Michael Schmidt

Those who set their sights on rooting out corruption are usually focused on two fields, of government and the state, and of corporations and financial markets. But in Africa, there is an immense third field where ingrained corrupt practices flourish that is usually overlooked by investigators: the foreign aid industry. The argument that the disbursing of developmental aid to African governments and civil society organisations constitutes an “industry” in its own right is unusual in the first place, but the massive sums of money and the huge number of employees involved give it a gravity of such pull that it…

Its skyline is dominated by the rail-served grain silos that are the cathedrals of the South African platteland (rural flatland). Ottosdal appears as a typical small town straddling a railway branch line, sustaining only one guesthouse and one safari lodge, and a small “country club” near the quarry outside of town. The town originated as a Dutch Reformed Church parish in 1913 and was incorporated four years later. Inevitably, given the longevity of apartheid geography, this North West Province settlement of more than 800 registered residents in only 5,15km² still has a “black” township, Letsopa, and adjoining shantytown separated from…

It was more of a challenge chewing the hard carapace of the palm-sized Madagascar hissing cockroach than swallowing it. That, strangely enough, elicited a pleasant chocolaty taste—not that anyone I have told about this experience even faintly believes me. Yet pre-Columbian insect tucker, as eaten by ancient Aztecs and Mayans—cockroaches, spiders, scorpions, worms, grasshoppers, and so forth—is pretty standard fare that one can find in food markets, even in a giant modern metropolis like Mexico City.  Ant-eggs are an Aztec delicacy and taste like pomegranate, but my personal favourite is a taco filled with slices of fresh avocado topped with…

At the entrance to the dusty town of el-Fashir in North Darfur, there is a sun-faded sign that reads “Desert Combat Department”. But despite the tribal conflict there, this is not an army unit but a municipal outfit with the Sisyphean task of holding back the immensity of the Sahara desert. I was there as a foreign correspondent covering the war and attempting to understand the complexity of it all. One night, I was invited to a large dinner hosted by the governors of the three Darfurian provinces. During an interview, the governor of South Darfur told me about his…

A decade ago, when Nigeria’s then-president Goodluck Jonathan announced the master plan for the continent’s biggest new urban development, Centenary City, a satellite of the capital Abuja, he took care to stress that it would be independent of the notoriously erratic national power grid.  Absent from the tree-lined avenues of the $18.376 billion smart eco-city for 137,000 residents and half a million daily commuters would be the smell and racket of tens of thousands of labouring diesel generators to which Nigerians are so accustomed in Abuja, Lagos, and other cities struggling to keep the lights on.  The largest foreign direct…

The evolution of criminal networks across Africa is a complex tale crossing centuries – but the continent’s integration into the global economy, especially after the advent of democracy in the wake of the Cold War, has consolidated gangsterism as never before. The dense networks of smuggling routes established in the pre-colonial era, such as those that transect the Sahara desert, linking the riches of West Africa such as gold and ivory to the markets of the Mediterranean world and thus Europe, were the same used during the slave trade. Remarkably, they continue to be used centuries later, albeit now augmented…

Africa’s ‘lawless third’: duty of care Swathes of the continent are home to people whose efforts at self-rule or traditional ways of life have challenged state attempts to deal with COVID-19 The lack of access to healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic experienced by millions of Africans as a result of living in ungoverned, under-serviced, rebel-controlled, or poorly supported alternatively administered regions, raises a unique set of problems for governments, donor agencies, and healthcare professionals combating the novel coronavirus. The sheer scale and persistence of this problem has caused many decision makers at country and international levels to turn a blind…

The media: no place to hide Journalism is a high-risk job for African reporters, who are often not only undertrained and underpaid but also face jail, injury, even death A promising young journalist told me of covering a recent riot and tweeting an update on the action on his cell phone when he fortunately looked up mid-tweet to see “two Molotov cocktails flying through the air towards me” – forcing him to abandon his frankly useless tweet to scramble for his life. That neatly encapsulates one new dimension of threat to journalists working in Africa: while navigating between authorities wielding…

Africa: an artificial patchwork? Understanding the dynamics of ethnic conflicts in Africa means appreciating the role of ethnic identity In 2011 Peter S. Larson, a professor at the University of Nagasaki, Japan, published an attempt to chart the interplay between ethnicity and African conflict. Larson used the 1959 map of 835 “ethnic regions” of Africa produced by anthropologist George Murdock. While admitting that Murdock’s map is “perhaps naïve”, Larson states that it remains an important source to Africanists. He then drew on the University of Sussex’s Armed Conflict and Event Location Database to plot current conflict events onto Murdock’s ethnographic…

Africa: the scourge of ethnicity Understanding ethnicity—inherited or imposed—can go a long way to ensure accurate coverage of conflict in Africa As a journalist I have covered a range of conflicts, some of which had a clearly ethnic dimension. But ethnicity is a multidimensional concept that blends race, colour, creed, class, clan, language, lifestyle, identity and culture in an ephemeral and continually shifting matrix. This can make it a tricky subject at the best of times. Moreover, politics can be distorted through an ethnic lens, making it treacherous territory for journalists, especially when they can’t speak local dialects or know…