Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, who saw himself as the custodian of his people’s culture and was praised by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as a “visionary monarch”, died aged 72.

Gunmen in Nigeria’s northwestern Kaduna state kidnapped a number of students from a college late on Thursday, a police spokesman and a state government official said today.

Callers seeking the parents of lost children have been regularly dialling in to radio and television programmes since a series of explosions levelled much of Equatorial Guinea’s largest city and sent thousands fleeing for the countryside.

Child soldiers and other victims of convicted Congolese militia leader Bosco Ntaganda should get a total of $30 million compensation, International Criminal Court judges ruled on Monday, in their highest ever reparation order.

A series of large explosions at a military base rocked the city of Bata in Equatorial Guinea, killing at least 20 people and injuring hundreds, local television station TVGE said.

At least ten people, including the two pilots, died when a plane crashed at an airstrip in South Sudan's Jonglei state, the region's governor and the airline said.

Gunmen in Nigeria released 27 teenage boys who were kidnapped from their school in the northern state of Niger, while security forces continued to search for more than 300 schoolgirls abducted in a nearby state.

Kidnappers have released 53 people including women and children they seized on a bus in Nigeria, local authorities said, while dozens of others taken from a school in a separate incident are still missing.

The Italian ambassador to DR Congo and an Italian carabineri police officer were killed Monday while traveling in Congo in a UN convoy, the Foreign Ministry said.

Africa has surpassed 100,000 confirmed deaths from Covid-19 as the continent praised for its early response to the pandemic now struggles with a dangerous resurgence and medical oxygen often runs desperately short.

Six children were killed and five others injured in northwest Uganda after an old explosive they found in the bushes detonated as they played with it, police said yesterday.

Gunmen believed to belong to a criminal gang have kidnapped hundreds of schoolboys from their hostels along with some of teachers in central Nigeria, an official and a security source told AFP Wednesday.

The World Health Organization has alerted six countries to watch out for potential Ebola cases after fresh outbreaks in Guinea and Democratic Republic of Congo, a spokeswoman said today.

As revolution swept their region in 2011, three young Libyans joined mass protests against Muammar Gaddafi’s four-decade rule. They now live divided by Libya’s frontlines, their futures irrevocably shaped by the uprising.

Several thousand people demonstrated Sunday in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, saying the government was trying to establish a new dictatorship and denouncing international support for President Jovenel Moise.

Suspected Islamists killed three soldiers and 13 civilians and burnt down a church in a raid on a village in Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeastern Ituri province, the army and a rights group said on Monday.

Guinea has declared a new Ebola outbreak, as tests came back positive for the virus after at least three people died and four fell ill in the southeast - the first resurgence of the disease there since the world’s worst outbreak in 2013-2016.

Somalia’s opposition leaders have announced that they no longer recognise President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, after his term expired without a political agreement on a path toward elections to replace him.

Libya yesterday embarked on a new phase of its post-Kadhafi transition after a unity government was selected to lead the country until December elections following a decade of chaos.

Libyan delegates yesterday gathered in Geneva to choose new temporary leaders for the war-scarred country, with the UN stressing the importance of respecting their commitment to hold elections next December.