Africa

Legal sources in Paris say the long, venomous investigations into oil company Elf-Aquitaine will be buried before May's presidential election. Elf, merged in 1998-9 with Franco-Belgian giant TotalFina,...

Arms supplies to countries such as Zimbabwe and Congo-Kinshasa will be more tightly controlled, says Britain's Minister of State for Trade, Nigel Griffiths. UK-based arms dealers breaking embargoes...

Belgium's Sabena went bust. Swissair was to have rescued it but followed it into financial collapse. For Africa's business travellers and public servants, it's a disaster. Swissair, trying...

The third US-Africa Business Summit, in Philadelphia on 30 October – 2 November was larger and more successful than the previous ones in Washington (1999) and Houston (2000)...

Africa will see little of the billions of dollars being pumped into the United States' military, diplomatic and intelligence services since the 11 September attacks. However, already there...

Every African government sent condolences to Washington after the attacks of 11 September and popular sympathy everywhere was with the victims. However, opinion is divided on Washington's diplomatic...

The Islamist international movement, which has suddenly drawn half the world into a major confrontation, has roots in Africa. It was founded in its modern, radical, manifestation as...

Zambian Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo has been at odds with the Vatican since 1982, when he was removed from his archdiocese of Lusaka and given unspecified duties in Rome...

The leadership struggle in Britain's Conservative Party has an African dimension. After one of right-winger Iain Duncan Smith's backers was expelled last week from the party for also...

The last relics of colonialism are at last being swept out of Paris. For decades, French-speaking Africa was regarded as the chasse gardée, the private hunting-ground; now the...

Francophone dignitaries are gathered in Ottawa, Canada, and its Québecois sister-city, Hull, for the 2001 Jeux de la Francophonie, starting, appropriately enough, on 14 July, Bastille Day. But...

Five days after the Labour Party's landslide victory in the 7 June parliamentary elections, South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki arrived in London and was the first visiting head...

Africa needs peacekeepers more than ever just now. France has abandoned its post-colonial policies in West Africa, and has launched a new kind of military-backed diplomacy. The result...

Business is looking up for the Washington lobby firms that want to work for African governments. New contracts worth several million dollars, plus many more in negotiation, followed...

Who's lobbying for whom - and what's it worth - in Angola, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Swaziland and Uganda?

Rwanda and Uganda must pay for their military involvement in Congo-Kinshasa by exclusion from the French-led peacekeeping programme, the Renforcement des Capacités Africaines de Maintien de la Paix....

A Belgian arms trader, Jacques-Germain Monsieur, is the new star in the French judicial inquiry into France's former state oil company, Elf Aquitaine (now privatised and part of...

Britain's Labour government, whose proclaimed ethical foreign policy has been under fire since the Sandline affair in Sierra Leone (AC Vol 39 No 5), wants to show it...

The political cost of the arms-for-oil scandal is growing fast in Luanda and Paris. It reaches right across the power elite in two countries. In Angola, it has...

President Jacques Chirac is growing ambivalent about Africa. A critical observer of Franco-African affairs, the Chairman of the non-governmental organisation Survie, François-Xavier Verschave, has called the Angolagate affair...

We are saddened to announce the death of Justice Austin Amissah, a reader, critic and friend of Africa Confidential.

The assassination of Congo-Kinshasa's President Laurent-Désiré Kabila played havoc with the running order at Cameroon's Franco-African summit, the 21st since 1973. Underlying the scheduled theme, 'L'Afrique - l'heure...

The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, better known as the Unification Church and even better known as 'the Moonies', continues to court African leaders....