I recently received a message from a radio reporter researching a piece on Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the Congo. Could I help her track down a famous quote? The occasion was Independence Day, 30 June 1960, when an irate Lumumba informed Belgium's visiting monarch: "Nous ne sommes plus vos singes" - "We are no longer your monkeys." This public rebuke signalled the end of an era [...]

A pretty, earnest young woman came up to me at the end of an African talk I recently chaired at the Royal Festival Hall. She wanted some advice. She had organised a trip to Rwanda with a group interested in development, but was experiencing some misgivings. Was she doing the right thing?

Absolutely, I answered, assuming she was worried about security. Eastern Congo, just across the border, might have fallen [...]

As the UN, EU, US and Britain all piled in to cajole or browbeat the African Union into Doing the Right Thing over Zimbabwe at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh, I experienced a sudden déjà vu.

There was another occasion when commentators informed us that Africa's leaders had fin ally lost patience with Robert Mugabe and were about to rap him across the knuckles. That would be [...]

When Eritrean and Djiboutian troops clashed in the Horn of Africa this month, leaving 12 Djiboutians dead and more than 50 injured, local people wondered if they were caught in a time-warp.

A badly defined colonial border, nervy soldiers, the bloody escalation of a minor incident threatening to lead to all-out war - it was a repeat of the events of May 1998, when Eritrean and Ethiopian forces clashed near [...]

I used to live not far from one of Africa's nastiest slums, or "informal settlements", as we are told to call them. A guided tour of Kibera, conducted under the watchful eye of a well-muscled local football player, later became a trendy rite of passage for a certain type of well-meaning foreign visitor. But when I was based in Nairobi, no sane middle-class person - black or white - would [...]

It is rare for African societies to show much interest in their neighbours' affairs. Language differences and cultural perspectives rooted in the colonial era usually make the citizens of one African state feel they have more in common with events in Washington, Paris or London than the country next door.

Not this time, however. With Kenya and Zimbabwe locked in post-election crises, leaderships, voters and opinion-makers in both nations are [...]

By the time this goes to press, many of the weaknesses of the power-sharing deal signed on 28 February by Kenya's president, Mwai Kibaki, and the opposition leader Raila Odinga will have started to show.

Brokered by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, bolstered by President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania and the Africa Union, the agreement is dangerously vague when it comes to the president's and prime minister's relative powers, [...]

Imagine trying to cover Northern Ireland's troubles without using the words "Protestant" or "Catholic". Or reporting Iraq without referring to "Shias" and "Sunnis". The attempt would be absurd, the result unfathomable. And yet, as Kenya's post-electoral crisis enters its eighth week, that is exactly what much of the local media are still doggedly trying to do.

When we read an account in a British newspaper of shack-dwellers being evicted from [...]

As Kenya's crisis entered its third week, the country's foreign donors were agonising over their future dealings with the regional linchpin. The hurried inauguration of Mwai Kibaki as president, after a farcical vote-counting exercise, leaves aid donors and multilateral lenders in a fix.

Aid to Kenya - which stood at $770m in 2005 - has been steadily rising since Kibaki was first elected in 2002, a reflection of western relief [...]

Samuel jabs his finger at the television screen, which is broadcasting images of opposition supporters lobbing tear-gas canisters back at the riot police who fired them. "They say these are ODM supporters. But look, he's a Luo, she's a Luo; that's another one. That one, he could be anything. But these are all Luos, not just 'opposition supporters'."

I stare at the screen, comparing the faces to those of Samuel [...]