Guinea’s first free election since independence was met with praise and relief on Tuesday, but observers warned the days to come were crucial.
Four million Guineans vote on Sunday in the first democratic election in the West African nation.
In a dusty basement in Dakar, the archived history of nearly two centuries of French presence in West Africa is in an advanced state of degradation.
Guinea-Bissau voted on Sunday to elect a new president after a series of assassinations, including that of veteran leader Joao Bernardo Vieira.
Senegal, which imports the majority of its food and all of its petrol, has been hit hard by rising food and fuel prices.
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/ 13 December 2007
Parents of hundreds of minor children shipped to Spain in a wave of illegal emigration from Senegal in recent years are not keen to have them back under a planned repatriation exercise. ”I don’t want my only son, my sole hope in life, to come back to Senegal,” sobbed housewife Diodo Seye.
Senegal’s movie business, home of some of the continent’s first black filmmakers, is in the throes of crisis with cinema theatres downing shutters as cheap and mostly pirated DVDs flood the markets. Many cinema halls have been turned into warehouses for anything from spare car parts to cheap Chinese trinkets hawked on the streets.
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/ 6 February 2005
The recent seizure of a huge collection of stolen West African art is a bright spot in the sad story of antiquities protection on the world’s poorest continent, which has robbed Africans of chapters of their history. French customs agents searching for drugs intercepted a shipment from the desert state of Niger bound for Belgium in early January.