Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan in Congo fails to halt fighting, Benin faces a failed coup attempt, and a Ghanaian artist tops an annual list of the most powerful people in the contemporary art world.
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An estimated 200,000 people have fled fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo just days after U.S. President Donald Trump hailed a “historic” peace deal to end the conflict brokered in Washington last Thursday.
Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi and his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagame, formally signed the accord in a ceremony attended by Trump and several African leaders. But, as in previous peace efforts, the talks did not include the Rwanda-backed M23 militant group, which has driven much of the fighting this year.
In recent days, M23 launched a fresh offensive in Congo’s South Kivu province, sparking the latest wave of displacement. On Wednesday, M23 fighters said they had seized the strategic city of Uvira near the Burundi border after Burundian soldiers fighting alongside the Congolese army were unable to hold them back.
“Signing an agreement and not implementing it is a humiliation for everyone, and first and foremost for President Trump,” Burundian Foreign Minister Edouard Bizimana told AFP. He added that “several trucks full of soldiers” had come from Rwanda to support M23.
Underpinning the U.S.-brokered peace accord is a critical minerals deal with Congo and Rwanda, which the Trump administration said will bring billions of dollars of private U.S. investment to both nations.
As part of the deal, the Congolese government agreed to provide the United States with a list of critical minerals and gold assets, ripe for exploration by U.S. companies, in exchange for U.S. support in “security, defense, and protection of critical infrastructure.” Rwanda would also see private U.S. investments in minerals processing.
But regional experts suggest that the peace deal largely overlooks M23’s growing autonomy and strengthened military force.
M23 emerged from a rebel group called the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP). It takes its name from a March 23, 2009, peace agreement that laid out a plan for rebels to be given amnesty and integrated into the Congolese army. After the agreement was never fully implemented, former CNDP fighters formed M23 in 2012. Its members are largely Congolese Tutsi, the same ethnic group as Rwanda’s ruling government.
Other rebel groups have joined M23’s cause in the past couple of years to overthrow Congo’s federal government under a broader political coalition called the Congo River Alliance, led by Corneille Nangaa, a former president of Congo’s electoral commission.
Now, M23 operates a parallel proxy government across the territories it has captured since January, where it has heavily recruited civilians and installed local leaders.
The group also collects taxes from mining operations—including at the Rubaya mines, which it seized in April 2024. Rubaya produces around 15 percent of the world’s coltan, a critical ore for the production of tantalum, which is used in everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.
One of the problems with Trump’s plan is that M23 is involved in separate Qatar-mediated peace talks with the Congolese government in Doha, said Jason Stearns, a former coordinator of the United Nations Group of Experts on the Congo and author of The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo.
“That creates a structural problem,” Stearns said. “You can advance in the Washington process, but if things stall in the Doha process, then fighting will continue on the ground.”
While Stearns thinks that the Washington process in theory has “the ability to bring about a peace deal,” he said that “the economic incentives were both not enough, and they were very long term.” He added that no party to the conflict is currently facing adequate sanction threats to prevent them from violating peace terms.
Fighting in eastern Congo has endured for more than three decades and has displaced at least 7 million people. M23 only has a few more territories to seize before Rwanda would no longer share a border with territories under the control of Congo’s government. It is little surprise that, while engaging with its own peace talks in Doha, it has continued to launch offensives.
Wednesday, Dec. 10, to Thursday, Dec. 11: The African Energy Commission of the African Union meets in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Thursday, Dec. 11: The House Foreign Affairs Committee holds a hearing on the U.S. response to atrocities committed in Sudan.
Thursday, Dec. 11, to Friday, Dec. 12: The U.N. Security Council discusses its stabilization mission in Congo.
Sunday, Dec. 14: Leaders from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) are set to meet to discuss the Guinea-Bissau coup.
Benin coup attempt. Benin’s government has arrested at least a dozen soldiers after a failed coup attempt. On Sunday, soldiers said on state television that they had ousted President Patrice Talon and dissolved all state institutions before the government announced hours later that it thwarted the attempt.
That day, ECOWAS deployed a force to Benin made up of troops mainly from Nigeria, but also Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone.
After a decade in office, Talon is due to step down in April at the end of his two-term limit. His handpicked successor, Finance Minister Romuald Wadagni, is forecast to win next year’s presidential election, since the country’s electoral body rejected main challenger Renaud Agbodjo’s candidacy in October, citing his lack of sufficient sponsorships.
