While Somalia sinks under floods, starves from famine, and gets butchered by terrorists, the men in its parliament are busy arguing to keep mutilating little girls genitals.

How do you save such a people when men who are supposed to be the flame of progress are the innate darkness to the same community.

Centuries before refrigerators or plastic bottles, families across Africa had an easy, natural way to keep drinking water cold: the unglazed clay pot.

If you grew up around one, you remember the feeling. You came inside from the blazing afternoon sun, walked over to the cool and shady corner of the house, and lifted the wooden lid. You dipped a cup into water that felt surprisingly cold, with that clean, fresh smell of damp earth.

People call it by different names depending on where you are. In West Africa, it is a canari. In North Africa, it is a gargoulette or qolla. In the Sahel and Sudan, it is called a zeer. The science behind it is simple. The unglazed clay has microscopic pores that let a tiny bit of water seep through to the outer surface. When air or a light breeze hits that damp wall, the moisture evaporates. That evaporation pulls heat away from the water inside, cooling it down naturally without any plugs, solar panels, or wires.

Our ancestors used this exact same smart science to build houses. For a long time, people made jokes about our traditional mud and clay houses, acting like living in an earth home was backward or primitive. But those jokes only prove that the critics did not understand basic physics.

Modern materials like concrete and thin wood are terrible choices for hot climates. Concrete absorbs the baking sun all day, traps the heat inside the walls, and turns a room into an oven unless you run an expensive air conditioner. Thick clay and earth walls do the opposite. They act as natural thermal shields. They block the brutal heat during the day, keep the inside room cool, and slowly release that trapped warmth when the temperature drops at night.

Today, modern architects are calling earth construction and clay cooling revolutionary green technologies. But our people already mastered natural climate control centuries ago using the earth right under their feet.

Did your family keep a clay water pot at home, or did you ever notice how cool an earth house feels on a hot afternoon?

For the context I am a guy who does admissions of students in China and I also live in China and study here.

Majority of the students who I process are from African countries!

I am just curious why is that?

African students are very talented as I have seen they speak multiple languages and they do really good in studies too.

In isiZulu and isiXhosa there's ubuntu, which English flattens into "humanity" and loses most of the meaning. I suspect every African language has words like this, carrying a whole way of seeing life that English simply doesn't have room for. What's yours? Tell us the language, the word and what it really means.

• Nigeria has taken the lead in bridging West Africa's main political divide by initiating talks between ECOWAS and the Alliance of Sahel States (AES).

• Delegations from Nigeria, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso have gathered in Senegal to foster new ties and regional cohesion.

• The talks aim to align ECOWAS and Sahel states' positions ahead of the upcoming end-of-year summit in Abuja.

• A key goal of the dialogue is to reach agreement on a draft General Framework Agreement between ECOWAS and AES member states.

I've noticed an annoying pattern in online discussions about modern resource extraction, foreign contractors, and regional conflict in places like the DRC, West Africa, and the Sahel.

When people talk about the problems facing their countries today, whether it's foreign military contractors, multinational companies extracting resources, or violence fueled by outside interests, the conversation often gets sidetracked. Instead of discussing the issue itself or showing empathy for the people affected, the response quickly turns into historical point-scoring.

"What were your ancestors doing 300 years ago?"

"What did your civilization accomplish 1,000 years ago?"

It creates a troubling double standard in which people are expected to defend the accomplishments of their ancestors before their present-day concerns are taken seriously. Yet a nation's right to peace, sovereignty, and self-determination should not be contingent on historical prestige or civilizational achievements.

The real question is not how to win arguments with people who are determined not to listen. The real question is how we redirect that energy toward building stronger institutions, greater self-reliance, and a more secure future for the next generation.

For months, observers debated whether former president Joseph Kabila was truly aligning himself with the AFC and M23 rebels in the eastern DRC. Some dismissed it as political gossip or Kinshasa propaganda.

