abortion activist in Africa on X. C-Fam and ADF are designated as hate groups by the US monitoring group Southern Poverty Law Center, as is Family Watch International, another backer. Hosted by the Africa Christian Professionals Forum, with a focus on “promoting and protecting the sanctity of life, family values and religious freedom”, the Nairobi event has sent chills through activists and health workers in Kenya and beyond, who fear their work will become much more difficult at a time when the second Trump term has supercharged a “freefall” of rights globally. Nelly Munyasia, director of Reproductive Health Network Kenya (RHNK), says there is nothing African about the agenda being pushed under the guise of family values. “They claim it is African, and yet it’s not African. Africa values are pegged on love and living together as a community. “They are perpetrators of hate,” she says, with their anti-abortion stance “predisposing women to death”. Livingstone Imbayi and Nelly Munyasia, who says the agenda being pushed at the conferences is not African. ‘They are perpetrators of hate,’ says the reproductive health activist. Photograph: Reproductive Health Network Kenya As a result of her advocacy work and efforts to improve access to health information and services, Munyasia has been attacked online and called a “murderer” and a “killer”, accused of “leading young people to hell” by anti-abortion groups. Okwara Masafu, a human rights lawyer at Kenya’s National Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission , fears the conference will catapult Kenya’s family protection bill through parliament. The 2023 bill proposes harsh anti-LGBTQ+ laws including life imprisonment for homosexuality, and a number of bans targeted at the LGBTQ+ community including public displays of “amorous relations”, cross-dressing and protests. “This conference is going to solidify the push-through of the family protection bill,” she says. “We can’t overstate the harm it will do.” The Pan-African Conference on Family Values is one of four significant gatherings taking place in Africa over the next four months. This weekend, Uganda will host the third Interparliamentary Forum on Family, Sovereignty and Values. It is reportedly being sponsored, as it was last year, by Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccination advocacy organisation founded by the US secretary of health, Robert F Kennedy Jr. The first Interparliamentary Forum was attended by Sharon Slater, founder of Family Watch International (FWI), another organisation accused of spreading hate and homophobia, and the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, who signed the draconian Anti-Homosexuality Act weeks later in May 2023. According to a CNN investigation, FWI even helped shape the legislation, which is one of the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws with penalties including life in prison or the death penalty in some cases. The group denies that it was involved in lobbying for this law. Kenya’s family protection bill, which aims to outlaw same-sex relationships, LGBTQ+ activities, public cross-dressing and related advocacy campaigns, was submitted by the opposition MP Peter Kaluma shortly after he attended the 2023 conference in Uganda, suggesting that such gatherings not only “stunt and reverse rights but also allow for sharing tactics and resources”, according to Joy Asasira, a reproductive and gender justice campaigner in east Africa. In June, the Mormons, or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, will host a conference entitled Strengthening Families in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, with Mormon leaders taking key roles alongside the country’s first lady, Fatima Maada Bio, and Ivory Coast’s minister of family, women and children, Nasseneba Touré Diané. Fatima Maada Bio speaks at a UN event last year. Activists fear her presence at the Mormon-led conference will harm efforts to pass a law widening reproductive rights. Photograph: Imago/Alamy The presence of the first lady is “worrying”, says Ramatu Bangura, co-chief executive at Purposeful, a hub for girls’ activism in Sierra Leone, because Fatima Bio has, in the past, championed the rights of girls and women. Bangura is concerned that the Strengthening Families conference will affect the passing of a landmark bill that could overturn the country’s British colonial-era abortion ban, legalising a termination at up to 14 weeks for any reason and at any stage under certain conditions. Previous attempts at decriminalising abortion in Sierra Leone have failed because of lobbying from religious and anti-abortion groups. Although Bangura believes Sierra Leone’s president, Julius Maada Bio, supports reproductive rights, she describes the pressure from these groups as “intensive”. “Anti-abortion groups have raised their profile, and are much more adept and astute at their efforts. They’ve seen successes in places like Uganda and Ghana, so they feel emboldened,” says Bangura. She suspects the delay to the bill, which is going through parliament, is due to the conference, which will act as a “rallying point” for the anti-rights movement. Sign up to Global Dispatch Get a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development team Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. In August, Advocates Africa, a network of Christian lawyers and law students, is hosting a conference in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, with backing from ADF. ADF’s application for observer status at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 2023 was rejected, but Saoyo Tabitha Griffith, a Kenyan lawyer and activist at a gender rights organisation, says it was a clear example of western actors trying to increase their influence on the continent, as a means to “weaponise morality and other issues like ‘family’ and ‘African’ values to trigger massive legal reforms”. A session in Freetown at Purposeful, a Sierra Leonean feminist hub for girls active in the community. Photograph: WeArePurposeful “This is not just an attempt to infiltrate these bodies to export their hateful agenda; it is also intended to give them more credibility within the African continental context,” says Griffith. These conferences are not new, but observers say the support they are getting from leading figures in the global anti-rights movement is a significant development. “This is the first time in the history of our tracking that we are seeing new faces [at these conferences] such as La Manif pour tous [a French anti-transgender and anti LGBTQ+ group], Ordo luris [a ultra-conservative Polish Catholic group] and Political Network for Values [a global far-right network that rejects abortion and equal marriage] openly advertising themselves as sponsors and speakers at an African conference,” says Griffith. At one point the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was rumoured to be attending the Nairobi conference in a move, activists believe, that was calculated to give credibility and weight to the event. “[These conferences are] an opportunity for back-channel advocacy,” says Sarah Shaw, associate director of advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices, an organisation that provides safe abortion services around the world. “All it takes is an invitation letter to go out and they can list Rubio as a speaker tbc, and if they are lucky it will get kicked down the chain. It is a tactic, but one that would not have been possible before Trump’s second term. It sends a very clear message to other governments in the region that this is now the mainstream.” All four conferences are framed around family values, protecting religious rights and national sovereignty. “It’s only when you start digging and you look at the narrative surrounding them,” says Shaw. “It’s family, but it’s a very heteronormative version of the family.” Activists across the region are mobilising to counter the idea that African cultural values are under threat, as suggested by the anti-rights movement, and expose it for what it is: an attempt to maintain colonial-era laws that, in Bangura’s words, “were never in the interest of our people in our communities”. Munyasia says: “Debunking their disinformation and providing the right information for everyone is essential.” The Women’s Probono Initiative, a legal and advocacy organisation for women and girls in Uganda, has issued a statement expressing its alarm at the conferences in Uganda and Kenya, and warning that “family protection” policies are a smokescreen for oppressing women. “While we welcome critical discussions around strengthening families … we recognise from prior similar ‘family conferences’’ that what they seek to do is strip women of their basic human rights and dignity and reinforce the dominance of men within our society using family values as a vehicle,” it says. Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees who fled their country amid a wave of anti-gay government policies. They were living in a protected section of Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. Photograph: Zuma Press/Alamy Munyasia’s organisation is among the signatories of a petition criticising the venue for hosting the Pan-African Conference on Family Values. Boma hotel is co-owned by Red Cross Kenya, and is “complicit in enabling this harmful gathering”, it says. The Guardian has approached Red Cross Kenya for comment, but has yet to receive a response. Purposeful has been collaborating with women’s rights activists and organisations across Africa to strategise and learn from one another. On 25 May it will co-publish a report, Until Everybody Is Free, aimed at African feminists and young activists with information on networks, strategies and funding of organised opposition to rights and gender justice on the continent. “We’re ready for a battle; we’re ready to fight, and we understand what the stakes are,” says Bangura. “These forces that are coming into our country from outside are designed to take us back to a colonial era that we’re not interested in going back to.”

