标签： Africa

A new act of maritime piracy has roiled the strategically critical Gulf of Aden, with multiple Somali security sources confirming to the BBC that armed Somali pirates have seized control of a foreign-flagged oil tanker off Yemen’s coastline. This incident marks the fourth successful large vessel hijacking in just a 14-day window, marking a sharp resurgence of pirate activity that had been largely suppressed for more than a decade.

The targeted vessel, identified as the MT Eureka, was sailing under the flag of West African nation Togo when pirates overran the ship at approximately 5:00 a.m. local time, which corresponds to 03:00 British Summer Time. The hijacking unfolded in international waters close to Yemen’s port of Qana, before the hijackers steered the captured tanker toward Somali territorial waters. Three independent security officials from Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region confirmed the pirate group departed from a remote, unpatrolled stretch of coastline near the coastal town of Qandala, which sits on the Gulf of Aden shoreline. Regional maritime observers expect the MT Eureka to anchor in Somali waters within hours of the hijacking.

This hijacking comes only 10 days after the same group of pirate operatives seized another oil tanker, the Honor 25, in the same general area. The Honor 25 was carrying 18,500 barrels of crude oil en route to Somalia’s capital Mogadishu when it was overtaken.

In a separate, related incident just days prior, the United Kingdom Maritime Transportation Operation (UKMTO) issued a public warning on Friday about an attempted hijacking of a bulk carrier near Yemen’s Al-Mukala port. According to three senior security sources, the armed actors behind that attempted attack launched from a remote coastal zone near the fishing town of Caluula, located just 209 kilometers (130 miles) north of the departure point for the MT Eureka hijacking.

The spread of coordinated pirate attacks across two distinct coastal zones 200 kilometers apart confirms a worrying trend: piracy is expanding rapidly across Somalia’s 3,333-kilometer coastline, the longest continuous shoreline on the African mainland. As of Monday morning, neither Somali national nor regional authorities, nor the European Union Naval Force (EUNAVFOR) which leads official anti-piracy operations in the region, have released an official statement addressing the latest hijacking incident.

Regional security analysts trace this dramatic resurgence back to late 2023, when Houthi rebel attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden shifted international naval priorities. Once focused heavily on countering Somali piracy — a threat that had fallen to near-zero levels after a decade of coordinated patrols starting in 2011 — global maritime forces have redirected their assets to counter Houthi attacks on commercial shipping. This security gap along Somalia’s coastline has allowed armed pirate groups to reorganize, rearm, and resume large-scale hijackings for ransom.

One senior Puntland security official, speaking anonymously to the BBC, warned that the scale of the crisis is far greater than most international observers acknowledge. “The on-going crisis with the pirates is much worse than many realize. There are increasing movements of armed groups all over the coast,” the official said.

On the windswept Atlantic coast of Ghana, in the quiet fishing town of Apam, an unassuming tree rises from rust-red clay, anchoring a story of migration, resilience, and intergenerational memory that stretches back further than most written records of the region. Tucked between two defining monuments of Ghana’s layered colonial and post-colonial history, the tree — called Santseo, meaning “Under” in the local Fanti language, for the shade it has offered communities for centuries — is barely noticed by daily passersby. But for one extended Ghanaian family, it is far more than a feature of the landscape: it is the living anchor of their identity.

Oral tradition passed down through the Wilberforce family traces Santseo’s planting to the 13th century, when a small group of travelers led by Nana Asumbia, a royal spiritual leader from the Akwamu Kingdom’s historic capital of Akwamufie, set out on a westward journey along the coast. Though the exact cause of the group’s departure from Akwamufie has been lost to time, family accounts passed from generation to generation preserve the unique ritual Asumbia followed to choose the group’s new home: the travelers carried a sapling with them, and planted it wherever they paused. If the young tree took root and survived after several days, they knew they had found their permanent settlement. If it died, they continued onward.

The tree species Asumbia chose was no accident. Today identified as *Piliostigma thonningii* — commonly called camel’s foot or monkey bread tree — it is a hardy, drought-resistant species native to much of sub-Saharan Africa, valued across the continent for its medicinal leaves and bark, its wide cooling canopy, and its ability to thrive in poor, harsh conditions where other species fail. For a nomadic community searching for a place to put down roots, the species’ legendary resilience made it the perfect symbol of their own journey.

The group’s first stop after leaving Akwamufie was in what is now central Accra’s Otublohum neighborhood, around the site of the modern General Post Office. The sapling they planted there survived, and descendants of that first group still live in the area today. But the journey continued west, and the travelers next paused near Gomoa Buduburam along the Accra-Winneba highway, where they planted a second sapling. This time, the young tree did not survive. The group took this as a sign they had not yet reached their destination, and moved on once again.

