Two days earlier, people in Lebanon’s capital had commemorated the 2020 Beirut port explosion. The boom was reminiscent of the shattering sound back then, when 237 people were killed. 

This explosive sound was quickly followed by another — stronger and louder. In the streets, terrified people scrambled for shelter.

It was not a bomb or an explosion at the port: Israeli attack planes had torn through the air, flying as close as possible to the ground, fast enough that they broke the sound barrier. 

The sonic boom and shockwave this creates is used as a tool of psychological warfare, and it came right before a scheduled speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

It wasn’t the veiled threat of war by Israel that threw Marian Sesay, a Sierra-Leonean migrant living in Lebanon. It was the trauma of the past.

“Those sonic booms, that’s like what happened on the fourth of August explosion for sure,” says Sesay, referring to the port explosion among whose fatalities were 76 foreign nationals.

“Now, I’m scared of every little sound,” she says.

On that day in 2020, 2 750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate kept in Beirut’s port exploded, killing hundreds, injuring more than 6 000 and leaving about 300 000 people homeless.

Sesay was a domestic worker then in the Bourj Hammoud municipality, on the outskirts of Beirut, not far from the port. When the blast boomed through the air, like everyone, she was stunned at first then fear rapidly set in.

“After the blast, I was afraid of everything. I had insomnia and I was always afraid I was going to die,” she recalls. “That sound is a trigger.”

Sesay came to Lebanon 10 years ago to work for a Lebanese family under the Kafala system, an extreme form of employment sponsorship that allows employers to control the entry, exit, work and residence of migrant workers, making the labourers vulnerable to exploitation and modern slavery, particularly in domestic work.

Collectively, the Arab region is home to more than 24 million migrant workers, making up 40% of the labour force — the highest share of any region, according to the Global Slavery Index. Lebanon has at least a quarter of a million from Africa and Asia.

Crises exacerbate the vulnerabilities of workers under the Kafala system and the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion was a case in point.

“Many of the people in the affected areas were vulnerable women, and while Lebanese had other places to go to, they didn’t,” says Ghina Al-Andary, an officer at Kafa, an NGO that helps domestic migrant workers in Lebanon.

In the affected area, in-house help had become a status symbol.

Viany De Marceau, a Cameroonian who came to Lebanon as a domestic worker under the Kafala system in 2015, explained this in an article for the Migrant Worker Action group: “Along the port of Beirut, two maids per apartment are not enough. The more maids you have, the better you are regarded. There are two Filipinas for the cooking, two Ghanaians to take care of the children, an Ethiopian or a Cameroonian for the cleaning.”

After the 2020 blast, most of the help Lebanon received was prioritised for locals. One MP, George Atallah, proposed a law to explicitly exclude families of non-Lebanese victims from compensation.

Marceau wonders who remembered the Africans who died on 4 August 2020.

She wrote: “Even in death, for you, we do not count. They retrieved the bodies but did not mention the presence of the black women, our presence.”

In the aftermath, some migrant workers decided to leave Lebanon. Others chose to stay. They healed with the help of some organisations, their community and their family back home.

But the scars are still there — scratched each time Israeli jets break the sound barrier, as they have done several times since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.

The Israeli state responded to the attack not only by bombarding Gaza (where more than 41,000 people have since died), but also stretching the hits, or threat of them, to parts of Lebanon, Syria and even Iran, in pursuit of Hamas allies like Hezbollah. 

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

“They beat me with a machete while my hands and legs were tied,” he says in the voice note, “This assault has changed my life.” 

The voice note has since gone viral, prompting the Independent Complaints Commission, which investigates the police, to take up his case.

That’s the kind of reaction Kachingwe was hoping for when he sent the note.

“This is a corrupt world,” he said. “I know I can’t just get help so I want human rights organisations to know about this.”

But, if prior complaints to the commission are any kind of predictor, viral empathy may be all the justice Kachingwe ever receives.

In the small hours of 17 February, robbers broke into the premises of Popat Wholesalers where Kachingwe worked. Nothing was stolen but when he informed his boss, he showed up with police officers from the criminal investigations department.

The police detained the guards, including Kachingwe, for interrogation.

“This is when they tortured us,” he says. “They didn’t stop even when I screamed. They made fun of my private parts.”

Kachingwe says his injuries were ignored for two days until other officers not involved in the assault took him to Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. 