 By Abbas Nazil In a landmark move poised to redefine environmental accountability in Africa, a coalition of civil society organizations has filed a petition to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, demanding an Advisory Opinion on the responsibilities of African governments in addressing the climate crisis through a human rights lens. Filed on May 2 in Arusha, Tanzania, the petition marks the first time that civil society has utilized the Court’s advisory powers for a climate-related cause, signaling a major turning point for climate justice across the continent. Led by the African Climate Platform (ACP), Resilient40, Natural Justice, and the Environmental Lawyers Collective for Africa, in collaboration with the Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU), the petition calls on the Court to interpret how existing African legal frameworks mandate state protection of fundamental rights under conditions of worsening climate impacts. These include the rights to life, health, water, food, housing, and a safe environment — all of which are increasingly under threat due to rising temperatures, droughts, floods, and other climate-induced disasters. Alfred Brownell, Lead Campaigner for the ACP, emphasized the broader significance of the case: “This isn’t just a legal filing — it’s a demand for justice. Africa contributes the least to climate change but suffers the most. We need the Court to acknowledge that environmental destruction is a violation of human rights and to hold our governments accountable for protecting current and future generations.” The petition is rooted in African legal instruments such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the Maputo Protocol, the Kampala Convention, and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. It seeks legal clarity and stronger standards for climate adaptation, loss and damage compensation, energy justice, corporate responsibility, and the protection of environmental defenders. As the petition was finalized, a broad range of voices from across the continent gathered in Arusha to share stories of climate suffering and resilience. From the water protests and heatwaves in North Africa to the record drought threatening 61 million people in Southern Africa, the message was clear: climate change is already ravaging communities. Testimonies highlighted the disproportionate burdens faced by women, Indigenous peoples, and youth, who are often both the most affected and the least represented in decision-making. Activists underscored the increasing risks faced by land and environmental defenders, many of whom suffer harassment, arrests, or violence for protecting natural ecosystems. Others, like Inna Maria Shikongo of Namibia, stressed the urgent need to confront climate injustice and inequality across gender and generational lines. Legal experts, including PALU’s June Cynthia Okelo, insisted that the petition sends a powerful message: Africa will no longer accept being a dumping ground for global pollution and negligence. With the Court now poised to weigh in, this case could set a transformative precedent for environmental and human rights law in Africa. A press briefing at the African Court is expected to follow, outlining next steps in what may become a defining moment for climate accountability across the continent. The post Africa’s Historic Climate Justice Petition Heads to Human Rights Court appeared first on Naturenews.africa.

The government has called for strict monitoring and thorough vetting processes for all individuals entrusted with the care of children. This comes after two minors went […]

Pope Francis sought to make the church more welcoming, global and collegial, after his predecessors adopted more doctrinaire and traditional approaches.