The 613 men had traveled from their native Niger to neighboring Libya, where many of them planned to reach Europe over the Mediterranean Sea, a journey thousands of people from sub-Saharan Africa endeavor to make every year. But late last month, the men were deported by Libyan authorities in one of the country’s largest expulsions […]

Jazz Is Dead initially brought Taylor to the United States in 2022 for his very first American shows. The singer and actress Janelle Monáe was among those who attended his concert in Los Angeles at Lodge Room that year. She’d first been turned on to Taylor by the Ghanaian producer Nana Kwabena, who worked on […]

Parents and their children, or people who know each other well, often share some expression that is unique to them — a phrase or gesture that began by happenstance but gradually acquired a meaning that only they know. The same is true of Beryl, a chimpanzee living in Kibale National Park, in Uganda, and her […]

Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home. Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign […]

One sector that most publishers in Africa say is rapidly growing is children’s books. Lola Shoneyin, a novelist and the publisher of Ouida Books in Nigeria, is leading a project to train writers, agents, illustrators, editors and graphic designers on the publication of children’s books. The project, known as BookStorm, was born from a trip […]

Making his final trip as America’s top diplomat last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrived in Paris, his former hometown, to a hero’s welcome. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, proclaimed Mr. Blinken “an eminent servant of peace” at a ceremony at the Élysée Palace before awarding him the country’s highest tribute, the Legion of […]

A former finance minister of Mozambique who was accused of helping facilitate a multibillion-dollar fraud that nearly pushed his country’s economy into catastrophe has been ordered to spend eight and a half years in prison and pay $7 million in forfeiture, prosecutors said. The sentencing was handed down after a four-week trial that ended in […]

Sudan’s military has used chemical weapons on at least two occasions against the paramilitary group it is battling for control of the country, four senior United States officials said on Thursday. The weapons were deployed recently in remote areas of Sudan, and targeted members of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries that the army has been […]

Decades ago, Mozambique’s liberation party, Frelimo, easily attracted adoring crowds. The promise of salvation from Portuguese colonizers, and a life with jobs and housing for all, was an easy sell in a southern African nation that was suffering under racist rule. But when Daniel Chapo of Frelimo becomes president on Wednesday, he will confront a […]

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made a long shot cold call to J.R.R. Tolkien’s American publisher with the hope of landing a dream assignment: to create an exhaustive atlas of Middle-earth, the […]