From the hospital he was taken back to the same cell. He was eventually charged with theft, along with one of his colleagues.

Kachingwe says his health passport — a booklet issued by the ministry of health and kept by patients as a portable medical record — went missing while he was at the Blantyre police station. 

It held information about the assault, medication prescribed and follow-up appointments.

He has since had some of the information from the hospital’s electronic recording system noted in an older health passport. It shows that on 4 July, months after his detention, Kachingwe underwent surgery for serious injuries to his genitalia.

Aubrey Kawale, the officer-in-charge at the Blantyre police station, denies Kachingwe was assaulted in police custody, saying he only learnt of the allegations after the voice note went viral.

“If the issues were reported to us rather than social media, we would have investigated and dealt with officers involved,” he says.

As the civil courts examine the charges against Kachingwe, the police oversight body will investigate his own claims against officers. It has a dismal record.

Established by law in 2020, the commission receives and investigates complaints by the public against the police. It has received 285 complaints over the years but 186 of them remain under investigation. Only 50 investigations have been resolved, 10 were withdrawn and 39 complaints are categorised as “pending”.

The body’s complaints log is a troubling look into the misconduct of Malawian police. It includes 37 complaints of physical assault and nine reports of wrongful death in police

custody. 

One complaint documents the case of a 13-year-old boy whose hands were amputated allegedly a result of police negligence. Another case has parallels with Kachingwe’s: a security guard died allegedly because of police action.

Many of the cases remain unresolved in part because of collusion within the police force, says the oversight body’s commissioner, Christopher Tukula.

“There is still a tendency to protect each other or conceal information among officers,” he told a parliamentary committee earlier this month. “There is a failure to report issues to oversight institutions in fear of reprisals.”

The commission is also struggling with limited resources and inadequate training for investigators.

All this leaves Kachingwe in painful limbo. “I’m heartbroken and frustrated,” he said.
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

They built custom GPTs — artificial intelligence programs — to educate each other about the proposals, gathered in X Spaces to plan protests, and even had TikTok influencers doing political education.

During the protests, they used walkie-talkie apps to coordinate their movements and mobile money to crowdfund the medical bills of the injured.

This is what Gen Z activism looks like: civic engagement reimagined for the digital age. 

But technology can be a double-edged sword. The same digital infrastructure

that empowers protesters can be used to repress them. The Kenyan government appears to have used more than a few tools from the tyrant’s digital toolbox to respond to the June uprising.

Its first move was to shut down the internet on 25 June. This is the first time such a disruption has happened in Kenya (which likes to bill itself as the “Silicon Savannah”). Internet watchdog Netblocks said the outage occurred just as protesters attempted to storm parliament in Nairobi.

As the protests raged on, journalists, activists and dissenters began to disappear.

CNN reported that this included at least a dozen prominent social media users, who were abducted by Kenyan security forces on the night before the storming of parliament.

According to Amnesty International Kenya’s Ramadhan Rajab, those who had been abducted afterwards spoke of their phone functioning strangely before they were picked up; cars waiting at their residences and favourite hangouts; and their abductors confiscating their phones as soon as they took them. 

These stories draw attention to the surveillance infrastructure that Kenya has invested in over the years.

Nairobi streets have about 2 000 police surveillance cameras, according to a 2023 investigation by Coda Story. The Communications Authority of Kenya has a device monitoring system (DMS) capable of intercepting text messages and phone calls.

The agency fought a long legal battle against campaigners, who argue the DMS unduly breaches privacy, but eventually secured the right to use it.

In addition, according to a 2017 investigation by Privacy International, Kenya’s spooks can directly intercept telecom networks, even without the operator’s knowledge.

The abductees’ stories raise suspicion that some combination of such capabilities were used to target them.

When initial attempts at repression failed to quiet the protests, President William Ruto tried a less combative approach: a widely publicised X Space to meet the protesters online, where it all began.

He followed this with a full cabinet reshuffle to signal he was listening. But the olive branch was ultimately ineffective at reconciliation, and the unrest continued.

A more insidious but familiar tactic entered the fray: disinformation that blames foreign entities for domestic troubles. Speaking at an event in Nakuru on 15 July, Ruto suggested that money from the Ford Foundation had been used to fund the “anarchy”.

