Michael Schmidt

The recent rash of African military coups may have started in Chad with the 2021 shoehorning in of Mahamat Déby Itno after his father Idriss Déby died of wounds sustained in battle against rebels, but the face of the new anti-democratic wave is 37-year-old Captain Ibrahim Traoré, the “interim president” of Burkina Faso, who is hailed by many Africanists as the “new Sankara”. With his youthful good looks, camouflaged muscle-tops, and no-nonsense attitude, Traoré, who came to power by coup in 2022, certainly reminds one of the compelling figure of Captain Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s first president, who, as revealed…

Most urban planning for Africa’s mushrooming cities has focused on megacities and high-value port-and-transport corridors, but medium-sized cities, which accommodate a quarter of the continent’s urban population, should play a pivotal role in development. Urbanisation is proving to be the most dynamic determinant of Africa’s future prospects, with projections that African city dwellers will double from 700 million to 1.4 billion by 2050, outnumbering their peers in North America (617 million), Europe (449 million), the Middle East (294 million), and Oceania (32 million) combined. According to the report Africa’s Urbanisation Dynamics 2025 by a consortium including the African Development Bank…

Women play an unusually large role in Africa’s artisanal and small-scale mining sector, which employs nine-million Africans and supports some 54-million people, according to Nordic Africa Institute estimates, yet much of it is in the shadow economy, drawn into international criminal cartels at war with often equally-shady extractives multinationals. Last June, SwissAid estimated that between 321 and 475 tons of gold alone derived from the informal (and thus usually criminalised) mining sector was smuggled out of Africa each year, with a value of between $24 and $35 bn. In South Africa, losses from gold, platinum, and coal amounted to an…

The joke that every city child knows that milk comes from boxes and not cows highlights a distressing reality: while food is central to the healthy development of Africa’s cities, food supply is rarely on the urban planning agenda, while urban demand is equally absent from rural food security policy, despite rapid urbanisation across the continent. That is a glaring gap that a series of 18 studies presented in the 2018 book, Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities, edited by Prof Vanessa Watson and Dr Jane Battersby-Lennard of the University of Cape Town, hopes to bridge. The…

“They cut my nets, and the government does not do anything,” an outraged Somali fisherman named Yusuf told senior East Africa analyst Omar Mahmoud of the International Crisis Group. “If I take up a weapon to defend myself, they call me a pirate – but who is the real pirate?” Mahmoud recalls this emotional encounter in a June 2024 article in which he warns of the resurgence of piracy off the Horn of Africa, where its original surge, from 2009 to 2012, was initially provoked by desperate local fishermen turning to armed robbery of the foreign vessels, hailing from nations…

Self-rule and tradition 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 eye to it – with the unfortunate result being the avoidance of the duty of care in this troublesome so-called “lawless…

Disinformation has proven deadly for many Africans In February 2013, gunmen believed to have been members of the terror group Boko Haram shot dead nine female health workers outside two clinics in Kano state, northern Nigeria, where the women were preparing to provide polio inoculations. The killings occurred a full decade after the religious and political leaders of Kano, Zamfara, and Kaduna states urged parents not to allow their children to be vaccinated against the debilitating poliovirus. Their opposition stemmed from a fatwa, or legal ruling, by Datti Ahmed, a Kano-based physician heading a prominent Muslim group, the Supreme Council…

By Michael Schmidt Those who set their sights on rooting out corruption are usually focused on two fields: government and the state, and corporations and financial markets. However, in Africa, there is an immense third field where corrupt practices flourish that is usually overlooked by investigators: the foreign aid industry. The argument that the disbursement 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 a 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…