Ghana is developing into the AI epicentre of Africa. Because those who train AI specialists themselves can also set their own goals. Such as developing a drug against malaria using artificial intelligence. But does the new president, who will be elected on Saturday, also believe in the AI revolution?
Read our reportage (with pictures by Swedish photographer Fredrik Lerneryd) by clicking here.
Every week, around 15 million discarded garments come from the West to Ghana. An increasingly smaller portion of these T-shirts and dresses are still suitable for wearing or recycling. ‘Because you in the West are buying more and more cheap clothes, we are left with more and more waste.’
Sudan’s lone caretaker protects ancient treasures from looting, write FT correspondents Andres Schipani and David Pilling, as the war creeps closer to an archaeological site with more pyramids than the whole of Egypt. “All the objects that have been stolen are unique pieces,” expert Amani Gashi said. “All the archeological sites are now at risk due to the war.”
Read the full story, with my Sudan pictures, here.
Fun news: my story about Kilkilu Ana, a comedy evening in Juba has been nominated for a Gouden Freelancer Award by Bureau Wibaut! The prize is sponsored by the Dutch NVJ. Find a short interview I did with Vera Spaans on their website. The award ceremony is held in Amsterdam’s Volkshotel on November 1st.
After hundreds of kilometers of vast arid flats, Ethiopian migrants encounter a point where the Djiboutian desert meets the sea. On the other side, just 30 kilometres away, the mountains of Yemen pop up. This is the Bab-el-Mandab, Arabic for the ‘Gate of Tears’, where the African continent almost meets the Arabian Peninsula.
An unknown number of migrants die in these waters; IOM doctor Youssouf Moussa (white kufi, 4rd picture) showed me pictures of drowned women and children, swollen by the sea and eaten by the fish. He and his team buried the bodies in makeshift graves on the beach, under piles of black stones.
Last year, over 123,000 people came into Djibouti, to make the dangerous journey into war-torn Yemen; many want to reach Saudi Arabia to work there. But for all the optimistic migrants who traveled with smugglers to the coast, we also met large groups of disillusioned migrants turning back.
Suicidal, traumatised people, who as “failed migrants” fear to go home empty handed. In Yemen, women have been raped by smugglers, men were tortured. Videos of the beatings were sent to relatives in Ethiopia, so they would pay ransom for their loved ones to be released.
Those who still made it through, told us how the smugglers dropped them at the Saudi border, where they “had to run like Usain Bolt” while the border police used them as “target practice”.
A few phone snaps from our recent trip to South Sudan:
With escalating wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the still ongoing civil war in Sudan has gone largely ignored by the international community. For over a year, fighting has devastated the African country, since fighting erupted between two rival generals who couldn’t reach an agreement about power sharing.
11 million people have been forced to flee their homes. Although many are displaced within their home country, many have also fled violence and hunger (famine was declared in parts of Sudan earlier this month) to neighbouring countries.
Over 700 thousand people have now fled Sudan into refugee camps in northeastern South Sudan, where they still face food and water shortages and live in makeshift homes in the mud. UN organization @worldfoodprogramme said they will scale down their food distribution in the four camps we visited, as they lack funding.
“I’d Rather die by a bomb or bullet in my homeland than in a camp in South Sudan”, said one refugee who wants to go back to his homeland. But for now, most people are stuck in the camps; the area surrounding the camps is flooding, making access routes impassable (we arrived on a small plane, that can’t even fly out to Maban on most days because of the rains).
To read our story, with pictures by Guy Peterson, tap/click on this Volkskrant link.
A few phone shots from Juba, the capital of South Sudan, where we attended the South Sudan Fashion Week event. On the catwalk, models hope to be discovered by international scouts. South Sudanese models are very popular in the West; quite a few South Sudanese women became top models in the past years.
But while Western countries are looking for South Sudanese women and men for their dark skin, many South Sudanese believe lighter skin is more beautiful. They even bleach their skin, which leads to many health risks.
It’s an idea that stuck from when South Sudan and Sudan were still one country, and black people were discriminated against by Sudanese from the North (who also controlled what is now South Sudan).
But, as many people in Juba told us, because of the upcoming of black models in Europe and the US, young girls learn to love their black skin — they’re seeing that skin bleaching is done less by Gen Z’ers and millennials.
