ADF

VOICE OF AMERICA In Ghana and elsewhere in West Africa, organic food is growing in popularity. But organic produce is not easily regulated, and consumers are paying extra for unverified claims. Farmers across the region have created their own system, with support from international bodies, to certify that produce is organic, meaning it is grown without the use of chemical pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. Organic farmer Kobina Hudson grows about 40 types of vegetables and fruits in Ghana. Up until about a year ago, the only way his customers could be assured of his organic practices was by trusting his…

ADF Staff Almost 500 years ago, a man named Yasuke drew crowds wherever he went in Japan. He was the first foreign-born man to become a samurai, Japan’s elite warrior caste. He also was the first, and only, black man most Japanese people had ever seen. A fellow samurai described him at that time as being stunningly tall, “and his skin was like charcoal.” He is believed to have been 1.88 meters tall, towering over Japanese men, who averaged 1.6 meters at that time. His given name is not known. Yasuke, pronounced yas-kay, was his Japanese name. He arrived in…

CLUES This city was built as a fortified colony on the Atlantic coast in the early 16th century. It is one of the first settlements Portuguese explorers created in Africa on the route to India. Among the original surviving buildings is the Church of the Assumption. The city has a large cistern, which was featured in a 1951 movie production of Shakespeare’s Othello. ANSWER  The Portuguese fortification of Mazagan, now part of the city of El Jadida, Morocco

ADF STAFF In the early 1990s, a symbiotic relationship began between poachers of South African abalone and organized crime syndicates from China, where the large sea snail is considered a delicacy. That relationship, which includes African gangs and Chinese drug traffickers, continues to this day. Called “white gold” because of their pearly underbelly, the snails are considered a luxury item. Sharply rising demand in the 1990s created a multibillion-dollar global export industry — and a booming poaching industry in South Africa. Of the 56 species of abalone worldwide, five are found in South Africa. One of them, Haliotis midae, is regarded…

ADF STAFF  As the violent extremist threat festering in Mali began to spread into Niger and Burkina Faso, coastal states such as Benin became the next frontier. On May 1, 2019, violence reared its head in that frontier, as assailants kidnapped two French tourists and killed their wildlife guide in Benin’s Pendjari National Park. French forces operating out of Burkina Faso later rescued the two tourists and two other civilians — an American and a South Korean — in an operation that resulted in the deaths of two French Soldiers. On February 10, 2020, men armed with machetes and rifles…

ADF STAFF The Fisheries Committee for the West Central Gulf of Guinea (FCWC) has established a Regional Monitoring, Control and Surveillance Center (RMCSC) to help counter illegal fishing in the Gulf of Guinea. Headquartered in Tema, Ghana, the center will help FCWC member countries Benin,  Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Togo manage their fishing sectors. The new center was integrated into the FCWC West Africa Task Force, which is financed by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, known as Norad. The center opened in mid-May. It is equipped with vessel-tracking systems and has the capacity to collect data on authorized fishing…

ADF STAFF Ethiopia’s civil war in the northern region of Tigray has dragged on for more than six months. What Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed initially called “a law enforcement operation” against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) has devolved into lawless chaos. The United Nations human rights office says that all parties involved are accused of committing war crimes against civilians. There is no end in sight, and the conflict has sparked violent border disputes within Ethiopia’s ethnically separate, semi-autonomous states and with neighboring countries. When Abiy consolidated power in 2019 by dissolving the country’s ruling party, he promised to…

ADF STAFF Somalia’s leadership announced May 27 that they will hold new elections within 60 days, ending a political impasse that had roiled the country for months. The announcement came after several days of negotiations between Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble and representatives of the country’s five federal states. The lower house of Parliament in early May reversed a previous vote granting President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed a two-year extension of his term, which expired in February. The May vote calmed tensions that began when Mohamed’s four-year term expired without elections being held. The resulting conflict threatened to undo many of…

ADF STAFF When Sierra Leone’s government inked a $55 million deal with China to develop an industrial fishing harbor on 100 hectares of beach and protected rainforests, conservationists and local fishermen were outraged. The project at Black Johnson Beach borders Western Area Peninsula National Park, home to endangered species such as duiker antelope and pangolins, and the waters burst with sardines, barracuda and grouper, according to a report by The Guardian in the United Kingdom. The vague details of the deal upset local fishermen, who catch 70% of the fish for the domestic market, and enraged conservationists who say no…

ADF STAFF Across Africa, countries have eagerly adopted Chinese technology to build communications networks and monitor public spaces. However, the spread of China’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems might pose a risk to nations’ national security and sovereignty. In 2017, for example, African Union officials discovered that sensitive data from servers in their new Chinese-built headquarters was being routed in the middle of the night from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to servers in Shanghai, China. The data dumps had taken place every night from the time the headquarters opened in 2012, prompting accusations of spying. China has deployed technological improvements along with…