Their final stop came after a chance encounter in the coastal forest, according to oral history. A royal hunter named Inhune Akubuha from Gomoa Asin had wounded an elephant, which fled into the bush before collapsing. When he tracked the dead animal to its final resting place in what is now Apam, he called the traveling group to the spot. It was here that Asumbia planted her third sapling. Days later, when the tree sprouted new growth and took root in the red coastal soil, the group settled. Centuries later, the tree still stands, and the family built their home directly around it, naming the property Santsiwadzi in Santseo’s honor.

Today, Santseo occupies a unique space between two eras of Ghana’s documented history: on one side sits Fort Patience, a Dutch trading fort completed in 1697 during the transatlantic gold and slave trade, when the region was known as the Gold Coast; on the other stands Apam’s Methodist Church, a monument to the spread of Christianity across Ghana’s coast in the centuries after European arrival. Yet according to family tradition, Santseo predates both structures by hundreds of years, making it a rare living marker of pre-colonial African history that outlasted the arrival of European powers and the transformation of local belief systems.

As Christianity spread across Apam, the family that cares for Santseo donated the land on which the Methodist Church now stands. Over time, the tree’s traditional spiritual significance faded, as community members avoided being labeled idolaters for maintaining the old traditions. What remains is not a shrine, but a living memory: a connection to the ancestors who founded the community. Even so, tensions persist around preserving the tree: any extra care or maintenance is often misinterpreted as a return to old ritual practices, leaving the family to walk a careful line between honoring their history and adapting to modern beliefs.

Roughly 40 years ago, members of the extended family reconnected with their ancestral roots in Akwamufie, making the journey east back to the kingdom their ancestors left centuries earlier. Oral tradition in Akwamufie had preserved the story of the traveling group for generations, with a repeated prophecy that they would one day return. The reunion was an emotional occasion, and a family member was installed as Nana Asumbia II, the new Queen Mother, mending the centuries-long divide between the two communities.

Today, Apam’s rhythm is still shaped by the Atlantic Ocean that frames its coast. Fishermen haul nets to shore before dawn, children walk past Santseo on their way home from school along paths their grandparents and great-grandparents used, and every Tuesday, the town observes a long-held sacred tradition: no fishing boats leave the shore, and a gentle stillness falls over the coast, broken only by the quiet roll of the Atlantic.

Santseo still stands through it all, its branches gnarled and shaped by centuries of salt wind and coastal storm, still rooted in the same red clay where Asumbia planted it so long ago. It has survived the rise and fall of kingdoms, the arrival of colonial powers, the transformation of local beliefs, and the slow passage of centuries. A guide for a displaced community, a source of shade and medicine, and a living archive of unwritten African history, the question Nana Asumbia asked when she planted the sapling all those years ago — will this tree take root? — still has the same clear answer, centuries later: yes.

On Friday, a senior Ghanaian official confirmed to the Associated Press that Accra has turned down a proposed bilateral health partnership with the United States, joining a growing list of African nations walking away from the agreement over unaddressed data privacy and national sovereignty risks. The core sticking point for Ghana was the deal’s provisions granting U.S. entities broad, unsupervised access to the country’s most sensitive health data without adequate regulatory safeguards, according to Arnold Kavaarpuo, executive director of Ghana’s Data Protection Commission, the government body directly involved in negotiation talks. Kavaarpuo emphasized that the scope of data access the U.S. demanded far exceeded the standard parameters aligned with the deal’s stated public health objectives.

The U.S. State Department has not issued an immediate response to requests for comment on Kavaarpuo’s remarks. The framework of these health partnerships was first rolled out under the Trump administration’s “America First” global health strategy, which replaced a fragmented network of older health aid agreements overseen by the now-restructured U.S. Agency for International Development. To date, Washington has finalized similar deals with close to 24 African countries, offering hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to nations that previously faced U.S. aid cuts, with the stated goal of shoring up local public health systems and strengthening outbreak response capacity.

Despite the financial incentives on offer, the agreements have sparked widespread criticism and pushback across the continent over long-standing concerns about data governance and national sovereignty. Zimbabwe became the first country to publicly reject the proposal back in February, citing identical worries around health data access, unfair terms, and threats to national sovereignty. Zambia has also pushed for revisions to problematic sections of the draft agreement, though it has not yet announced a final decision on whether to move forward.