The accusation, which he provided no evidence for, and which the Ford Foundation has strongly denied, initially landed flat offline — but that didn’t discourage its promotion by a small army of dubious social media accounts.

The first post linking the Ford Foundation with the protests appeared on 23 June, and was published by Sam Terriz, a state official.

A surge of more than 500 posts, from accounts aligned with Ruto’s administration, built on it, often using cherry-picked funding disclosures from the foundation’s  website and manipulated images.

Subsequent disinformation campaigns have since blamed LGBTQIA+ groups, human rights defenders and journalists.

Whether people believed these messages is almost immaterial. They distracted, muddied public discourse and made the truth debateable. They also harassed key players to exhaustion as they tried to counter the deliberate spread of falsehoods.

Kenya’s protests appear to have lost momentum for now, and Ruto is back to touring the country.

But his government’s actions over the past two months leave a digital blueprint for politicians to use against the surge of protests across the continent, and cast a troubling shadow over Kenya’s Silicon Savannah brand.

The state’s tactics are forcing activists to take counter-measures.

“People have reduced their digital footprint, changed their numbers or phones, are restricting their communications to less popular apps like Signal, or even abandoning cellphones entirely,” said Amnesty’s Rajab.

The move towards encrypted apps shows that as states invest in more sophisticated surveillance, people learn to be more vigilant about privacy when using technology. According to Top 10 VPN, demand for virtual private networks in Kenya rose by 534% in the period right before 25 June.

This response brings to mind Chinua Achebe’s proverbial bird, which learnt to “fly without perching” once “men learnt to shoot without missing”. 

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

He let go of his handlebars, smiled to himself, and then punched the air in defiance. Behind him, heads bowed, still pedalling hard for the line, were 175 of the world’s best bicycle riders.

There were no bicycles ahead of him.

The Tour de France is the world’s oldest and most prestigious cycling race. Over 21 gruelling stages that span 3  500km, cyclists race each other through streets and up mountains and along winding, picturesque country roads.

It is one of the most brutal competitions in world sport, and also one of the most elite. Never before in its 121-year history had a stage been won by an Eritrean. Never before had a stage been won by a black African. Until Girmay.

The 24-year-old was not much fancied heading into the race, but that win in stage three was no fluke. He also won stage eight and stage 12, and is currently wearing the iconic maillot vert, the green jersey that is typically awarded to the fastest sprinter (the polka-dot jersey goes to the fastest climber, while the yellow jersey is for the fastest cyclist overall).

“It was unbelievably crazy, people everywhere celebrating,” Girmay said. 

Those celebrations were especially pronounced in the streets and bars of Asmara, Eritrea’s capital, where cycling is a religion and Girmay is already a national hero.

“The plan was to build up for the Olympic Games but now I think I’m almost in my top shape,” said Girmay. “First, the goal is to finish the tour safely.” 

He may have tempted fate.

Just a few days later, in the last few hundred metres of stage 16 — on a flattish course ideal for the kind of sprint finish in which he excels — Girmay crashed as he navigated through a roundabout at high speed.

His teammates helped him up, and he gingerly pedalled to the finish line — but the stage was lost to his closest rival, the Belgian rider Jasper “Disaster” Philipsen, and his hold on the green jersey suddenly felt a lot more precarious.

Girmay was undeterred. He dusted himself off, got a good night’s rest, and the next day he smashed Philipsen in an intermediate sprint on a mountain stage, increasing his lead once again. Given the obstacles that he has overcome to get here, a few bruises and scratches were never going to hold him back.

The first bicycle in Eritrea was imported by the Italian military — then an occupying power — in the late 1800s. The sport caught on quickly. At first, bike races were strictly segregated, and Eritreans were not allowed to compete with their colonial rulers.

In 1939, Italian authorities organised a special race with both Italian and Eritrean riders — ostensibly to prove Italian superiority. It backfired: the race was run by Ghebremariam Ghebru in a victory that is still celebrated today. In the words of Eritrea’s information ministry, “that victory shattered colonial Italian myths about Eritrean inferiority”.

Since then, Eritrean cyclists have continued to prove their excellence in the face of considerable obstacles. At home, riders have had to contend with civil war, diplomatic isolation and one of the world’s most authoritarian governments.

These conditions can also provide a perverse incentive, as African Arguments reports, because professional cycling is one of the few ways to escape mandatory, indefinite national military service — as long as athletes can keep riding fast enough.