Talon has jailed opponents as he has cracked down on dissent and concentrated power in the executive in recent years. Last month, Benin’s parliament passed constitutional amendments that extended elected officials’ terms from five to seven years and created a Senate partly appointed by the president.
Benin’s coup attempt comes on the heels of the successful coup in Guinea-Bissau, which followed a disputed election in November and disagreements over when ousted President Umaro Sissoco Embaló’s term officially ended.
Trump travel bans. The United States has paused immigration applications for citizens of 19 nations deemed “high-risk” after an Afghan national shot two National Guard members in Washington in late November.
All 19 countries have faced full or partial travel bans since June. Many of the nations are African, including Burundi, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, Congo-Brazzaville, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and Togo.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that visa restrictions could also be applied to “Nigeria and any other governments or individuals engaged in violations of religious freedom,” referencing what the Trump administration has falsely framed as “anti-Christian” violence in Nigeria. The White House previously threatened Nigeria with visa restrictions in July.
Russian job scam. Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, the daughter of former South African President Jacob Zuma, resigned from her seat in parliament last month amid allegations she deceived 17 South African men into fighting in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Police are investigating claims the men were promised non-combat security training but instead were sent to the front lines. Zuma-Sambudla, a member of her father’s uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK), denies the allegations. Meanwhile, Brumelda Zuma, another of Jacob Zuma’s daughters, was sworn in as a parliamentarian representing MK on Wednesday.
In the face of high youth unemployment, Africans across the continent are being lured through fake job advertisements into digital scam centers in Asia and Russia’s military operations.
Rosetta repatriation? Egypt has renewed calls for the British Museum to return the Rosetta Stone but says it can keep all other holdings of ancient Egyptian artifacts. Mohamed Ismail Khaled, the secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said last week that the 50,000 Egyptian objects held in the British Museum were now “part of the London identity” and helped promote tourism to Egypt.
Khaled’s statements came as Egyptian officials have indicated that their main focus in repatriation is the return of three objects—the Rosetta Stone, the Dendera Zodiac at the Louvre in Paris, and the Bust of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum—following the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum outside of Cairo last month.
The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite slab from 196 B.C. with a decree written in three scripts (hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Ancient Greek) honoring King Ptolemy V. It was discovered by French soldiers under Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 and taken to the United Kingdom in 1801 after British forces defeated the French in Egypt. It proved invaluable in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs because experts could compare the Greek script with its hieroglyphic counterpart.
Institution builder. Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama recently became the first African to top ArtReview magazine’s annual list of the most powerful people in the contemporary art world.
Mahama founded the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art and Red Clay Studio in his hometown of Tamale. When I met him a few years ago, he told me that the most important thing to him was building a creative industry that ordinary people in northern Ghana—a region largely made up of farming communities—could engage with, not just Western collectors.
Red Clay Studio doubles as a learning center and was built from locally sourced materials. When I visited the studio, the colossal repurposed Soviet-era planes in its vast courtyard were filled with the sounds of children playing in them.
“Mahama is offering the role of the artist as localised institution builder, arts educator and community advocate, drawing on the proclivities of the international artworld to fuel, but not guide or determine, what art might be otherwise,” ArtReview wrote.
Prince’s ransom. In the Wall Street Journal, Benoit Faucon reports that the United Arab Emirates paid more than $20 million to secure the release of an Emirati prince abducted in Mali by al Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) in September, helping the group to sustain a deadly insurgency.
The ransom paid to JNIM “comes at the worst possible time,” Justyna Gudzowska, executive director of policy organization The Sentry, told Faucon. “Such a large injection of resources is a huge boon for the group and will enable its extremist ambitions on the continent.”
Money matters. In Frieze, Ayodeji Rotinwa argues that Nigeria’s $25 million Museum of West African Art—whose opening has been indefinitely postponed—was bound to fail because it is reliant on foreign donors. (In contrast, the John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, which was funded by the Lagos state government, opened without controversy last year.)
Nigeria faces a “vacuum created by traditional rulers, the patronizing elite, independent museums and the government—who have historically neglected to build systems of value, knowledge, understanding and, ultimately, pride around our tangible and intangible heritage,” Rotinwa writes.
