Dawit was watching television at a relative’s one-room apartment in Axum, a historic city in Ethiopia’s war-torn, northern Tigray region, in early March when a news bulletin flashed up on the screen. Graphic, unverified footage had surfaced of a mass killing near Dawit’s hometown of Mahibere Dego, in a mountainous area of central Tigray. In the shaky video Ethiopian soldiers …

A Burkina Faso court charged former President Blaise Compaore in absentia on Tuesday in connection with the 1987 murder of then-President Thomas Sankara, one of the most infamous killings in Africa’s post-independence history. Sankara, a charismatic Marxist revolutionary often called “Africa’s Che Guevara,” was assassinated during a coup led by his former friend Compaore. Compaore went on to rule Burkina …

It was a kidnapping as brazen as it was unexpected. While the numbers are murky, more than 300 schoolboys are still missing after an attack on a boys’ school in northwest Nigeria nearly a week ago. A large number of attackers riding motorbikes ambushed the children at the school. “They said they were not here to rob us, that we …

The Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 seemed at the time to be a major shift in how governments in North Africa were going to be ran, changing from autocratic regimes to democratic ones. Nevertheless, after ten years this has not been the case, as most of these countries are either suffering a raging civil war or a new dictatorship has …

Nearly 350 victims of human trafficking have been rescued by police in 13 Caribbean and Latin American countries. The Interpol-coordinated Operation Libertad saved men, women and children trafficked abroad and forced into work. Victims were found working in night clubs, factories, markets, farms and mines. Some worked in spaces “no bigger than coffins,” said Cem Kolcu of Interpol’s human trafficking …