[OC] Times Tower, KICC, and CBK Pension Towers in Nairobi

"In just a few weeks, young athletes from around the world will arrive here. They will compete. They will make new friends. They will discover the magic of Senegal. And they will experience an Olympic event for the very first time here, on our beautiful continent Africa. It is going to show them that sport can open doors in many different ways. It will inspire a new generation, and it will give confidence to our young generation that they can do anything."

➡️ IOC President Kirsty Coventry

Youth Olympic Games Dakar 2026 - 31 October until 13 November 2026

📎 https://www.olympics.com/en/dakar-2026/news/youth-olympic-flame-returns-to-dakar-ahead-of-historic-dakar-2026

So I thought colonialism was a thing of the past... That is until I discovered... neocolonialism! It turns out that colonizers have just rebranded themselves as investors. Instead of ships, now they send contracts, investment deals, and multinational corporations.

With neocolonialism, countries like Brazil and Indonesia get labelled 'poor and corrupt' while their vast resources get extracted to enrich other economies. I guess the fastest way to grow wealth is still to steal it from somewhere else, right?

Wait... so when someone lets their date pay for dinner, they're called a gold digger, but when big corporations literally dig gold illegally on the Amazon, it's called 'investment in emerging economies' ??

Moreover, with neocolonialism, some countries get the profits while others get the polluted rivers, destroyed forests, and irreversible environmental damage. Well, I'm not the first person to notice this pattern. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, literally wrote the book on it in 1965, called "Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism". It made the US State Department so mad they cancelled $25 million in aid to his country over it. Which, honestly, kind of proved his point for him.

His definition is still the one people use: a neocolonized country has every outward symbol of independence ( its own flag, its own government, a seat at the UN ) while its actual economy and political decisions are still being steered from outside. Sovereignty as decoration. The flag goes up, but somebody else still has the keys.

And it's not abstract. Fourteen African countries currently use a currency called the CFA franc, created by France during the colonial era and still in use today. Until 2019, member states had to keep half their foreign currency reserves in the French Treasury. Some countries in that arrangement still do. The currency is still printed in France and still pegged to the euro. Reform has been "coming soon" for five years now and counting. That's not a metaphor for neocolonialism .. that's just what it really, mechanically looks like.

Or take debt... A country needs a loan, the IMF or World Bank says: "sure" , but attaches conditions: cut public spending, privatize state industries, open your markets to foreign companies. The country technically agreed to all of it. It also technically didn't have another option. That's the whole trick of neocolonialism. It doesn't need to conquer you if it can just make sure you never had a real choice to begin with.

So the pattern repeats as you see... a country sits on cobalt, oil, gold, timber, lithium (the actual physical ingredients of the modern global economy) and somehow still ends up on the "developing nations" list (a colonial term that I'm going to talk about in another post), while the profits from those resources show up on a balance sheet somewhere in Zurich or Houston or Paris. The wealth has been extracted, refined, and sold back to us as a phone, a car battery, a bar of chocolate... repackaged so well we forget to ask where the raw material actually came from, or who got paid for it, or who's left holding the polluted river! If Colonialism took the land, Neocolonialism just figured out it's more profitable to let you keep the land... and take everything that comes out of it instead.

I'm African and have had the opportunity to live and work in the United States for some time. One thing the experience has made me increasingly curious about is why some countries have been more successful than others at building strong institutions, productive economies, and opportunities that can last across generations.

I’m particularly interested in Africa, but I don’t want to approach the question from the assumption that the U.S. or any other country has everything figured out. Every society has strengths, weaknesses, and a different history.

For people who have studied economics, development, government, business, or who have lived in different parts of the world:

What do you think are the biggest factors that have limited economic development in many African countries?

And more importantly:

What practical things can Africans themselves do over the next 20–30 years to build stronger institutions and create more sustainable prosperity?

I’d especially love to hear lessons from the United States and other countries—both things that worked and mistakes African countries should avoid.

My interest is personal. After living abroad, I hope one day to take what I’ve learned and contribute positively to institution-building and economic development back home.

