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JEUNE AFRIQUE
Jeune Afrique is a French-language weekly news magazine. It was cofounded by Bechir Ben Yahmed and other Tunisian intellectuals in Tunis in 1960, and is now headquartered in Paris.
photo of Senegal President Macky Sall coming out of his airplane
eyes on the U.S.
Alex Hurst

Eyes On U.S. — When African Leaders Go To Washington, China Is In The Room

-Analysis-

Some 100 of the most important political eyes in Africa aren’t turned towards the U.S. this week — they’re in the U.S. For the first time in eight years, the White House is hosting 49 African heads of state and leaders of government (and the Senegalese head of the African Union) for a U.S.-Africa summit. Not invited: any nation that has recently undergone a military putsch, or otherwise not in good standing with the African Union, like Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Sudan.

It’s only the second such summit, after Barack Obama held the inaugural one in 2014. For African nations, it’s a chance to push for trade agreements and international investment, as reports FinancialAfrik, as well as to showcase their most successful businesses. According to RFI, dominant in its coverage of West Africa, on the agenda are: fighting terrorism, climate change, food security, and a financial facility intended to facilitate African exports to the U.S.

These themes are recurrent in national coverage and official diplomatic communiqués, from the likes of Cameroon (whose communiqué pointedly notes the U.S.’s “lack of colonial history” in Africa), which is seeking to regain access to the the U.S. market under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, to Madagascar, which as an island nation, is particularly concerned with climate change.

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But is the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit and the accompanying nice talk all just cynical cover for what are, in fact, purely U.S. strategic interests in its wider global competition with China? That’s certainly the message from Chinese media — but also a point of view either echoed, or simply acknowledged as matter of fact, by African voices.

“No matter how many fancy words the U.S. uses, the country still sees Africa as an arena to serve its strategic goal of competing with China,” Liu Xin writes for China’s state-run Global Times.

Indeed, for the U.S., the summit is a chance to move past the disinterest — if not outright disdain — that the Trump administration showed for Africa at a time when both China and Russia were ramping up their economic and military presence on the continent. Even if Biden Administration officials have been eager to talk about Africa on its own terms, the “long shadow” of China is everywhere, writes Kenya’s The Standard.

There is more than simply a U.S.-China competition at work.

The U.S. is playing “catch up,” writes The Standard, having fallen behind China when it comes to foreign direct investment in Africa, and must convince African countries that it is a better partner than China. The Nairobi-based daily isn’t coy about Africa’s growing strategic importance, leverage, and need to be wooed, writing, “The continent, whose leaders often feel they’ve been given short shrift by leading economies, remains crucial to global powers because of its rapidly growing population, significant natural resources, and a sizable voting bloc in the United Nations.”

Cognizant of the UN voting bloc that African countries constitute, the Biden administration is eager to court their support for Ukraine, but maintains that irrespective of outcome, it wants Africa to have a louder international voice — perhaps, as Al Jazeera reports, by making an African nation a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Finally, for Malcom Biiga, writing in the regional Francophone magazine Jeune Afrique, there is more than simply a U.S.-China competition at work, and the timing of the summit can’t be disconnected from France’s pullback from West Africa, in particular the announcement this year of the end of its military mission in Mali. “As anti-French sentiment grows larger across Africa, the U.S. is giving it a go with a charm offensive,” Biiga says. It’s not so much competitively “thumbing its nose" at French President Emmanuel Macron, but an expression of Washington’s worry that Russia or China will step in to fill France’s void — reminding readers that Russian military contractor group Wagner has done exactly that in Mali.

As Cameroonian research Paul Simon-Handy told RFI on Tuesday, the U.S. “is trying to define its own strategic vision [in Africa] while remaining a strategic ally of France [in the region].”

Biiga, meanwhile, concludes his analysis of the African leaders’ collective pilgrimage to Washington by wryly pointing out that neither President Joe Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to visit Africa.

— Alex Hurst

In other news …

📰  UP, FRONT PAGE AND CENTER

U.S. scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that they have — for the first time — created a net positive amount of energy from fusion. It could be a major breakthrough in the search for near limitless clean energy. The experiment used enormous, high powered lasers to start the reaction. Even if actual electricity generation on a large scale remains a long way off, for the Italian daily LaRepubblica, it’s the very first glimpse of a “spark” from the future.

⚜️ AMERICAN EXPORT

“We need an Anglo-American cultural detox,” writes a worried Montréal columnist, otherwise les Québecois risk becoming “Anglo-Americans who just speak French.”

It’s tough being an 8-million person linguistic island in the middle of a 350-million strong North American anglophone ocean … Referencing a professor friend who queried his students about Christmas movies and realized that none of them had any francophone references (like cult comedy films Le Père Noël est une ordure or Les Bronzés font du ski), Loïc Tassé doesn’t just fret about a loss of Québecois culture, but proposes solutions: more public financing of French language movies, books, and music, and introducing more francophone writers (possibly even in English translation) in school courses.

🎅🏻🎄 SO AMERICAN?

Germans are known to take their Christmas sehr seriously. And should they wish to expand their merry horizons and “celebrate it like in the USA,” Focus came up with a handy list of typically American customs for its readers. Some are well known (cookies and milk for Santa, hanging up socks, etc.) and others … less so.

Case in point, the “Christmas pickle,” which the weekly magazine says probably originated in Germany, and wherein a small cucumber (or cucumber-like ornament) is hidden among the other Christmas tree decorations. Guests and children are then invited to look for said Weihnachtsgurke, with the person finding it being awarded an extra present.

Hmmm? It seems most American readers will be as interested as Germans to discover this supposed popular tradition ...

