分类： world

In a groundbreaking move that signals a growing shift toward accountability for colonial-era cultural theft, a British museum institution has announced plans to hand back 45 historical cultural artefacts to their country of origin, Botswana. This transfer, arranged through a formal collaborative partnership between the UK and Botswanan museum sectors, is being hailed as the first large-scale repatriation of indigenous cultural heritage ever carried out by a United Kingdom museum.

The objects set for return were originally pulled from Botswana’s Gammangwato region in the 1890s, collected by Christian missionary Rev William Charles Willoughby during the height of British colonial expansion across southern Africa. The collection spans a broad cross-section of daily and cultural life for local communities, including traditional clothing, personal accessories, hunting tools, and everyday domestic items that carry deep cultural meaning for Batswana people.

The process that led to this transfer grew out of the Making African Connections initiative, a research and partnership project led by the University of Sussex that ran between 2019 and 2021, which built formal connections between Brighton & Hove Museums and Botswana’s Khama III Memorial Museum based in Serowe. Two years after the project concluded, in 2022, the Khama III Museum submitted a formal repatriation claim for the collection, launching the negotiation process that has now resulted in an agreement for return.

Curators on both sides of the partnership have framed the transfer as far more than a simple movement of objects across borders. Portia Tremlett, senior curator at Brighton & Hove Museums, emphasized that the repatriation fills a critical long-standing gap by returning cultural items to the community that created and gave them meaning. “This repatriation represents an important step in reconnecting these artefacts with the communities, histories and knowledge systems that give them meaning,” Tremlett explained.

For the receiving institution and the people of Botswana, the handback carries profound meaning for cultural self-determination. Gase Kediseng, curator at the Khama III Memorial Museum, described the transfer as an act of historical restoration that goes beyond material exchange. “This process affirms dignity, identity, and material culture, empowering [the people of] Batswana to tell their own story on their own terms through objects that represent who we were, and who we continue to be,” Kediseng said.

The 45 artefacts are scheduled to be unveiled to the public as part of a new permanent exhibition opening at the Khama III Memorial Museum on May 27. To mark the milestone occasion, the Botswanan museum will host a two-day international summit alongside the exhibition opening, in partnership with both the University of Sussex and the University of Botswana, to bring together global experts on cultural repatriation and indigenous heritage.

A wave of coordinated cross-national attacks carried out by separatist fighters and Islamist militants over a single weekend in Mali has led to a landmark development: Russia’s Africa Corps has formally confirmed its full withdrawal alongside Malian government forces from the strategic northern city of Kidal.

In a sequence of public posts shared across social media platforms, the Russia-aligned Africa Corps confirmed that both its own personnel and local Malian troops had exited the Kidal locality. The Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), the Tuareg separatist group leading the push for an independent northern state, announced Sunday that the Russian force had agreed to a permanent pullout. The separatist movement subsequently claimed full control of Kidal, releasing a statement declaring the city “now free” from government and allied control.

Mali has grappled with decade-long instability, pitting government and allied forces against two overlapping threats: northern separatist movements led primarily by ethnic Tuareg factions, and violent insurgent groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. This most recent outbreak of violence began Saturday, when reports of explosions and sustained automatic gunfire spread across multiple population centers nationwide, including the capital Bamako.

Attacks were also documented in central Malian cities of Sevare and Mopti, as well as the northern Saharan fringe cities of Gao and Kidal. In Kati, a garrison town just outside the capital that hosts one of Mali’s largest military bases, Malian Defense Minister Sadio Camara was killed in a suicide truck bombing targeting his official residence. Security analysts confirm the FLA’s assault focused primarily on regional urban centers in the north, while Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), a jihadist insurgent group, carried out parallel strikes across multiple regions to stretch government defenses thin.

Sporadic fighting continued in Kidal through Sunday, but shortly after clashes tapered off, FLA spokesman Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane announced the group had finalized a deal with the Russian Africa Corps to facilitate the force’s safe exit from the city. Ramadane had previously told the BBC the FLA maintained a presence in Kidal’s outer neighborhoods because Malian army units and Russian mercenary personnel remained deployed in the city center.

Kidal holds deep symbolic importance for the Tuareg separatist movement: it served as the movement’s unofficial headquarters for more than a decade before Malian government troops, backed by Russian mercenary fighters, retook control of the city in late 2023. The separatist group now holds full administrative and military control of the urban center following the withdrawal.

While confirming its exit from Kidal in a Monday post on the social platform X, the Africa Corps emphasized that counter-insurgency operations would continue across other parts of Mali, though it declined to provide further details on upcoming deployments or operational goals. The force added that all wounded personnel and heavy military equipment had been fully evacuated from Kidal ahead of the pullout.

“The situation in the Republic of Mali remains complex,” the Africa Corps wrote in its statement, noting that multiple civilians had also been wounded in the fighting and were transferred to the corps’ medical facilities for treatment.

The majority of the Africa Corps’ serving fighters are veterans of the Wagner Group, the infamous Russian private military firm that built a widespread presence across Africa over the past decade, contracted by local friendly governments to help suppress insurgent movements and stabilize central control. Following the 2023 death of Wagner leader Yevgeni Prigozhin in a plane crash, most of the group’s African operations were absorbed and reorganized by Russia’s Ministry of Defense, which formed the newly branded Africa Corps to continue the mission.