African privacy and public health activists have repeatedly flagged that most versions of the agreement lack sufficient guardrails for sensitive personal and population health data. In some cases, the deals also include restrictive provisions: for example, in Nigeria, the U.S. has committed to prioritizing funding exclusively for Christian faith-based healthcare providers, limiting access to support for broader public health infrastructure. Jean Kaseya, Director General of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, previously told reporters that the organization holds “huge concerns” about the deal’s terms around both health data and pathogen sharing between African nations and U.S. entities.

For Ghana, the proposed $300 million total agreement would have allocated roughly $109 million in U.S. funding to the country over a five-year period, with matching supplemental investment from the Ghanaian government. Kavaarpuo outlined that the most problematic provision allowed U.S. entities to de-identify patient data at their own discretion, a policy that effectively amounted to outsourcing Ghana’s entire national health data governance infrastructure to a foreign power. The agreement would have granted access not just to aggregated health datasets, but also to underlying metadata, public health dashboards, national reporting tools, standardized data models, and official data dictionaries. Up to 10 separate U.S. entities would have been permitted to access this full suite of data with no requirement for prior approval from Ghanaian authorities, regardless of the intended use case.

“We did not get any assurance that Ghana would retain meaningful governance and oversight over how this sensitive data would be used,” Kavaarpuo explained. “The agreement only required U.S. entities to notify Ghana after they had already completed a project involving data access, rather than establishing a mandatory prior approval framework.”

Kavaarpuo confirmed that Ghana has formally communicated its rejection of the current draft agreement to U.S. officials, and has requested revised negotiations to address the country’s core concerns around data governance and sovereignty before any new deal can be reached.

In a stunning development that has deepened the security crisis across conflict-wracked Mali, Malian authorities confirmed late Friday that active and recently dismissed military officers colluded with jihadi and separatist insurgents to carry out the largest coordinated offensive the country has seen in more than 10 years. This wave of attacks has already forced government and allied Russian forces to retreat from strategic territory and claimed the life of the nation’s defense minister.

The string of unprecedented assaults, which opened with near-simultaneous strikes targeting multiple population centers including Bamako’s main international airport, was launched earlier this month through a rare partnership between Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaida-affiliated jihadi group, and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a separatist movement fighting for northern Mali’s independence. Fighters carried out the raids using motorcycles and heavy trucks, striking at least 10 separate locations across the country in coordinated action.

By the start of this week, the offensive delivered a major blow to Mali’s ruling military junta, which seized power in a 2020 coup: insurgents seized control of Kidal, a major northern city, in the retreat that followed the attacks. The violence also killed Malian Defense Minister Sadio Camara, marking one of the highest-profile casualties of the Sahel’s long-running extremist conflict.

On Friday, separatist commander Achafghi Ag Bouhanda announced in a verified online video that FLA fighters had captured another critical strategic site: the military camp in Tessalit, a northern town located near the Algerian border and adjacent to a key regional airport. The announcement came after Malian army troops and fighters from Russia’s Africa Corps withdrew from the camp ahead of the separatist advance. The Associated Press has not been able to independently verify conditions on the ground at the camp, and Malian officials have not yet issued an official response to requests for comment on the fall of Tessalit.

The most shocking revelation of the unfolding crisis came via an official statement read on Malian state television from the public prosecutor of Bamako’s Military Court. Investigations into the coordinated attacks have uncovered “solid evidence regarding the complicity of certain military personnel” – including both currently serving and recently discharged officers – in the assault, the prosecutor confirmed. The statement added that these officers directly participated in “the planning, coordination, and execution” of the attacks, and also named exiled prominent opposition politician Oumar Mariko as a co-conspirator in the plot.

The collapse of government control across swathes of northern Mali comes as the capital Bamako faces mounting pressure from insurgent blockades. JNIM this week announced a full blockade of all four major road arteries leading into Bamako, expanding on a partial fuel and supply blockade that militants imposed on the city late last year. Traffic into the capital was severely disrupted on Friday, with multiple confirmed militant roadblocks along major routes. The persistent instability and blockades have already forced multiple travel agencies to suspend operations, leaving residents facing dangerous and restricted travel across the country. “These days, traveling by road is a dangerous undertaking,” said Aminata Traoré, a frequent traveler between Bamako and the southern Sikasso region.

Mali’s junta leader Assimi Goita has pledged to press forward with counteroffensives to retake lost territory. “Military operations will continue until the armed groups involved have been completely neutralized and security has been sustainably restored throughout the country,” Goita said earlier this week. The Sahel region, a vast expanse of land south of the Sahara Desert spanning multiple West African nations, has become the global epicenter of violent extremist activity in recent years, with jihadi groups expanding their control across remote border areas as national governments struggle to contain the insurgency.