Welcome to Overseas Coverage’s Africa Transient.
The highlights this week: Tanzanians head to the polls beneath an more and more repressive regime, Cameroon and Ivory Coast crack down on postelection protests, and the Sudanese metropolis of El Fasher falls to the Fast Help Forces.
Violent protests have damaged out in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest metropolis, as polling stations opened on Wednesday for the nation’s normal election. In line with rights teams, Tanzania has grow to be more and more authoritarian as President Samia Suluhu Hassan has tightened her grip on management to make sure victory.
After Hassan changed President John Magufuli following his sudden demise in March 2021, many analysts believed that her tenure would mark a break from his authoritarian regime, particularly as she reversed bans on opposition rallies and newspapers important of Magufuli.
However now, some analysts and critics contemplate Hassan to be worse than the autocrat she changed.
Up to now couple of years, Hassan’s critics have confronted brutal killings, abduction, and rape in what Amnesty Worldwide has described as a “wave of terror.” Between January 2024 and October 2025, the rights group stated it documented “enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, torture, illegal killings, and extreme restrictions on freedoms of motion, expression, and peaceable meeting.”
Hassan will successfully be operating unopposed. Tundu Lissu, the chair of Chadema, Tanzania’s important opposition social gathering, has been detained since April, when he was charged with treason for pushing for electoral reform. Lissu has argued that elections can’t be free or honest when Hassan instantly appoints members of the nation’s electoral fee.
Chadema’s deputy chair, John Heche, was briefly detained final week whereas attempting to attend Lissu’s trial, which started in early October.
In the meantime, in September, Tanzania’s electoral fee disqualified one other main presidential candidate, Luhaga Mpina—a former authorities minister-turned-critic from the second-largest opposition social gathering, ACT-Wazalendo.
Behind the scenes, Hassan’s repression might be pushed partly by her need to rein in critics inside her personal Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) social gathering, the second-longest ruling social gathering in Africa. CCM and its predecessor have held energy since Tanzania’s independence from Britain in 1961.
“She sees this as essential to cement her rule in a patriarchal society,” one former advisor informed AFP. “She knew that the federal government she inherited was deeply in opposition to her and deeply misogynist.”
Hassan’s supporters level to elevated tourism and regular financial development throughout her tenure. Hassan is trying to rework Tanzania from a lower-middle-income to an upper-middle-income financial system.
Her authorities not too long ago secured a $1.4 billion take care of China to refurbish the Tazara railway connecting Tanzania and Zambia, which is able to quadruple the road’s capability, improve important minerals income for landlocked Zambia’s Copperbelt area, and open up new commerce alternatives with Beijing. Tanzania has additionally ramped up manufacturing of latest offshore pure fuel reserves in a $42 billion venture backed by overseas buyers.
Tanzania’s trajectory follows a broader pattern of rising authoritarianism and violent crackdowns on dissent in Africa, which have helped gasoline protests throughout the continent, together with in Cameroon, Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco, Nigeria, and Tunisia. Younger Africans are more and more fed up with their voices going unheard, particularly as they face excessive unemployment charges and elections which might be successfully predetermined.
“There isn’t a election in Tanzania,” Deogratias Munishi, Chadema’s overseas affairs secretary, informed Citizen TV Kenya. “If I could sum up correctly, it’s a coronation ceremony.”
Wednesday, Oct. 29: Tanzania holds a normal election.
Thursday, Oct. 30: The United Nations Safety Council adopts a brand new mandate for its peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara.
Tuesday, Nov. 11: The Museum of West African Artwork opens in Benin Metropolis, Nigeria.
Protest crackdowns. Protests have continued to rack Cameroon since election outcomes had been introduced on Monday, declaring 92-year-old President Paul Biya—the world’s longest-ruling chief—the winner of an eighth time period in workplace. Not less than 4 individuals had been killed and dozens arrested in demonstrations over the weekend.
Ivory Coast equally noticed discontent following a poll on Saturday that handed 83-year-old President Alassane Ouattara a fourth time period. Ouattara’s strongest challengers, former Credit score Suisse chief government Tidjane Thiam and former President Laurent Gbagbo, had been barred from operating. Gbagbo denounced the election as a “civilian coup.”
Ivorian presidents are restricted to 2 phrases in workplace, however Ouattara has argued that his time period limits had been reset when he modified the structure in 2016. This month, authorities authorities arrested a whole bunch of individuals protesting Ouattara operating for a fourth time period.
