🔅 Pan-African Air Travel: Still Taxiing on the Runway
Meta's Trauma Show and Lawsuit
Good morning from… can you guess where? (Answer at the bottom!)
Pan-African Air Travel: Still Taxiing on the Runway
Flying across Africa today feels less like catching a quick flight and more like competing on The Amazing Race. Johannesburg to Dakar? Two stops and 14 hours if you’re lucky. Port Sudan to Kampala? Nine hours with a bonus layover. Want to get from sub-Saharan Africa to the north? Pack a baguette, or buy one as you swing through Paris first.
Africa’s skies are wide open, but access to them isn’t.
The problem is that a few heavy-hitter airlines – Kenya Airways, Ethiopian Airlines, EgyptAir – have the continent on lock, with little competition and even fewer cheap options.
Visa headaches don’t help either: In many parts of Africa, it’s easier to enter with a European passport than with an African one – something that feels less like bureaucracy and more like colonial cosplay. Kenya’s making some noise about opening visa-free travel for all Africans, but so far it’s just that: noise.
Yet, there’s hope buried in history. Once upon a time, there was a pan-African dream called Air Afrique, flying to 56 destinations, setting style standards, and sponsoring film festivals. But economic shocks and mismanagement eventually grounded it for good in 2002.
Today, the business case for truly connecting Africa by air is stronger than ever. Kenya and South Africa are plotting a new joint airline. Nigeria wants direct flights to Jamaica and Barbados. People are ready to travel, invest, and link up for business, pleasure, and culture.
But until better infrastructure, smarter investment, and friendlier visa policies take off too, flying within Africa will remain a turbulent experience – more ordeal than adventure.
The Puppet Herds Hitting the Road to Raise Awareness on Climate Action
The Herds set off from Kinshasa’s Botanical Gardens on April 10th, not as a convoy of trucks but as a parade of hundreds of life-size animal puppets (zebras, wildebeest, monkeys, giraffes, baboons) each one a recycled-material marvel built by Cape Town’s Ukwanda collective.
From the very first step, these puppets are a moving canvas for local creativity. In Lagos, more than 5,000 people lined the streets to watch the herd’s debut performance; in Dakar, over 300 artists vied for just 80 spots to guide or build the next wave of creatures, ensuring the herd literally grows wherever it goes.
At every stop, community volunteers learn puppet-making from the provided prototypes, so the project evolves organically as it traverses 20,000 km – from West African capitals through Morocco, Europe, and beyond.
By the time this papier-mâché group reaches the Arctic in early August, the hope is that it will have sown the seeds of climate activism in twenty cities. Each puppet migration reminds us that protecting our world isn’t a solitary race but a collective journey: if hundreds of volunteers can learn to animate giraffes out of recycled soda bottles, perhaps we can find equally inventive ways to tackle the real emergency unfolding around us.
Innovative and worth a look, if you ask us.
Meta’s Accra Reality Show: Trauma, Tiny Paychecks and a Lawsuit (Season 2)
Meta’s content-policing empire has another legal cliff-hanger on its hands. After Kenyan moderators sued in 2023, a fresh crew in Accra say screening beheadings and child-abuse videos for Facebook and Instagram has wrecked their mental health, and they’re ready to see Meta in court.
Who’s who: 150 moderators on Meta’s Ghana desk are technically hired by Majorel (owned by French outsourcing giant Teleperformance). UK legal nonprofit Foxglove and Ghana’s Agency Seven Seven are lining up two suits: one over psychological harm, another for unfair dismissal after a moderator’s suicide attempt.
The day job: Sift through footage of live skinning, beheadings and every depravity the internet musters, then decide whether it stays or goes, all while earning a base salary of about £64 a month.
The fallout: Moderators report PTSD, insomnia, depression and substance abuse. They say “well-being” sessions are run by non-doctors, personal disclosures leak to managers, and surveillance is so tight supervisors follow them into the toilets.
The corporate line: Teleperformance insists pay is roughly 10 to 16 times Ghana’s minimum wage, housing is up-market with gyms and pools, and mental-health staff hold proper qualifications. Meta, for its part, repeats that contractors are obliged to pay above local industry norms and provide counselling.
Why it matters: Big Tech’s safety net is still propped up by low-paid workers in the global south. If Ghana’s courts accept psychological injury as workplace harm, expect copy-and-paste lawsuits from any corner of the moderation map.
Bottom line: moderating humanity’s worst impulses may be the web’s dirtiest job, but in 2025, it also looks like one of Meta’s biggest legal liabilities.
Food for Thought
“A good name is better than riches.”
— Niger Proverb
And the Answer is…
The photo is taken from Hargeisa, Somaliland! You can also send in your own photos, alongside the location, and we’ll do our best to feature them.
Hello Baobab,
I just want to comment on the story on airlines. Unfortunately the story seems to just repeat what non-Africans have been saying about how tough/difficult/expensive/circuitous it is to fly around Africa for years without discussing the nuances is on the ground.
While Ms Nesrine Malik's story may have been true in 1960, 1970, 1980, and perhaps 1990 surely there has been change in flying around Africa over the years. That old insulting trope (story) about flying to Dakar from Nairobi via London or Paris is surely no longer true!
E.g. her story speaks about how flying is now dominated by a few airlines namely Kenya Airways, Ethiopian Airlines and EgyptAir without stating the role that the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s had on the grounding of many national airlines around the continent when Africans were told to implement capitalist market reforms so that the few standing airlines are the result of 'market forces'.
Ms Malik also mentions carriers such as KLM, Air France and Turkish Airlines as 'mopping up travel' in Africa. . It is not clear which part of Africa that these airlines carry people between African countries. Curiously she doesn't even mention the impact of middle east airlines such as Emirates and Qatar which have arguably become more important and game changers as former colonial powers such the UK closed their space through visa restrictions even to transit traffic. E.g a traveler from most of Africa is now more probably likely to transit via Dubai or Qatar if traveling to Americas or Europe or Asia than a European capital.
A better story would be based on the numbers (very easily available) on how air travel is growing in Africa over the years, and how much European airlines still have market share compared to the dominant African carriers and the Mid Eastern airlines. That is the real story here. Europeans including air France being pushed out the easy money markets that they dominated for years including through their defunct Air Afrique which is probably not very lamented in west and central Africa where it dominated.