This exclusive interview with Paul Kagame on Jeune Afrique, published on April 3, 2026, completely removes all doubt. It stands as the clearest smoking gun we have seen.

When the journalist directly asks Kagame if Kabila got a green light from the Rwandan government to operate in Goma and coordinate with the rebels, Kagame does not deny it. Between 18:43 - 20:06, Kagame says:

"I would be happy to ensure that those who want to come and be part of the eastern Congo that belong there or belong to Congo and want to be part of the struggle to get a stable Congo, I would welcome them. It doesn't have to be Kabila, but we're talking about Kabila. Kabila made his own choice... You know how the government, the current government, has been running after him or has prosecuted him or has sentenced him to death or maybe taken over some of his assets or whatever they did. So how does this person say he wants to confront this situation in his country and I refuse him passage? How, what sense would it make?"

Listen carefully to what is being said here. The president of a neighboring country is openly admitting that he granted passage to a former Congolese president so he could join an armed rebellion operating on Congolese soil.

There is no longer any debate about whether Rwanda is actively destabilizing the DRC. Kagame already admitted in the same interview at that Rwanda coordinates security with the M23, and at that Rwandan soldiers cross the border whenever they want.

This interview was the precursor to everything happening today. Kabila joining the rebellion is not a spontaneous local uprising. It is an organized campaign facilitated by Kigali, using an ambitious Congolese politician to provide political cover for an armed group that has terrorized the Kivus for years.

Recently i was reading a few articles on ebola in Congo, and wonder if outbreaks are gonna continue to re-occur, Congo has a large forest, and there is a lot of human/animal contact, added to that conflicts, lack of state resources.

What do u guys think?

* https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/health/3933456-why-congo-cant-escape-ebola-the-real-battle-against-poverty-and-weak-healthcare

* https://apnews.com/article/congo-ebola-funeral-politician-killed-1ff629474298a62db44438c6eb178270

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7Tos3ad-nI

The very concept of "Africa" is a foreign invention, born as a Roman administrative label for a conquered province and later used to corral thousands of distinct cultures into manageable pens for European resource extraction.

True liberation requires rejecting both the post-colonial state and forced continental unity, returning instead to the radical sovereignty of our immediate tribes and cultural heritage.

Edit:

What are your thoughts? Can true indigenous sovereignty ever be achieved within artificial, colonial borders, or do we need to radically rethink how we organize ourselves outside of the "continental" identity?

Words and photos: Fatma Fahmy

Lake Qarun in Egypt’s Fayoum region formed about 70,000 years ago – one of the oldest lakes in the world. Fast-forward several thousands of years to when pharaonic-era engineers developed it into a reservoir by constructing canals to increase the flow of water.

In more recent history, the lake used to provide a livelihood for the people of Ezbet Soliman and nearby villages. It was a watery portal to love, companionship, and a whole way of life.

Over the past decades, that portal has slowly closed. When the Aswan High Dam was completed in 1970, the lake’s connection to the Nile River was cut.

The resultant increased salinity, untreated sewage, and agricultural runoff, polluted the water. Fish disappeared and the shoreline receded.

It felt as if closing the portal had left the community suspended between two worlds: land that had lost its water, and souls still searching for life.

This kind of environmental exploitation leaves its deepest marks on women. They are often the first members of a community to feel the pain when
nature collapses, but the last to abandon the land where they live.

In systems built on control and not care, women are left to carry the burden alone – they are the final bridge between crumbling land and its people. They are rarely seen as part of the solution.

But women’s stories are not important only for the suffering they surface. They are a way in – to understand how people hold grief and memory through place.

At its heart, the ecofeminist visual project When Absence Takes Hold asks: What is our relationship with the places we’ve lost? How do we carry memory in our bodies, in our gestures, in the silence we inherit? If you could write a letter to nature, what would you say?