Read more by tapping on this Volkskrant link! With great pictures and videos by Guy Peterson.
iPhone snaps from the weekly at the Kilkilu Comedy Show at the Nyakuron Cultural Center in Juba, the capital of South Sudan.
To forget that the war in neighbouring Sudan is pushing the South Sudanese economy over the edge, hundreds of young South Sudanese watch the performers here “as a form of therapy”. Meanwhile, inflation in Juba is surging.
Read our reportage, with pictures by Guy Peterson, on the website of de Volkskrant. This story was nominated for a Dutch Golden Freelancer Award. Find out more about the award and nomination here.
Since this week, The Netherlands has been in command of the European Aspides operation to protect ships against attacks by Houthis in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea - a crucial trade route. “We must guarantee the basic principle of freedom of navigation.”
For our report, we traveled to Djibouti to board the Karel Doorman, the largest ship of the Dutch navy fleet.
“We are facing a strong armed force,” says Aspides force commander George Pastoor. He says that each day, several Houthi attacks on cargo ships occur. Ships are also fired upon several times along the route. “The Houthis are a learning organization, just like we are. The threat posed by them has definitely increased since November.”
Eight iPhone snapshots from a long trip through South Africa. Photographer Sven Torfinn and I traveled from Mthatha to Cape Town - from Cape to Cape - to find out why so many disillusioned South Africans are turning their backs to the ANC.
Many believe that Nelson Mandela’s party isn’t keeping the promises they made over 30 years ago, when they came to power after apartheid was abolished and free elections were finally held. For many, the high hopes for a free and equal ‘rainbow nation’ have evaporated as unemployment, crime and corruption are soaring.
A constant water and electricity supply is only there for the rich. The voters have punished the ANC, that has been ruling South Africa since 1994; during last week’s elections, the party got just over 40 percent of the votes, meaning they will lose majority in parliament.
On assignment for de Volkskrant; read our story here.
The Hope Hostel in Kigali (first four pictures), operational through British funding, has been empty for two years and is now preparing to receive the asylum seekers London plans to deport, despite criticism of the Rwandan regime by human rights organizations.
In the UK, parliament approved a controversial law Tuesday that would allow asylum seekers who have come illegally to the United Kingdom to be sent to Rwanda. The lighter their claim for asylum, the greater the chance that the refugees (initially mainly solo-travelling males) will be deported to Rwanda.
The U.K. intends to deter would-be migrants. The Conservative government, led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, has pledged to put an end to boats carrying migrants crossing the Channel illegally from France. Since 2018, almost 120,000 people have crossed to the U.K. via that route.
Hope Hostel is Rwanda’s first “transit center,” with capacity for 100 people. Maintenance of the site has been covered with British funds for years, through a €433 million ($462.7 million) agreement signed by the two countries in 2022.
Human rights activists and members of the opposition accuse the repressive regime of Rwandan President Paul Kagame of human rights violations and consider that the migration agreement with the U.K. is simply a way to whitewash the reputation of the head of state and his government.
The Brits were inspired to do business with Rwanda in 2021 because Kigali had previously shown its willingness to receive refugees and migrants from the Libyan Civil War. After images spread around the world of migrants in Libya being abused, tortured, and sold into slavery, UNHCR called on countries to help evacuate the stranded migrants. The first flights arrived in Rwanda in 2019.
Since then, more than 2,000 refugees have arrived in Rwanda, where they will be relocated to a safe country through the UNHCR. They are housed just outside the village of Gashora, 40 miles south of Kigali. When we visited the facility, a small group of Eritreans departed for resettlement in Canada and the United States.
Read the whole reportage, for De Volkskrant, here. The story in Spanish can be found here, in English here. More about my picture and story can be viewed in this Buitenhof TV sequence.
Exactly 30 years ago, a genocide commenced in the Central African country Rwanda. In just a hundred days, over 800 thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered. For de Volkskrant newspaper, photographer Sven Torfinn and I made a tour through the country to find out: is there reconciliation? What does the discovery of a mass grave do to a community? And why is the government so strict when it comes to who can and cannot be remembered during the annual Kwibuka commemoration? The answers to these questions can be found by tapping on this link. Or listen to the Elke Dag podcast.
How is it for kids to flee their country from war and ethnic violence? What do you play with when there are no toys around? And how can you learn when there is no school in the refugee camp? For Samsam Magazine, I interviewed Aliyah (blue headscarf, 3rd photo) who fled from El Geneina, Darfur (in West Sudan).