Meanwhile the country’s high-altitude and relatively quiet roads — a consequence of economic stagnation — provide ideal training conditions. For riders able to keep ahead of all this, they must enter the cut-throat, expensive and at times racist world of international cycling, where opportunities for African riders are scarce.

Girmay hopes his success will change this. After his first stage win, he posted a picture to social media with the caption: “Let me open the door.”

“It is a huge opportunity for African cycling, especially for my country,” he said, and urged the big international cycling teams to start investing more in talent from the continent. 

“They need to invest for this because my team invests a lot on me and now it’s time to pay them off.

“The other teams need to do the same and believe in [African cyclists] also.”

This is a familiar refrain in Africa’s growing cycling community.

Despite the huge potential in young talent, cycling clubs in Africa mostly survive thanks to the self-sacrifice and collective support of members who are driven by their goodwill and passion for cycling. 

They often survive in spite of national cycling federations, who struggle with leadership issues and fundraising.

Cameroon’s most renowned cyclist, Kamzong Abesselo Clovis, is one of the few Africans who can make a living from the sport. 

He counts himself as lucky that he is in a team that pays him a salary and training bonuses. He said that African athletes need more opportunities to compete.

“A sportsman’s food is competition,” he said. “Training can’t make you progress like competing.”

Girmay’s dominance in this year’s Tour de France is proof of what happens when African cyclists do receive the necessary support: his exceptional early promise earned him a rare spot at the International cycling body’s World Cycling College in Switzerland, which brought him to the attention of his current Intermarché-Wanty team. 

He then pedalled into the global spotlight. And he is still pedalling.

This article first appeared in This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

The government was spending the equivalent of 2.2% of its national gross domestic product on fuel subsidies to keep pump prices low and oil barons rich, and the naira was being artificially propped up, which discouraged foreign investors.

Hard decisions had to be made.

“This meant that any honeymoon period would be short [for Tinubu],” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, a research analyst at the Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development.

Tinubu did not ask for a honeymoon.

On his inauguration day on 29 May last year, Tinubu went off script to announce that he was cutting the fuel subsidy. His government now spends well under half of what his predecessors did on those subsidies. 

The president has also allowed the naira to float — driven by market forces, rather than artificial interventions, it is now selling at around 1 400 against the US dollar, up from 462 a year ago.

Macroeconomists approve of Tinubu’s choices. The International Monetary Fund projects that the Nigerian economy will grow by 3.3% this year, up from 2.9% in 2023.

But on the streets, sentiments run in the opposite direction. A litre of fuel sells for 850 naira, up from 239 naira last May. Food prices have increased by 38%, because a weak naira has made imports such as fertilisers, wheat and rice more expensive for local businesses.

Bola Tinubu’s hardnose economic decisions failed to account for the impact on low-income Nigerians.

“It has not been easy. We thought we were getting a government that would transform the situation but what is happening now does not meet our expectations,” said Titilayo Owolabi, a 25-year-old mother of two.

Owolabi runs a shop selling food in Apapa, the port area in Lagos. Last year a derica (measuring bowl) of rice sold for 500 naira but now she offers it at 1 200 naira. With customers unable to afford her goods, Owolabi’s income has nosedived. 

She used to make about 50 000 naira in daily sales but hardly gets a quarter of that now. 

Food and fuel have become prohibitively expensive and many Nigerians can no longer afford the basics.

Hunger protests have broken out in major cities such as Lagos, Ibadan and Kaduna. Some people have resorted to looting trucks and warehouses for food.

Owolabi began rationing food in her own household. “My children’s lunch bag used to be filled with food and snacks,” she explained. “But nowadays I put a 100 naira biscuit in the box and I tell them to manage it.”

Like Owolabi, 55-year-old mechanic Adeleye Adeoye has seen his income fall to a quarter of what it used to be. He often sits idly at his workshop for hours, waiting in vain for customers to bring their cars in for maintenance. 

He went from making about 20 000 naira per day a year ago to 5 000 naira — on a good day.

Analysts fault Tinubu’s government for failing to plan for short to medium-term social protection programmes that would have reduced this pain.

“You want leaders who realise that there is a human cost to policymaking. And, unfortunately, it didn’t happen. If the government prepared for the aftereffect of these policy moves, it did not show it,” said Ikemesit Effiong, a partner at Lagos risk advisory firm, SBM Intelligence.

