Using whips and clubs and firing teargas canisters, police broke up another demonstration demanding constitutional reform, this time at Nyahururu on 19 October. It was the latest in...

Talk of improved relations between the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front and the main Oromo opposition party, the Oromo Liberation Front, looks overblown. On 8 October, the...

The government's reshuffle of top army posts is widely considered a bid to be seen to be doing something amid rising protest against the pressganging of teenagers for...

The transformation of old Zaïre in to the new Democratic Republic of Congo has also transformed the politics of the region around Lake Kivu. Yet insecurity remains endemic...

In what is believed to be the first such case ever, a Sudanese doctor has been charged in Scotland with committing torture in the Sudan. On 5 September,...

There is no likelihood in the near future that the International Monetary Fund will resume lending from its US$220 million balance of payments support. The Kenya government has...

On the face of it, the plan for 25 Somali factions to meet in the north-eastern port of Bossasso in November sounds like a step forward for the...

The Federal Islamic Republic of the Comoros has again sprung a surprise on the world, with two of its three islands calling (separately) both for independence and for...

President Nelson Mandela's extraordinary peacemaking bid in Sudan, which appears to have pleased only the National Islamic Front, came without South African Foreign Ministry support, Africa Confidential understands....

This is a bad year for authoritarian governments. The dean of despots, Mobutu Sese Seko, was chased out in May, Sudan's Hassan el Turabi faces coordinated military opposition...