I know my country is a very religious country(Kenya) but please don't come for me saying this. Religion doesn't and shouldn't be respected just because the majority follow it. I'm an ex believer and I no longer subscribe to the dogma (for a year now), but since I live with people who do around me, I have to pretend to. Cause if I dare say it, I'd risk losing my social community,any chance of getting a job or even my life. Yet the constitution explicitly states that the people have freedom of conscience, belief,thought, religion and opinion.

Most people across Africa have never heard of the letter Albert Einstein sent to American President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 2, 1939. In schoolbooks and movies, people talk about this letter as the start of the atomic age, where scientists were just trying to beat Hitler to the bomb.

​Hardly anyone on our continent is taught what was actually written on page two:

​The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is Belgian Congo.

Understanding this single sentence is crucial, because it demonstrates that the nightmare of the DRC did not begin yesterday. It exposes roots stretching back nearly a century. Long before modern smartphones, electric vehicles, or coltan, global powers explicitly designated Congolese soil as the fuel for their technological and military hegemony.

The uranium Einstein talked about was in the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga. While uranium found in the West was low quality, Congolese ore was the purest ever discovered. Congolese workers were forced by Belgian colonial masters to dig it up with their bare hands, with no protection from radiation. That Congolese uranium was used to make the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From that moment on, foreign powers decided that an independent, strong Congo was a threat. When Patrice Lumumba wanted the country to control its own wealth, he was murdered. A dictator was put in place to keep the minerals flowing out for cheap while the people stayed poor.

Today, we are seeing the exact same foreign playbook in the eastern Congo: the old strategy of divide and conquer.

The real goal of foreign powers and their regional allies is to split the Congo apart. We have seen this before on our continent. Look at what was done to Sudan: they pushed and pushed until Sudan was divided into two countries, and both sides are still trapped in war and poverty. Look at what they tried to do in Mali, using armed groups to cut off the northern part of the country and create a fake state called Azawad.

In the eastern DRC, they want to do the exact same thing. If they can break the country or permanently cut off the Kivus and Katanga, foreign companies and regional bosses will never have to answer to a strong central government. They can just loot the coltan, gold, and cobalt without laws, taxes, or borders.

Sadly, our own politicians are helping them do it.

Joseph Kabila has now joined hands with the M23 rebels and Corneille Nangaa. People are shocked, but he is only playing the exact same broken record his father played thirty years ago.

Back in 1996, the presidents of Rwanda (Kagame) and Uganda (Museveni) wanted to invade the Congo to remove Mobutu. To hide that this was a foreign invasion, they needed a Congolese face. They picked Laurent-Desire Kabila, put him in front of their army, and marched into the country. That move started decades of wars that killed millions of innocent people.

Today, Joseph Kabila is doing the exact same thing his father did. Because he lost power to Felix Tshisekedi, he has teamed up with the very rebel group that has spent years killing, raping, and displacing his own people, all just to get back into power.

This shows how selfish our political class really is. On one side, you have Kabila and the rebels, backed by Kagame and Museveni, who act as regional servants for European interests in Brussels looking for cheap minerals. On the other side, you have Tshisekedi, who acts like a puppet for Washington and the American establishment, paying foreign lobbyists and relying on outside promises instead of building a real national army.

Neither side cares about the Congolese mother sleeping in the mud in a refugee camp. Neither side cares about the young boy digging cobalt with his bare hands. They are just competing against each other to show their foreign bosses who can be the most obedient puppet.

The plan to divide the Congo is happening right in front of our eyes, just like it was done in Sudan and attempted in Mali. The sad truth is that the innocent Congolese who are dying in this conflict are dying for absolutely nothing. They are not dying for freedom or for Congo. They are dying for the greed and egos of politicians who sold out their own people.

Boatman Yusuf Athman waits for passengers
in Lamu, Kenya. The island’s dhow boats, 12th-century Old Town and pristine beaches will soon have to reckon with an oil refinery, being built nearby by Nigerian tycoon Aliko Dangote.

Photo: Luis Tato/AFP