A cash transfer to 15 million vulnerable households was not launched until October, and by the end of February, only about 20% of the targeted households had received the benefit.

Low-income households have been left hoping for divine intervention.

“Everything is in God’s hands now,” said Owolabi. “If He decides to change our situation through Tinubu, then things will ease up.”

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

They were Nigerian police officers from Abuja. He is an investigative journalist.

At the State Criminal Investigative Department in Panti, Yaba, in Lagos State, the men handcuffed Ojukwu from behind and emptied his pockets. They didn’t let him call his lawyer or family members. Instead, they held him in a police cell for several days.

Once his family and employers tracked him down, Ojukwu was flown from Lagos to a detention facility of the Cybercrime Centre in Abuja. 

“Both Lagos and Abuja cells were horrible,” Ojukwu said. “I felt ill many times.”

After pressure from Nigerian journalists at home, civil society and the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Ojukwu was set free after nine nights in detention. His detention was the 45th attack on the media since President Bola Tinubu took office last May.

About 62% of these attacks were by state security, according to Edetaen Ojo, who

leads Media Rights Agenda, a Nigerian press defence organisation.

Despite promising to uphold press freedom in a meeting with newspaper owners in December, Tinubu’s record is on track to be worse than his predecessor Muhammadu Buhari, whose administration arrested 189 journalists over its eight-year tenure, according to a Global Rights report.

From 1986 to 2023, 1 034 Nigerian journalists have been detained, according to the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development. That makes the 28 attacks on journalists by state security over the first year of Tinubu’s administration equal to the annual average of the last 38 years, some of which were under military rule.

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.

There are many good reasons for South Africans not to vote for the ANC.

The oldest liberation movement in Africa has now led the government of South Africa for 30 years. Over time, its weaknesses have compounded, and been repeatedly exposed under the glare of media and civil society.

So dominant has its rule been that its failures have become those of the country: the corruption, the crime, the failure to create jobs, the rising cost of living, the inequalities, and the lack of preparedness for the unfolding climate crisis.

In the most obvious metaphor for its decline, the party in power can no longer keep the power on — except, curiously, in the months leading up to this Wednesday’s election, when the state utility burned billions of rands worth of diesel to temporarily suspend rolling blackouts.

And yet the citizens of Africa’s largest economy will almost certainly vote the ANC into office once again. Its victory will not be as emphatic as usual — the party has never previously won less than 62% in a national election — and its majority may not even be absolute.

It may have to form a coalition. But even the most damning polls suggest that 40%

of citizens will once more put their faith in the party of Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela (and, more recently and less laudably, of Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa). 

That number is edging higher as the election draws nearer.

In some countries, support for the ruling party is vastly inflated by gerrymandering and ballot-rigging. This is not the case in South Africa, where there is little suggestion that the election will be anything other than one where people can vote freely

The ANC really is still the most popular party in the country.

This is partly because of the “liberation dividend” — a loyalty enjoyed by many liberation movements when they eventually do take power. This loyalty is not entirely misplaced. For all its faults, South Africa has many reasons to be grateful to the ANC.

It ushered in multiparty democracy in 1994, and avoided a civil war. In office, it dismantled

the apartheid regime and extended basic services — designed by the apartheid

government to service only the white minority — to most of the country. It also enabled the creation of one of the world’s most liberal constitutions, and an environment where media are able to publish in the public interest, often detailing the ANC’s failures.

For many voters, especially those who lived through the horrors of apartheid, nothing the ANC can do is worse than the government it replaced. This point is often overlooked by foreign commentators with short memories. 

In an especially egregious example of this, Britain’s The Times wrote recently that “30 years after black people got the vote, South Africa is the most unequal society on Earth” — as if, somehow, South Africa was more equal under white supremacist rule.

The ghosts of apartheid help the ANC in that the official opposition has done so little to banish apartheid’s ghosts. The Democratic Alliance (DA) has had just one black leader in its history, Mmusi Maimane — and it booted him after a disappointing electoral

performance in 2019. 

Former DA leader Tony Leon later described Maimane’s tenure as a “failed experiment” and, sure enough, the party replaced Maimane with a white man.

Fed up, a succession of senior black officials left, reinforcing perceptions it is a white-run party that caters to elites.

