The University of KwaZulu-Natal has announced that starting next year, all entering students must study Zulu. Zulu is spoken by perhaps a quarter of South Africa’s population and the extensiveness of its use is probably second only to Afrikaans. However, it is an exceptionally difficult language for adults to learn, and few whites, coloreds, or Asians do so. Read more »

At the Mali Donors Conference in Brussels on May 15 the United States announced $32 million in new humanitarian assistance to support Malian refugees in neighboring countries and to the internally displaced. The same day, the U.S. Department of State spokesman said that the Obama administration will request from Congress $180 million in FY 2014 for bilateral assistance. That funding would kick-in after the Mali elections, scheduled to take place in July. Read more »

This is a guest post by Dr. Deirdre LaPin, co-author of Securing Development and Peace in the Niger Delta (Woodrow Wilson Center, 2011) and a longstanding resident and development expert on Nigeria. Read more »

Kenya, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and, by extension, the international community currently face the dilemma of dealing with a president and a deputy president, freely and fairly elected (more or less; many questions remain) that are charged with crimes against humanity associated with 2007 election bloodshed. Africa Confidential has an excellent review of the current state of play. Read more »

Having cut short a trip to South Africa and annulled a planned state visit to Namibia, President Goodluck Jonathan has declared a “state of emergency” in the three northern states of Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa. In announcing this step, Jonathan acknowledged that there is an “insurrection” in northeast Nigeria, and that the government has lost control of certain geographic areas to “Boko Haram,” a defuse Islamist movement. Read more »

President Goodluck Jonathan has refused to say whether he will run for the presidency in 2015, although many Nigerians expect he will. The current efforts among the opposition parties to come together behind a single presidential candidate is based on the assumption that Jonathan will run. Read more »

Simukai Tinhu analyzes the staying power of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party in a thoughtful article, “Zimbabwe: Mugabe’s Will to Power.” It was published in ThinkAfrica Press on May 9. Also a “must-read” is the International Crisis Group’s (ICG) report “Zimbabwe Elections Scenarios;” it appeared May 6. Read more »

With Mali’s implosion, Islamic extremism in the Sahel, and the “Boko Haram” insurgency in Nigeria’s north drawing international attention, the Niger Delta has dropped off the radar of many West Africa watchers. Yet, only five years ago an insurrection there resulted in a major reduction in Nigeria’s oil production and impacted on state revenue. In 2009, then-president Umaru Yar’Adua introduced an “amnesty” that has been continued by President Goodluck Jonathan and ended (or at least reined-in) that cycle of violence. The United States Institute for Peace has just published an assessment of the amnesty by Aaron Sayne. The report is based on a wide range of interviews, but he cautions that it not a rigorous assessment of the amnesty’s success because the necessary data is absent. Nevertheless, the tone of his report is positive. Read more »

This is a guest post by Jacob Zenn, a research analyst at The Jamestown Foundation, and Atta Barkindo, a Ph.D. candidate, SOAS, University of London.

Since launching an insurgency in northern Nigeria in September 2010, Boko Haram leader Abu Shekau and his spokesmen have issued more than thirty statements to the Nigerian press and recorded a number of videos to claim attacks. In Shekau’s and other Boko Haram leaders’ pre-2010 sermons, the languages they use are Hausa and Arabic, not English. Shekau goes so far as to claim that the English language in northern Nigeria destroyed the traditional Arabic language education system for the region’s Muslims. We have reviewed Boko Haram sermons from before 2010, and our conclusions below are directly based on our interpretation of them in their original languages. We believe a study of these sermons is an important source for understanding the evolving Islamic insurgency in northern Nigeria that has been mostly overlooked, in part because their languages make them inaccessible to most Western observers. Read more »

The May 8 New York Times carries above the fold an Adam Nossiter story, “Bodies Pour in as Nigeria Rounds Up Islamists.” The story mostly consists of horrific reports of Nigerian security services (army and police) abuses of Northern Nigerian citizens, alleged members of or connected to Boko Haram, a radical Islamic insurgency. Nossiter notes that Boko Haram is “thoroughly enmeshed” in the local population making it difficult to root out the insurgents. He observes that security service brutality “…has turned many residents against the military, driving some toward the insurgency…” The security services and the Jonathan administration in Abuja continue to flatly deny that any abuses are happening, much less systematically carried out; despite the testimony of a wide range of credible northern observers. Read more »