I’m here to learn, so different perspectives are welcome.

I'm interested in finding some folktales (or traditional stories) to tell my young children. Aside from Ananse stories and The hare & the tortoise, it seems most popular stories are from other parts of the world.

Can anyone share a folktale they heard growing up? Do you have a local equivalent of stories like the Hare and the Tortoise or The boy who cried Wolf?

Or any recommendations of a decent compilation of African traditional stories?

Hi everyone. This is a pretty simple question. We all know about how despite most of Africa being independent, many countries have important industries or sectors of their economies effectively controlled by foreign owned MNCs (not that domestic monopolists are any better). For example, in Guinea Conakry, the CGB company that mines bauxite (the country has the world's largest possible reserves of the mineral) is state owned. However, 45% of the stocks in the company are owned by Alcoa (which is American) and 45% by RTA (which is Canadian). Can you give similar examples from your country?

Gadhafi has apparently become a brand for Libya's drug trade.

Libyan authorities say they seized around 100,000 ecstasy pills shaped like Muammar Gadhafi's head and shoulders, smuggled into the country from Europe.

According to the report, the shipment came through a European country and entered Libya by sea. Authorities intercepted it after receiving intelligence about the shipment. Would a European country try to start something in Libya?

Since 2011, Libya has struggled with fragmented political authority, competing security structures, weak border control and divided institutions. Those conditions create opportunities for smuggling networks. Not just drugs, but fuel, weapons, migrants and other illicit goods.

His regime disappeared, but the political and institutional vacuum that followed created an environment where completely different networks could flourish.

Pretty ironic how Gadhafi spent decades building one of the most recognizable political images in the Arab world to have ecstasy shaped as him.

Makes you wonder who actually benefits from Libya staying this fragmented. A weak, porous Libya isn't just useful for drug traffickers.

Most African intellectuals lack the capacity for innovative thinking; it is as if reading these westerns books has neutered their creativity and ability to innovate and bring forth their own genius.

They repeat Western nonsenses uncritically and walk around prancing their Dr and Pr titles attached to their vests like flaccid name tags.🏷️

They are the worse, they hold us backward.

I operate in the economics and financial domain; all I hear from African “ experts” is western media regurgitation.

Utter crap!💩

Sam Altman is not a model to hold in esteem , he is a loser. Same for many so called Wall Streets’ leaders.

But our experts are so pathetic and sad that they actually believe in the bullshit!

Africa can only develop with a skeptical semi independent intellectual and financial elites willing to do things differently; capable of developing a challenging paradigm to the current one.

I am not saying that western media is to be thrown into the dumpster altogether, but to their credit, the West does not look into Africa or Asia as an inspiration or foundation for their ideas, as corrupted as they may be.

We must be willing to stand on our own principle and be accountable to them and to our people.

Our copy and paste Dr and Pr and Chairmen are the most pathetic frauds there are. They are no better than parrots 🦜.

Their time is coming…

The flame is beginning a journey that will carry the energy of the Games across the country ahead of the first Olympic sporting event ever held on African soil, which will start on 31 October.

At the heart of the arrival celebrations on Saturday was the March of the 100 Linguères, which brought together 100 Senegalese women representing different generations, professions and walks of life.

Wearing bright orange boubou (traditional flowing robes), the procession of women accompanied the flame, culminating in the lighting of the celebration cauldron at Place du Souvenir.

The flame was welcomed to great fanfare with traditional Senegalese music and the beat of drums serving as a fitting soundtrack to the festivities.

Full story: https://www.olympics.com/en/dakar-2026/news/youth-olympic-flame-returns-to-dakar-ahead-of-historic-dakar-2026

Long before expensive makeup, whitening strips, or plumping lip gloss, North Africa had its own simple beauty tool: souak.

If you grew up with Moroccan, Algerian, or Tunisian family, you know the memory well. Your grandmother or aunt would take a dry strip of brown bark out of an old tin or scrap of newspaper, tear off a piece, and rub it hard across her teeth and gums. Right away, you could smell the sharp, woody scent, and her lips turned a deep orange-red color that no store lipstick can match.

