Stephen W. Smith teaches African Studies at Duke. The Scramble for Europe: Young Africa on Its Way to the Old Continent was published in 2019.
In apartheid South Africa, ‘the enemy’ was ever present, day and night, from the public toilets you couldn’t use to the neighbourhood you couldn’t live in, by way of police raids at first light to check on your bedfellows, or simply to keep you terrified. When Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – who died on 2 April at the age of 81 – spoke of ‘the enemy’, the words had an intimate ring.
Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was shot dead in the presidential buildings in Ouagadougou on 15 October 1987. I was the West Africa correspondent at the time for Radio France International and Libération, based in neighbouring Ivory Coast. The day before the assassination I got a call from Sankara. This was a first. We knew each other well but, until then,...
For eight years, France has been fighting jihadists in the Western Sahel. The first deployments were in Mali. Others followed, across a swathe of arid land south of the Sahara, from Mauritania’s Atlantic coast to eastern Chad, a landscape of sand and igneous rock eight times the size of France. The French expeditionary corps (5200 troops on last year’s count) has won every...
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