ADF

REUTERS Nigeria and neighbors Benin and Niger have agreed to set up a joint border patrol force to tackle smuggling among the West African countries. Foreign ministers from the three countries met to discuss smuggling after Nigeria, which has Africa’s largest economy and biggest population, decided to close its land borders to trade through at least January 31, 2020.  Nigeria launched a partial border closure to tackle the smuggling of rice and other goods. After that, all trade via land borders was halted indefinitely.  The joint communique from the meeting in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, said Benin’s and Niger’s delegations had…

VOICE OF AMERICA Cameroon’s military arrested several dozen men and destroyed hundreds of handmade guns circulating on the northern border with Chad and Nigeria. In a public event, a military compactor crushed more than 2,500 guns, ammunition and other weapons the military says it seized from smugglers, hostage takers, poachers and suspected Boko Haram fighters.  Regine Esseneme, head of Cameroon’s Department of Justice in the northern town of Garoua, said she wants to send a clear message that there will be no safe haven for criminals operating in the border region of Cameroon, Chad and Nigeria. She said the three…

REUTERS Portuguese architect Tania Monteiro and her husband are almost alone as they tour Sudan’s pyramids, a world-class attraction long neglected by the world. “People are really, really nice, always very welcoming,” Monteiro said on a visit to Meroe, an ancient city on the east bank of the Nile River about 200 kilometers northeast of the capital, Khartoum. Sudan has more, though smaller, pyramids than Egypt, but attracted only about 700,000 tourists in 2018 compared to 10 million in its northern neighbor. Conflicts and crises under former ruler Omar al-Bashir, a tough visa regime, and a lack of roads and…

VOICE OF AMERICA Grace Chakudza gave birth in November 2019 to a healthy baby boy — her fourth child — at  Achikondi Community Clinic. It opened in 2008 to help poor women safely give birth. Since then, the clinic has performed more than 8,800 successful deliveries without the loss of mother or child, according to its founder. That’s a record number in Malawi, where the United Nations Children’s Fund says the average mortality rate per 1,000 births is 22 deaths for babies and six for mothers. Chakudza appreciates the care she got from the clinic. “There is a big difference,”…

BBC NEWS AT BBC.CO.UK/NEWS Fifteen-year-old Divina Maloum of Cameroon has won a children’s international peace prize for her work with young people who have suffered extremist violence, particularly in the north of her country. The prize was awarded by Dutch organization KidsRights, which says it wants children to be recognized for their efforts to improve their own situation. In 2014, the Cameroonian teenager founded the Children for Peace movement to work with child victims of terror. She goes to communities to talk to children about their rights and tell them that they do not have to be drawn into the…

ADF  STAFF Africa is on the verge of being declared polio-free after three years without any recorded cases of the disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) said in August 2019 that Nigeria had marked three years without a wild polio case, calling it a “major milestone.” If no more cases emerge in the next few months, Africa could officially be declared polio-free in 2020. The last case was recorded in Borno state in August 2016.  North and South America eliminated polio more than 20 years ago. The disease has killed and disabled hundreds of thousands of people around the world.…

BBC NEWS AT BBC.CO.UK/NEWS Black Africans are at a disadvantage when it comes to drug treatments because they represent only 2% of the genetic samples used for pharmaceutical research. A new Nigeria-based genomics company wants to change that. According to Abasi Ene-Obong, founder and CEO of biotech startup 54gene, black Africans and people of black ancestry are more genetically diverse than all of the other populations in the world combined, making their genetic information “a huge resource to be tapped.” He has set up a genetic research laboratory in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, from where his team analyzed 40,000 DNA…

BBC NEWS AT BBC.CO.UK/NEWS Queues have formed outside banks in Zimbabwe as people hope to get hold of the country’s first Zimbabwe dollar notes issued since 2009. The currency was scrapped a decade ago because hyperinflation caused prices to double almost daily. Zimbabwe’s central bank hopes the new notes will ease a severe cash shortage as the country suffers a deepening economic crisis. The bank has played down fears that the move will fuel further inflation. Inflation in Zimbabwe reached 300% in August 2019 — the highest rate in the world. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe insists that the 2-…

ADF STAFF The Kingdom of Axum, also known as Aksum, was the first to do many things in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was the first kingdom to mint its own coins. It created its own written language, called Ge’ez, which still is in use in Ethiopia today. Its king was the first to adopt Christianity as an official religion. And Axum dominated trade in the Horn of Africa and across the Red Sea for centuries.  Although the kingdom dated to the first century A.D., its time of greatest influence and prosperity was from the third century to the sixth century. The…

CLUES This area has 18 lakes of various sizes, depths and colors.  These permanent lakes in a desert result from an aquifer and a complex hydrological system that is not fully understood. Some of the lakes have blue, green or reddish water, which reflects their chemical composition. About a third of the surface of the lakes is covered with green floating reed carpets that contrast with the water. ANSWER  Lakes of Ounianga, northeastern Chad