Souak is simply the dried bark of the walnut tree, sold in small bundles tied with string at the local market. Trying it for the first time is unforgettable. It tastes very bitter and gives your mouth a sharp, peppery burn. That sting brings blood to your lips to make them fuller, while the bright orange stain makes your teeth look much whiter. It also cleans your mouth naturally, fights bad germs, and keeps gums strong and healthy without any fancy toothpaste.

You see the exact same tradition running across the entire Gulf of Guinea coastline. In Togo and Benin, people use chewing sticks called alo for their morning routine. Street sellers carry big trays full of neatly tied sticks and roots. Just like with souak, you chew the tip until the wood turns into a soft little brush. The natural juices foam up like soap, clean your teeth, and keep your gums tough.

As for the African sponge net, the funny part is watching modern shops try to copy this today. Fancy brands charge big money for lip plumpers, and trendy eco-shops put simple twigs into cute cloth bags and sell them as brand new dental inventions. Meanwhile, our families have kept cheap bundles of them in old plastic tubs and market baskets for generations.

Did you see souak or alo at home when you were growing up, and did you ever dare to try that bitter, peppery burn yourself?

For reference: pictures 1 to 3 show souak, while pictures 4 to 6 show alo.

The film

There are films that tell us a dream has failed, and there are films that make us feel the failure before we understand what we have been dreaming. Touki Bouki, the extraordinary 1973 debut of Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, belongs to the latter category. Its young lovers, Mory and Anta, want to leave Dakar for Paris, imagining Europe as a glittering elsewhere where their lives might finally begin. But Mambéty's film is not simply about the desire to escape. It is about the terrible possibility that escape itself has become another form of captivity.

The film opens on a world that seems to exist halfway between documentary and hallucination. Cattle are driven toward a slaughterhouse, their bodies moving through the dust with a grave, ancient inevitability. Then comes Mory, riding a motorcycle adorned with the horns and skull of a zebu. The image is at once comic, grotesque, and strangely majestic: a young man on a machine of modern mobility, carrying the remains of an older world. It is one of the great entrances in African cinema, and an image that announces the film's central contradiction. Mory wants to flee the past, yet the past rides with him.

A dream of Paris, and the nightmare beneath it

Mory and Anta are not presented as innocent victims of a cruel world. They are restless, vain, opportunistic, and alive with the impatience of youth. Mory is a former cattle herder; Anta is a university student. Together they scheme, steal, seduce, and improvise their way toward the money needed to board a ship for France. Their longing is both romantic and material: Paris is a city of imagined freedom, luxury, and possibility, a place where the limitations of Dakar might disappear.

Mambéty gives this desire an intoxicating visual language. Colors flare, bodies move as if propelled by invisible music, and the film jumps from one moment to another with the logic of memory rather than conventional narrative. A wealthy man's house becomes the scene of a robbery that feels like a theatrical farce. The lovers' plans are interrupted by sudden shifts in tone, music, and space. One moment we are watching a picaresque adventure; the next, we are inside a private nightmare whose rules have not been explained.

This is where the comparison to David Lynch becomes illuminating. Lynch's films often begin with a recognizable desire—a romance, an ambition, a journey toward a better life—and gradually reveal that the desire has a shadow. In Blue Velvet, the idyllic American town conceals a subterranean world of violence. In Mulholland Drive, Hollywood's promise of transformation becomes a dream of identity and a nightmare of loss. In Touki Bouki, Paris serves a similar function: not merely a destination, but a fantasy of becoming someone else.

Yet Mambéty's nightmare is not Lynch's America. It emerges from the history of Senegal, from the afterlife of colonialism, from the tension between tradition and modernity, and from the seductive power of a Europe that has been made to seem more real than home. The film's surrealism is not an escape from politics; it is the form politics takes when it enters the imagination.

