18/1/2023
Africa’s prospects for the coming year hardly look rosy. Problems from climate change to debt, internal dissent, civil conflict and geopolitical rivalry, are piling up. And yet two things might surprise and encourage us: trade and politics. The problems are easy to catalogue. In terms of the megatrends – those things that governments can …
This week, 45 of Africa’s 54 leaders pitched up in Washington DC for the first US-Africa Summit in eight years, with another four countries represented at lower level – a powerful demonstration of the US’s continued pulling power and of its desire to woo...
16/12/2022
On 2 November, the Royal African Society marked its 120th Anniversary with a celebration of Creative Africa at The Shard in London. It was a great event, entertaining our 300 guests with African fashion, film, food and music, and an auction of contemporary Afr...
23/11/2022
New British prime minister Liz Truss has never said much in public about Africa. But, in my view, her administration must pay more attention to its relationship with Africa. African countries are increasingly important partners both in geostrategic and ...
08/9/2022
RAS Director, Dr Nicholas Westcott, who is also currently a Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, has just published an ECFR policy note on Shared Fortunes: Why Britain, the EU, and Africa need each other. It highlights the i...
03/5/2022
The Republic of Congo (also known as Congo-Brazzaville to avoid confusion with the Democratic Republic of Congo whose capital Kinshasa lies just across the river) came to town in London last week. The investment promotion road show was a very pro...
14/3/2022
African leaders, forty of them at Head of State or Government level, returned from the EU-AU Summit in Brussels on 17-18 February. Big issues were discussed – and I will return to them below – but scarcely had they landed back home when the world was turne...
28/2/2022
Another day, another coup in the Sahel. Within 12 months, Chad, Mali and Burkina Faso have all fallen under the de facto control of the military, as has Guinea on the coast. Democracy seems in retreat. Jihadists appear to be advancing. And destabilised states ...
31/1/2022
All wars end. It is just a question of how long it takes and how many people die in the process. Ethiopia is turning into Africa’s forgotten war, partly because so little reliable information is available, with the authorities reluctant to allow indep...
17/12/2021