Today, the Africa Corps is overseen by Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, with day-to-day operations led by Maj-Gen Andrey Averyanov, a senior core leader of Russia’s GRU military intelligence directorate. Russia’s military support to friendly African governments has consistently been rewarded with access to the continent’s lucrative critical natural resources, including gold, diamonds, and uranium, a key input for Russian domestic nuclear energy production.

Just like its predecessor the Wagner Group, the Africa Corps has faced repeated international accusations of systematic human rights abuses and mass atrocities against civilian populations across its areas of operation. Reported salaries for Africa Corps fighters deployed in Mali start at a minimum equivalent of $3,000 (£2,200) per month, a rate far higher than most local or even regular Russian military salaries.

This report included additional reporting from Vitaly Shevchenko of BBC Monitoring, with original production by BBC Africa.

ABUJA, Nigeria — Armed attackers launched a raid on an orphanage-affiliated school in north-central Nigeria over the weekend, abducting 23 young pupils before local security forces recovered 15 of the children in immediate follow-up operations, state authorities confirmed in a public announcement Monday.

The assault targeted the Dahallukitab Group of Schools, a mixed educational and orphanage facility located in a remote, cut-off area of Lokoja, the capital city of Kogi State. In an official statement, Kogi State Commissioner Kingsley Femi Fanwo noted that the institution had been operating without legal authorization from Nigerian educational regulators, a detail that raises new questions about oversight of community-based care facilities in the region.

As of Monday, no insurgent or criminal group had publicly claimed credit for the abduction. The wider north-central and northwestern regions of Nigeria have recorded a steady uptick in kidnapping-for-ransom attacks targeting civilian institutions over the past three years, with criminal gangs increasingly focusing on soft targets including schools and orphanages.

While official confirmation of the victims’ ages has not been released, local context clarifies that the term “pupil” in Nigerian educational and law enforcement discourse almost exclusively refers to young learners in kindergarten or primary school, meaning most of the abducted children are likely 12 years old or younger.

Fanwo confirmed that intensive search and rescue operations are currently underway across Lokoja and surrounding rural areas to locate the eight remaining abducted children and take the perpetrators into custody. “Our security teams are working around the clock to bring every missing child home safely and hold those responsible for this horrific attack to account,” the statement added.

Widespread school kidnappings have emerged as one of the most visible markers of the persistent insecurity plaguing Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation with over 220 million residents. Security analysts who study the country’s criminal landscape explain that armed gangs deliberately target students and educational facilities because attacks on children generate widespread media and government attention, increasing pressure on authorities and families to pay large ransoms for captives’ release.

Nigeria has grappled with a layered, multi-faceted security crisis for more than a decade, with instability concentrated most heavily in the country’s northern regions. A long-running Islamist insurgency first emerged in northeast Nigeria in 2009, led by the militant group Boko Haram. The group splintered in 2016, with a breakaway faction calling itself the Islamic State’s West Africa Province, or ISWAP, which now carries out most large-scale attacks in the northeast. In recent years, a new IS-affiliated group called Lakurawa has established a foothold in northwestern communities along Nigeria’s border with Niger, further expanding the scope of extremist activity in the country.

A simmering local dispute over access to a water well has exploded into deadly inter-ethnic violence in eastern Chad, leaving at least 42 people dead and 10 others wounded, senior Chadian officials have confirmed. What began as a confrontation between two families in Wadi Fira province quickly escalated into a sustained cycle of retaliatory attacks that spread across multiple communities, leaving multiple villages burned to the ground in its wake.

Chadian government announced on Sunday that a high-level delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Limane Mahamat has been dispatched to the conflict zone to oversee security operations and mediate local tensions. Officials confirmed that the violence has now been contained, and stability is gradually being restored to the area.

Deadly inter-communal clashes are a persistent crisis across this central African nation, where long-standing frictions between farming and pastoral communities, compounded by deep-seated ethnic tensions, have created a repeating pattern of violence. Competition over increasingly scarce water resources and grazing land is the most common trigger for these outbreaks of conflict.

In recent months, the already fragile security situation along Chad’s eastern border has been further exacerbated by the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the ongoing civil war in neighboring Sudan. The influx of new residents has placed enormous additional strain on limited natural resources, driving up resource competition and stoking broader security tensions. On Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Mahamat reaffirmed the Chadian government’s commitment to deploying all necessary measures to stop Sudan’s conflict from spilling over and destabilizing the country’s border regions.

This latest deadly incident is part of a years-long trend of escalating communal violence across Chad. Over the past several years, hundreds of people have been killed in these clashes; in November last year alone, 33 people died in a similar conflict over a contested water well in the southwestern town of Dibebe. Data from the International Crisis Group, a leading international think-tank, shows that between 2021 and 2024, roughly 100 separate communal clashes across the country left more than 1,000 people dead and another 2,000 injured. Global human rights organization Amnesty International has also documented seven major outbreaks of herder-farmer violence between 2022 and 2024, which collectively claimed 98 lives.

In a report released last year, Amnesty International linked the rising frequency and severity of these clashes to the accelerating impacts of climate change, which has worsened drought conditions and scarcity of critical resources across the Sahel region. The organization also criticized Chadian authorities for failing to effectively protect civilian populations, noting that security force responses to emerging violence are often delayed, and few perpetrators are ever held legally accountable for their actions. “This pattern of inaction fuels a widespread sense of impunity and deepens feelings of marginalization within affected communities,” the report stated.