“The racism I experienced in the DA was not overt. Rather, it was that less honest, covert, paternalistic, difficult-to-put-your-finger-on-it kind of racism,” said Herman Mashaba, a former DA mayor who quit to start his own party, writing in the Mail & Guardian in 2021.

“It was the kind of racism that questioned why we were spending time delivering services to informal settlements when they don’t represent ‘traditional DA voters’ and ‘those who pay the rates’. ”

The DA’s leader, John Steenhuisen, said comments like these came from people who were “bitter and angry” after losing party leadership contests. But he appeared tone deaf when it came to the sensitive issue of race relations.

When asked if the country was ready for another white man as president, he compared himself to Barack Obama, “a minority in America, and he was able to get elected”.

The prospect of Steenhuisen getting himself elected is slim. He has said that winning just 22% of the vote would be a major achievement for the DA — a strikingly limited ambition for a well-established opposition party operating in a free and fair political

environment, and competing against a corrupt and scandal-prone ruling party.

Other opposition parties are making a lot of noise, but failing to attract support in the kind of numbers that would pose a real threat to the ANC. The Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema, is on track for about 10% of the vote, according to polls, matching its performance from last time.

Newcomers the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) party, led by former president Jacob

Zuma, is the biggest surprise. Polls put it at about 13%, but its appeal is largely limited to areas of the country with large Zulu populations, such as KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. 

And the constitutional court ruled last week  that Zuma, sentenced to time in jail for

contempt of court, cannot stand for parliament, which thwarts some of the MK party’s higher ambitions.

Although there is no doubt that the ANC will remain the most popular party in the country, it should still be worried about the decline in its support. The extent of its worries will depend on the exact percentage of that decline. Should it retain more than 50% of the vote, then it will have a majority of seats in the National Assembly — and that will allow it to appoint the president unilaterally. 

If it dips to 40% or below, it will need to work with at least one major opposition group —

the DA, the EFF or MK — to form a government. If the track record of local government coalitions is anything to go by, this will be a messy process.

The most likely scenario is that the ANC receives somewhere between 40% and 50% of the vote. This should allow it to form a coalition government with smaller parties such as the newly formed Rise Mzansi, the policies of which are similar to those of the ANC, but position itself as the “grownup” in the room in any coalition scenario.

Rise Mzansi will be able to extract minor concessions, but won’t be in a position to shape the government as a whole.

This is still ANC country, after all — at least until 2029.

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

But today, at Sigelege Beach Resort in the town of Salima, the beach is deserted, save for a few locals. The usually animated John Banana, a curio seller who has been plying his trade here for five years, looks downcast as he arranges his wares. 

“This is bad,” he says, gesturing at the waves hitting the shore. “If the water comes any higher, there won’t be any beach left.”

Next door, at the Blue Waters Lake Resort, manager Don Samaraseka is supervising workers as they pile rocks to shield buildings from the waves.

“We’ve packed in about 100 tonnes of rocks along the waterfront and we are still fighting the waves,” he says. 

When he started working at the resort in 2014, the lake waters were almost 150 metres away from where the shoreline is now, he says.

Along the stretch of the lake, as far as the eye can see, sandbags now line the shore, a frail barrier against the relentless advance of the waters. Some resorts try to pump the water away from their premises.

In the lakeshore resort districts of Mangochi, Nkhata Bay and Nkhotakota, sandy expanses have been swallowed by the lake.

“The water’s advance knows no bounds,” says George Zibophe, the disaster preparedness official for Nkhotakota.

He says the lake began to swell in February, and talks about submerged resorts and flooded houses on the edges of the lake.

“We’re still assessing,” he says. “But the damage is clear. So many buildings and structures.”

Malawi’s agency for disaster management says the rising waters have affected 1 500 households in Nkhotakota alone, and 800 of them have been displaced.

The National Water Resources Authority says Lake Malawi’s waters have risen to their highest level in more than a decade: 52 centimetres higher than last year.

As the lake swells, people living in an area defined by its beauty must battle the elements or watch their fortunes nosedive.

But their battles might prove too feeble against nature. As the disaster management agency’s Charles Kalemba acknowledges, this calamity for human beings is nature reclaiming its dominion. 

This article first appeared in The Continent , the pan-African weekly  newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian . It’s designed to be read and  shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

First, it was Idriss Déby. Come the election on 6 May, it will be Mahamat Déby.

