Vindza and Kimba, two cities in the heart of Congo's Pool region, have become virtual ghost towns in recent months, as residents flee to the forest to escape fighting between government troops and rebels.
Restaurant customers in Zimbabwe pay with thick wads of local currency bulging in their bags and pockets. Real estate buyers hand over deposits of millions of Zimbabwean dollars stuffed into suitcases and car trunks.
Several foreign and local companies are fighting for a slice of the African skies, which only account for about 2,5% of the global air traffic and witnessed an ''annus horribilis'' in 2001.
The impoverished African nation of Mali voted in the second round of parliamentary elections on Sunday, but with most people ignoring calls to vote and leaving polling stations largely deserted.
POLICE arrested and charged a columnist for Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper on Monday, bringing to eight the number of journalists arrested under harsh new media laws.
Centuries of history in the ancient Algiers kasbah are falling away, literally. Once a sparkling white medina, or Islamic city, perched on a hill above a glistening waterfront, the kasbah has become an overcrowded home with unsteady walls.
Lesotho's ruling party is headed for an overwhelming win in parliamentary elections, but the main opposition party has rejected the preliminary results.
Rapid population growth, wars and high levels of national debt, disasters and disease have all taken their toll on the people and the rich natural environment of Africa over the past thirty years.
Survivors of Rwanda's 1994 genocide and relatives of those jailed for their alleged role in the massacres hope that this week's revival of traditional village courts will help ease the pain.
When a resident of rebel-held Bouake in Ivory Coast rings the headquarters of the mutineers who seized control here in September to complain that he was robbed, they react fast.
Nobel laureate and Northern Ireland politician David Trimble drew parallels on Thursday between the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and Zimbabwe under President Robert Mugabe.
Swaziland's king has defended a custom enabling him to take as many brides as he likes and said a woman who asked the courts to prevent him from marrying her daughter had been badly advised.
Two accomplished but amateur Egyptologists have run into a bureaucratic brick wall in their search for what they suspect might be a hidden corridor in the Pyramid of Cheops.
''A woman who is not circumcised is a dog and in the olden days was a slave,'' declares Stella Omorogie, a well-known Nigerian traditional female circumciser.
A major report published by the International Bar Association exposes how threats to freedom and justice have triggered off a chain reaction putting millions of people in Malawi under threat of famine.