RSF takes main metropolis. El Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state, fell to the paramilitary Fast Help Forces (RSF) on Sunday. Sudan’s military has since confirmed that it has withdrawn from town, its final stronghold within the nation’s west. Round 250,000 individuals have been trapped in El Fasher for the reason that RSF laid siege to town 18 months in the past.
Because the RSF features floor, the U.N. has warned of worsening ethnic cleaning in opposition to non-Arabs. Satellite tv for pc imagery collected on Monday by Yale College’s Humanitarian Analysis Lab discovered proof of the RSF conducting mass killings of civilians in El Fasher in systematic house-to-house assaults.
Zuma authorized charges. A South African excessive courtroom has ordered former South African President Jacob Zuma to pay again round $1.6 million in authorized charges coated by state funds throughout his quite a few personal litigations regarding prices of corruption, tax evasion, and cash laundering.
Zuma beforehand served two months of a 15-month jail sentence in 2021 for contempt of courtroom after defying an order to testify in a state corruption inquiry.
Zuma’s scandal-ridden legacy has tainted his former social gathering, the African Nationwide Congress (ANC), and worsened its repute for corruption. His newfound help for rival social gathering uMkhonto weSizwe has additional eroded the ANC’s voter base.
Trump-style migrant deal. Uganda has finalized a deal to start internet hosting asylum-seekers deported by the Netherlands beginning subsequent yr. The settlement, which the Dutch far-right coalition authorities first floated in 2024, was initially struck final month on the sidelines of the U.N. Normal Meeting in New York.
Uganda will act as a “transit hub” for primarily African migrants earlier than they’re ultimately deported to their international locations of origin. Kampala signed a comparable deal with Washington in August. The Dutch migrant deal is anticipated to face authorized pushback from home rights teams.
Uganda is Africa’s largest refugee-hosting nation. It shelters greater than 1.7 million refugees and asylum-seekers, most of whom fled conflicts in neighboring South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Most of the nation’s refugee camps are situated in distant areas and are affected by excessive local weather, together with drought and flooding.
Critics argue that Uganda’s open-door refugee coverage has led to international powers trying the opposite manner on President Yoweri Museveni’s repressive regime and anti-LGBTQ legal guidelines. Museveni is looking for to increase his almost 40-year rule in upcoming elections in January.
The top of October kick-starts a sequence of year-end annual arts and tradition occasions throughout West Africa, when members of the diaspora historically return dwelling for seasonal holidays and celebrations. This yr’s festivals come because the continent’s artwork and music scenes have thrived lately, pushed by a surge in worldwide curiosity that has helped contribute to the institution of latest galleries, residencies, and artist studios.
In Nigeria, back-to-back occasions are beginning with LagosPhoto Pageant, which opened this week, adopted by Lagos Style Week, Artwork X Lagos, the Lagos Worldwide Theatre Pageant, and Lagos Fringe. In Senegal, L’Artwork dans la Cité will happen throughout the capital of Dakar from Nov. 28, that includes exhibitions of labor by younger Senegalese artists, artwork workshops, and architectural walks.
In Ghana, Accra Cultural Week will kick off on Oct. 30. Organized by Gallery 1957, named after the yr of Ghana’s independence from Britain, the occasion will characteristic work from Ghanaian artists, together with Denyse Gawu-Mensah, who superimposes classic pictures from the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies onto textiles, evoking the nation’s optimism within the post-independence interval.
The area’s occasions will culminate in Accra’s two-day AfroFuture competition, beforehand named Afrochella, set to begin on Dec. 28. Final yr, greater than 1,000,000 individuals attended AfroFuture; its recognition displays the worldwide success of Afrobeats and rising demand for Africa-based music festivals.
Gold-for-arms commerce. Every year, Nigeria loses greater than $9 billion to unlawful mining, which has partly financed terrorism within the nation’s northwest, Lami Sadiq studies for the Worldwide Centre for Investigative Reporting.
“With competitors over the area’s mineral assets, particularly gold, contributing to ongoing instability in Mali and Burkina Faso, it not solely exposes northern Nigeria to the regional patterns of insecurity however situates Nigeria amongst key hotspots of violence and arms trafficking, facilitating each importation and home manufacturing of weapons in West Africa,” Sadiq writes.
South Africa’s literary canon. South African Scottish author Zoë Wicomb died on Oct. 13 on the age of 76. In Africa Is a Nation, Lynne Brown and Desiree Lewis recount how her writing probed the complexities of colonization, emigration, and political resistance.
Wicomb’s “evaluation was usually misinterpret,” the authors write. “Some critics mistook her deconstruction of those colonial fictions as a tacit endorsement of them, folding her into the very discursive lineage … that she so exactly challenged.”