When Idriss Déby died fighting rebels in April 2021, his son, Mahamat, was handed the presidency and is now seeking to legitimise his rule. Nine other candidates are challenging him. Nonetheless, he is very likely to win, having sidelined his critics and opponents.

Key among them was his cousin, Yaya Dillo, who was killed on 28  February during clashes between security forces and members of his Socialist Party Without Borders. State security had accused Dillo of leading an attack on the headquarters of the intelligence service in N’Djamena, but he denied this.

Mahamat Déby insists Dillo was not deliberately assassinated and says he is open to an international investigation. Dillo had been a thorn in the side of Déby senior, too, running against the late president in the 2021 election. At that time, he survived a raid by security forces on his home — but his mother, his son and at least five other people were killed.

Threats and criticism that dogged the elder Déby’s rule still prevail in Chad: rebels are waging an insurgency from neighbouring countries, political opposition faces constant threats and intimidation, and the nation is divided. The upcoming election has stirred a complex mix of passion, hope, suspicion and cynicism.

The only meaningful contender against Mahamat is his prime minister, Succès Masra, who joined the military government this year, after leading deadly protests against it in October 2022.

For some, his decision to join Déby’s government reduced his credentials as one of the few bulwarks against the political status quo. But it is also a practical way of steering the election by managing the government tasked with organising it.

Masra’s candidacy has attracted support from Chad’s youth. In the economist-turned-leader of the Transformers party, they see hope for a new generation of political leaders who will promote transparency, democratic governance and socio-economic development. He has also pledged to fight corruption, promote education and employment and consolidate national unity.

International observers and human rights organisations are monitoring the electoral process, fearing rights violations and political manipulation. Nonetheless, many Chadians will turn up on 6 May to make their voices heard at the ballot box — even as the state prepares to inaugurate another Déby.

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly  newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

Dry patches of sandy soil dominate the rest of the field. The April harvests from Juwawo’s

three fields used to be enough to feed his family for a year. Now, they barely get by.

“With six children to care for, life is very hard,” the farmer said. “This year, things are even worse because the dry spells go on and on. After the cyclone, we got some supplies donated, but now it’s every person for themselves.”

Such hardship now affects nearly two million Malawian farmers, said Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera, who declared a state of disaster for the fourth time in as many years.

The latest devastation is largely because of the El Niño weather phenomenon, which has cast dry spells over some countries while raining unusually heavy torrents in others. 

Chakwera said 749,000 hectares of maize — more than 44% of the national crop area — have been damaged by the effects of El Niño.

“This situation is devastating,” Chakwera said. “It would have been catastrophic even if this were the first disaster in recent years. Unfortunately, this marks the fourth time in four years that I have declared a state of disaster.”

The president has appealed for $200 million in food aid for the affected people in 23 of the country’s 28 districts.

A deadly combination of raging cyclones made stronger by climate change local environmental devastation driven by deforestation has driven Malawi to the verge of famine. As much as 40% of Malawi’s population is facing hunger, according to a statement from the World Food Programme released last week to echo the president’s appeal.

Cyclone Freddy in March 2023 was the worst in Malawi’s recorded history.

Its heavy rains caused multiple floods and landslides in the south of the country, killing 679 people, and 537 people are missing. At least 2,186 were injured and more than 659,278 were displaced. 

A post-disaster assessment found that it wiped $36 million from Malawi’s economy in production losses. Forty-five percent of that loss was from crops devastated by floods — 60,000 hectares, equivalent to 27% of the planted acreage that year, were flooded.

But even before that disaster, 20% of Malawians were expected to struggle with food. 

Freddy came after Storm Ana and Cyclone Gombe in 2022, which destroyed sanitation infrastructure, setting off one of Malawi’s worst cholera outbreaks.

As national maize stocks ran low because farmers were producing much less, the country had to import staples such as maize, rice, soya beans, cowpeas and groundnuts.

But import costs and scarcity have driven maize prices to nearly double in just one year. Today’s prices are triple the five-year average.

Unable to produce food on their farm or afford food from the shops, and bereft of aid, farmers like Juwawo face an unyielding future of endless starvation.

This article first appeared in The Continent , the pan-African weekly  newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian . It’s designed to be read and  shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here