Uganda's incumbent President Yoweri Museveni has been declared the winner of the election. Museveni changed the constitution to enable him to run in the elections, the first in 25 years. ... Read More

For the first time in 26 years, Ugandans have headed to the polls to vote in multi-party presidential and parliamentary elections. There are 10,450,788 registered voters according to the Ugandan ... Read More

A powerful earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter Scale struck Mozambique and Zimbabwe just past midnight. The quake's centre was in Manica Province and news reports say that two people ... Read More

São Tomé is considered to be a priciple port used for the export of slaves across the Atlantic, but this is only part of the story. The total number of ... Read More

As was done in South Africa after the end of apartheid, Liberia is to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate atrocities. President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is quoted by ... Read More

In an attack that will certainly go down in the history of African literature, the head of the University of Cape Town's English Department, Stephen Watson, has accused the eminent ... Read More

The hope is that the adoption of a new constitution in the Democractic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is another step towards finally getting the country working again after the ... Read More

Two thousand years ago the first of several waves colonists swept into South Africa. Each time a new wave arrived the existing populations were marginalised. In the first of these ... Read More

The United Nations tribunal dealing with Rwandan genocide cases has been given until 2008 by the UN Security Council to conclude all its trials. (Since it was established it has ... Read More

Small though they may be (they grow to less than an eighth of an inch or two millimeters), assassin spiders don't spin webs and sit around waiting for prey. Instead, ... Read More

On 13 February 1960 France successfully tested its first atomic bomb near the Reganne oasis in the Sahara Desert in Algeria. Three further atmospheric tests were done at the site, ... Read More

Under the Apartheid government, the vibrant, mixed-race community of Sophiatown in Johannesburg was declared a whites-only area and renamed Triomf ('triumph' in Afrikaans). Now the original name has been restored ... Read More

On a small island off the coast of Tanzania lies the site of Kilwa Kisiwani, also called Kilwa (and spelled in Portuguese Quiloa), the most important of about thirty-five trading ... Read More

When Nelson Mandela was released from prison on 11 February 1990, he repeated words from the defence statement he'd made during his trial for treason 27 years previously: "I have ... Read More

A new intact tomb has been found in Egypt's Valley of the Kings by a team from the University of Memphis in the United States, the first such discovery since ... Read More

The Southern African government is to re-open the investigation into the death of Mozambican president Samora Machel in a plane crash in 1986, according to news reports. Machel was on ... Read More

On 9 February 1955 the first forced removals took place in Sophiatown, as the apartheid government started its campaign to flatten the township and rebuild a white residential suburb named ... Read More

The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) has confirmed that the "highly pathogenic H5N1" strain of bird flu has been found in northern Nigeria, the first occurence on the continent. ... Read More

The Dictionary Unit for South African English, which was was set up in 1969, keeps track of the way English is used in the country. Its database was used for ... Read More

The spread of English in the southern tip of Africa started when the British took over the Cape colony in 1806, extending to the Eastern Cape with the arrival of ... Read More

Established in 1950 by Robert Crisp and Jim Bailey (who a year later became sole owner) Drum magazine portrayed what life was really like in townships and homelands under apartheid. ... Read More