🔅 The World's Deadliest Animal is on the Move, & Mozambique Makes Writing History
Plus, Zuckerberg Trains with Nigerian MMA Champ, Uganda Referred to the ICC, Sudan's Mass Grave.
Photo of the day: Liberia
Markets:
🔴 Nigerian SE: 62,748.94 (-2.03%)
🟢 Johannesburg SE: 77,317.26 (+1.01%)
🔴 Ghana SE: 2,861.11 (-0.05%)
🔴 Nairobi SE: 114.20 (-0.24%)
🟢 US S&P 500: 4,509.96 (+0.85%)
🟢 Shanghai Composite: 3,236.48 (+1.26%)
*Data accurate as of the close of markets across the continent
Brief & Bright: Africa's Top Five Highlights
🇺🇬 Uganda's Brutal Political Game: Museveni and Son Accused of Sponsoring Violence | Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba have been accused of sponsoring violence against political opponents. An international criminal court filing includes harrowing testimonies of 215 people who report being arrested arbitrarily and being held incommunicado in “torture centres”. Reports of torture include physical harm, indignifying treatment, electric shocks, needles to the toenails, teeth being forcibly removed, and interrogations about their links with the opposition figure Bobi Wine. The president’s deputy press secretary Faruk Kirunda has dismissed the claims, saying that political rivals are “peddling wrong information”. Kainerugaba’s spokesperson, Andrew Mwenda, also denied the general’s involvement, saying that “We need to find out” who directed the torture. But the claimants’ lawyer Bruce Afran said: “What we’ve seen is the complete loss of civil liberties and respect for human rights in Uganda in recent years under the Museveni regime.”
🇳🇬 Nigerian-born MMA Champ Trains Zuckerberg for Cage Match with Musk | Move over, Mayweather and McGregor. This fight of the century involves two tech titans: Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. But Zuckerberg has a secret weapon: Nigerian-born MMA champion Israel Adesanya. Adesanya took to Twitter to show off his new client, sharing four photos of the duo training together. Adesanya is separately set to take on South African Dricus du Plessis in September. But first, he had to jet off to Zuckerberg's California residence to get the Facebook CEO ready for his battle with Musk. As for the date of the Zuckerberg-Musk bout? That's still to be determined, but in the meantime, Zuckerberg is fighting Musk with Meta's new Twitter alternative, Threads, which has already signed up over 70 million users.
🇸🇩 Sudan's Mass Grave: A Reminder of a Troubled Past | The U.N. Human Rights Office recently reported that 87 people—including women and children—were buried in a mass grave in Sudan's West Darfur. The deaths were allegedly caused by the country's Rapid Support Forces (RSF). But the RSF denies any involvement in the incident. Sudan has been dealing with a civil war that has been escalating in recent weeks. The situation in El Geneina has been particularly concerning, with reports of Arab militias and the RSF shooting non-Arab Masalit people at close range. Witnesses reported that locals were forced to bury the bodies of those killed in a shallow grave near the city. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, strongly condemned the killings, and the Sudanese Army also expressed their disapproval. The killings have raised fears of a repeat of the atrocities in Darfur in 2003, and many Sudanese citizens are afraid of further violence.
🇲🇿 Paulina Chiziane, The First African Woman to Receive the Camões Prize | Paulina Chiziane, a linguist, author, and pioneer of Portuguese literature from Mozambique, has made history. She’s the first African woman to receive the Camões Prize, the highest recognition for Portuguese literature. Her writing isn’t afraid to tackle the taboos of Mozambique’s patriarchal culture and social norms, and it has earned her a lot of recognition. In a TV interview, she said, “This prize is for all the people of my country, because I always wrote from a collective experience, transmitting a collective voice.” She also made a powerful statement when she received the award in person in Lisbon, “I am black. Yes, and so what? If you want to be someone in life, in this world, you need to affirm your space. Leave traces of your feet on the ground, indelibly engraved, for other people to say: here someone has passed.” Paulina Chiziane’s novels and short stories have not all been translated into English and French, but they are all worth reading. Her work is a powerful reminder that we should all be fighting for our space in this world and leaving our mark.
🍫 Chocolate Crisis: How Putin's Invasion of Ukraine Sent Cocoa Prices Soaring | The world is now in the midst of a chocolate crisis. Cocoa prices are skyrocketing, and Moscow is partly to blame. The price of cocoa has been on the rise since September, and it recently hit a 46-year high. How did we get here? It all started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Prices of oil, coal, and gas spiked as traders feared energy shortages, and European chocolate manufacturers consequently placed fewer orders for cocoa. But when Europe weathered the crisis, they all realized that the supply of cocoa beans was limited, and everyone started competing for it. Add to that fertilizer-intensive crops and a drought in West Africa, and you’ve got a chocolate-deprived world. Now, a major El Nino weather pattern is developing, which means drier conditions in West Africa.
🦟 The World's Deadliest Animal Is On The Move | Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal, killing an estimated 700,000 people a year by partaking in what scientists have named “the blood meal”. And here’s the bad news: Mosquitoes are on the move. The global shift in temperatures due to climate change has experts worried that mosquito-borne diseases will take an even higher toll in the years to come. In fact, the US recently saw five cases of locally transmitted malaria—the first in two decades—in Florida and Texas. So, what can be done? In short: take climate change seriously. As temperatures rise, mosquitoes’ ranges are shifting, and urban heat islands are expanding. This means that mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever, and chikungunya are moving into new areas.
Food for Thought
“If you see that a town respects a calf, then cut the grass and feed it.”
— Ethiopian Proverb.
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