How Ukrainian TV Was Turned Upside Down After Feb. 24
In The News
Anna Akage, Shaun Lavelle and Emma Albright

How Ukrainian TV Was Turned Upside Down After Feb. 24

Banding together, once rivals created a wartime system where media groups share several air hours a day, which are broadcast by all six central TV channels to ensure around-the-clock broadcasting.

With the start of the full-scale war, the leaders of Ukraine’s largest television holdings — typically business (and sometimes, political) rivals quickly got together to reorder the way TV would be broadcast in the face of the Russian invasion.

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Ukrainian Pravda has reported on the back story of this momentous decision to effectively turn national broadcasting into an ongoing shared telethon.

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Picture of a woman holding a child
Ideas
Aïda N'Diaye*

Why Western Outrage At War In Europe Never Makes It To Africa

The way armed conflicts have been represented in fiction for decades could explain the racism that has been revealed in Western media coverage of the war in Ukraine compared to multiple conflicts over the years in Africa.

Double standards. That is what is striking when we compare the political and media treatment of the war in Ukraine — and the massive exodus this conflict is creating — to the treatment (or non-treatment) of the multiple crises that have similarly affected African countries in recent decades.

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For example, think back to CBS News special correspondent Charlie D’Agata’s statement on Feb. 25: ”This is not a place […] like Iraq or Afghanistan […]. Kyiv is a relatively civilized city,” he said to underline what he found particularly shocking about the images shot in Ukraine.

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​Supporters of politician Abir Moussi and her Free Constitutional party protest against President Kais Saied during a rally in Tunis
Economy
Frida Dahmani, Hossam Rabie, Nina Kozlowski, and Rania Hamdi

Ukraine War, North African Food Shortages And Whiff Of A New Arab Spring

Rising tensions in wheat productions, explosion of oil prices, fear of the unknown, could the Ukraine war lead to a popular Arab uprising similar to the one in 2011?

TUNIS — History tells us that in 2010-2011 the rise in prices for raw materials, especially wheat, was one of the main causes of the uprisings that spread across the Arab world.

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Today, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is putting many of the world's economies dependent on wheat imports to the test, notably in North Africa. This prompts the question: Could there be a second “Arab Spring?”

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For African Diplomacy, The Ukraine War Opens A Whole New Era
Geopolitics
Amadou Sadjo Barry*

For African Diplomacy, The Ukraine War Opens A Whole New Era

Facing geopolitical devastation caused by the war in Ukraine, the African continent cannot be subordinate and obliged to choose one power over another. It must bring about an African foreign policy for a new multipolar world.

Those still in doubt just have to listen again to Vladimir Putin’s war-mongering speech on the eve of the invasion. The Russian president clearly calls for a reconfiguration of the post-Cold War international order, which would reduce the West’s grip on the world. The first country targeted by this repositioning strategy is the U.S., whose military presence Moscow intends to challenge in Europe, mainly in the East.

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After more than a month of conflict, the question is no longer whether the Russian armed forces will withdraw from Ukraine, but if Putin could take advantage of this new demonstration of force to impose new rules on Americans and their allies, in the new world in which Russia will be a center of politico-military domination in its own right.

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Unzipped! The African Women Breaking Taboos Of Sexuality
Society
Eva Sauphie

Unzipped! The African Women Breaking Taboos Of Sexuality

In countries and communities where sexuality is often kept under wraps, more and more women are taking up their microphones, pens and keyboards to talk about intimate issues without filters.

When the subject of African women's sexuality gets media coverage it's almost always a bad thing, says Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, a Ghanaian writer based in London: "through the spectrum of disease, HIV or repeated pregnancies."

While universal access to sexual and reproductive health services remains a central issue in West Africa, Sekyiamah wants to share other narratives. To do this, she co-founded the blog: Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women.

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Private flights have soared in demand for their ability to skirt certain travel issues
Society
Hannah Steinkopf-Frank

How The Pandemic Spread Private Jet Travel Beyond The Super-Rich And Powerful

Once the reserve of the super-rich and famous, private jet travel has soared during the pandemic. Amid border closures and travel restrictions, private charter flights are sometimes the only option to get people — and their pets!? — home.

PARIS — Traveling by private jet has long been a mode of transportation long exclusively reserved for the super rich, extremely powerful and very famous. This article will not report that it is, er, democratizing....but still.

During the pandemic, a surprisingly wide demographic have turned to private jets not because it was a luxury they could afford, but out of desperation, trying to reach a destination in the face of border closures and widespread flight cancellations. Last year, private jet hours were close to 50% higher than in 2020, according to the Global Business Aviation Outlook. While some of the increase can be attributed to more travel in 2021 because of COVID-19 vaccination, it still amounts to 5% more hours than before the pandemic, as Deutsche Welle reports.

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Abdul Wahid shows a manuscript from the 14th century at his house in Timbuktu, North of Mali.
Society
Manon Laplace

An Epic Mission, Preserving The Ancient Books Of Timbuktu

Mali's "mysterious city" welcomes a new class of students trained in looking after ancient books. From conservation to digitization of these works, a colossal task awaits them to preserve this endangered heritage and the secrets they contain.

TIMBUKTU — In the workroom of the Ahmed-Baba Institute of Higher Studies and Islamic Research, time seems to have slowed down. As the dust and the sound of brushes on paper float by, six students hold in their hands one of the most precious heritages of the region.

Ceremoniously, they repeat the same gestures: lifting the pages, one by one, with the tip of a thin wooden spatula, then, with the flat of the brush, ridding the inks and the centuries-old papers of dust.

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