Welcome to Foreign PolicyOverview of Africa.
Highlights this week: Historic decision deals new blow to UK-Mauritius Chagos Islands TreatyDemocratic Republic of the Congo ink a third country migrant agreement and the United States, and Mali-Mauritania the rift is widening amid increasing border violence.
A landmark legal decision has dealt a new blow to Britain’s plan with Mauritius to return the Chagos Islands, Britain’s last African colony, after decades of bitter war.
Last week, the High Court of the Chagos Islands—officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory—overturned ban on Chagossians living on the outer islands.
No Chagossian has lived permanently on any of the islands for more than 50 years. Britain separated Chagos from Mauritius three years before the country’s independence in 1968. At that time, Britain by force. removed thousands of Chagossians to build a joint US-British military base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the 58 islands. Most of them were transferred to Mauritius or England.
The military base, which is strategically located about halfway between Africa and Asia, helps monitoring Middle East and has been important to defense operations in the Iran conflict and previous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In February, four Chagossians it has arrived on Île du Coin—an archipelago located about 135 miles from Diego Garcia—and announced their intention to live there. The British government issued notices for the expulsion of the Chagossians and threatened fines and up to three years in prison for non-compliance, which led to a recent court case.
The judge said that “the alleged authority to exclude all people must be accepted by a legal source, not an administrative requirement,” and added that “it is impossible to say that the outer islands are needed for the purpose of defense” of the United Kingdom and the United States. However, he warned that the settlers must obtain the necessary permits to live there permanently.
The decision poses a threat to the agreement between the UK and Mauritius signed in 2024, in which the UK agreed to transfer the jurisdiction of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and lease Diego Garcia for 99 years for around 4.5 billion dollars. The agreement prevented resettlement for Diego Garcia, but a judge ruled that Britain’s arguments that the return of the Chagossians was “impossible on economic grounds” and on security grounds were invalid.
While the decision is aimed at the outer islands, it is unclear what the decision could mean for future claims on Diego Garcia, which previously had the majority of all the islands. The judge found out clear evidence the resettled population living in the Chagos Islands before the military base was built, despite British claims that it was uninhabited, which could bolster future Chagossian claims to return.
Even before that decision, the Chagos Islands program was in a bad state. From the beginning, it failed to address the right of return of the Chagossians. In recent months, it has become very interesting criticism from US President Donald Trump, which is said to have contributed to a pause in the process of approval in the British Parliament.
Britain felt more and more pressure to make an agreement after the International Court of Justice provided advisory opinion in 2019 stating that Britain’s secession of the Chagos before giving Mauritius independence violated international law. The General Assembly of the United Nations is non-binding resolution that year it also asked Britain to return the islands.
And increased calls from Mauritius and the African Union for the return of the islands, there was concern among some British politicians that they could not take action strengthen China’s influence in the country, especially as Beijing has sought to portray itself as an anti-imperialist ally. (Mauritius is one of them only two African nations, including Eswatini, which are not part of China’s Road and Road Initiative.)
At the same time, critics of the plan, including many Republicans of the United States as well as the British Conservative Party and the right-wing Reform Party, have claimed that handing over the area to Mauritius could embolus China to build a monitoring operation there.
Adding to this, the Maldives opposes Mauritius’ control of the Chagos Islands and is threatening to withdraw its claim to self-governance, the BBC recently reported. information. And some Chagossians he told me in 2024, when the agreement was announced, that they wanted to be allowed to settle with Diego Garcia and intended to push for the right to self-determination.
Mauritius, on the other hand, maintains that his authority over the Chagos Islands “should not be discussed again.” Expect more legal challenges to the deal.
Friday, April 10: Djibouti holds presidential elections. President Ismail Omar Guelleh is present predicted extending his reign of nearly three decades.
Sunday, April 12: Benin holds presidential elections. The chosen successor of President Patrice Talon, Minister of Finance Romuald Wadagni, is predicted win
Convention on Congolese migrants. Democratic Republic of the Congo he announced Sunday that it had agreed to a third-country immigration deal with the Trump administration. As of this month, Congo said it will for a while to hold immigrants deported from the United States in a facility in the capital Kinshasa. Congo did not give details on the number of migrants it would accept.
By the end of January, the Trump administration had spent an estimated $40 million — more than $1 million per person in some cases — to deport about 300 immigrants to countries other than their own, according to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. report.
Boycott energy summit. Ghana and Mozambique have pulled out of the Africa Energies Conference being held in London next month, citing alleged exclusion of African experts and the treatment of Black experts by the conference’s organizers.
The Ghana Energy Association, an industry association, said the country was not a “bystander” in the continent’s energy sector. “Africa cannot be considered a market to attend to when Africans are treated as willing participants in the killing,” the body said.
“Our narratives and voices are important. Any company that wants to work in this continent with the mindset of excluding Africans will fail. That is why Africans are staying away from the Africa Energies 2026 Summit,” he said NJ Ayuk, executive chairman of the African Energy Association, who called for a widespread boycott.
Changes to the Algerian constitution. At the end of March, the Algerian Parliament approved a constitutional amendment which legal experts they say to increase the power of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune on judicial appointments and elections. The rule of Tebboune he said the changes were “technical” and therefore did not require a referendum.
The package includes amendments that give the president the power to call early local elections, which critics the move would allow the central government to dissolve local parliaments that are dominated by opposition parties or deemed uncooperative.
Mauritania-Mali split. Years-long tensions between Mauritania and Mali have escalated in recent weeks, fueled by civilian deaths as Malian troops, along with contractors from the Russian-controlled militia group Africa Corps, battle Islamist militant groups and Tuareg separatists.
Mauritania soon the suspect Malian forces killed five Mauritian citizens “in the territory of Mali, near the border” between the two countries on March 26. Mali is not yet official. he replied suspiciously.
the host is Mauritania hundreds of thousands of Malian refugees. Last month, the Malian army he said that two of its soldiers had been “held by armed terrorist groups” in Mauritania’s Mbera refugee camp before later escaping – charges the Mauritanian government found “deeply offensive” and. rejected.
Malick Sidibé’s 1962 photo print, Look at me!published in 2003.MOMA
Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of New York, titled Imagination of Africa: Images and Political Ideashighlights the work of mid-20th century photographers who were instrumental in documenting post-independence Africa.
The exhibition, which opened in December and runs until July 25, is inspired by Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe’s 1994 book. The idea of Africawhich argued that “Africa” was a construct created by Western intellectual discourse and called for a redefinition of the continent in African terms.
Curators have sought to highlight how photography helped define African ideas of identity and representation. JD Okhai Ojeikere’s photographs, for example, showed a newly independent Nigeria through the elegant hairstyles of women in Lagos, while Sanlé Sory’s work captured the nightlife and youth culture of the Burkina Faso city of Bobo-Dioulasso.
Egyptian Ukrainian corn. For the Crime and Corruption Reporting Project organized by Ukrainian investigative agency Slidstvo.info, Oleh Kotiuzhanskyi and Maksym Savchuk report that the pair of relatives behind the Russian drone manufacturer also run a company that exports wheat from the occupied territory of Ukraine.
They claim that the company, Nika LLC, is exporting grain from the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol to Turkey and Egypt, Africa’s biggest wheat consumer. “The government of Ukraine has long maintained that Russia’s grain exports from Ukraine constitute looting, a war crime under international law,” Kotiuzhanskyi and Savchuk write.
The brutality of the Sudanese war. A new report Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has found that rape is being used as a weapon of war in the civil war in Sudan. “Gender-based violence has become a pervasive and defining feature of the crisis while also extending beyond the front lines,” Vickie Hawkins, managing director of MSF Netherlands, says in the report.
More than 3,396 survivors of sexual violence, mostly children, sought treatment at MSF-supported clinics across North and South Darfur between January 2024 and November 2025.