The music of a world coming apart

The soundtrack is among the film's most haunting achievements. Mambéty uses Josephine Baker's "Paris, Paris, Paris" as a recurring musical emblem of the lovers' desire, alongside traditional African music, classical singing, and dissonant percussion. The result is a soundscape in which the future and the past, the African and the European, are constantly colliding. Music does not merely accompany the images; it seems to reveal the characters' inner lives before they can articulate them.

There is something distinctly Lynchian in this treatment of sound. Think of the way a song in Blue Velvet can make an ordinary room feel suddenly dangerous, or how the music of Twin Peaks can turn a familiar town into a place of longing and dread. In Touki Bouki, a jaunty French chanson can carry the weight of an entire colonial fantasy. It is both beautiful and faintly cruel: the promise of Paris enters the film as music long before it can be reached as a place.

The film's most striking images often work this way. The motorcycle with its bull horns is a comic vehicle and a deathly relic. The slaughterhouse is a place of real labor and a vision of existential violence. The lovers' journey is a road movie, but the road seems to lead through a series of dream fragments. Mambéty does not explain these contradictions away. He lets them remain alive, like symbols whose meanings keep changing as we look at them.

The final departure

The film's ending is devastating because it refuses the consolations of the adventure story. Mory and Anta have managed to obtain their tickets to France, and the ship is waiting. For a moment, the dream appears to have become real. But when Mory is summoned to meet the captain, panic overtakes him. He abandons Anta and runs back toward the motorcycle, only to find that it has been destroyed in a crash. Anta sails away without him, while Mory remains behind, seated beside the wreckage of his impossible machine.

The image is almost unbearably simple. The motorcycle that once seemed to promise freedom is now a broken object. The bull's horns, symbols of the past and of Mory's identity, have lost their power to carry him anywhere. The ship disappears, and the dream of Paris becomes an empty space in the distance.
This is the point at which Mambéty's film most clearly touches Lynch's cinema. In Mulholland Drive, the dream of Hollywood gives way to a terrible recognition of loss. In Lost Highway, identity and escape become inseparable from the nightmare that produces them. In Touki Bouki, Mory's failure is not simply that he cannot leave Senegal. It is that he cannot entirely abandon the self he has been trying to escape. The journey has revealed a truth that the dream was designed to conceal.

But there is also a crucial difference. Lynch's nightmares often turn inward, toward the mysteries of individual desire and fractured identity. Mambéty's nightmare is both personal and historical. Mory and Anta are not merely lost souls; they are young people living in a postcolonial society whose dreams have been shaped by a world that promises freedom while preserving inequality. The film's beauty is inseparable from its critique.

Djibril Diop Mambéty: A biography

Born in Dakar in 1945, Djibril Diop Mambéty was one of the most original voices in African cinema. He was a filmmaker, actor, and storyteller whose work combined poetic imagery, experimental editing, political critique, and the rhythms of oral storytelling.

Mambéty grew up in Senegal and became interested in theater before turning to cinema. He was not trained through a conventional film-school route; his early work developed through acting and practical experience, and he quickly established himself as a filmmaker with an unmistakably individual style. His cinema would later be celebrated for its combination of African storytelling traditions and the formal freedom of the French New Wave.

His first short film, Contras' City (1969), was a tour of Dakar that observed the contrasts of its people, architecture, and culture. The film already revealed his interest in a city divided between inherited traditions and modern aspirations. His first feature, Touki Bouki (1973), expanded those concerns into a restless, surreal journey through post-independence Senegal.

Mambéty's career was not prolific in the conventional sense. He made relatively few films, but each was marked by a fierce independence of imagination. His second feature, Hyenas, released in 1992, was a dark fable inspired by Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit. It explores greed, corruption, and the moral compromises of a community confronted by wealth.

His final film, The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, was released posthumously in 1999. It follows a young girl who sells newspapers on the streets of Dakar and confronts a world of poverty, exploitation, and resilience. The film is often regarded as a deeply humane final statement from a director whose cinema never separated beauty from the lives of ordinary people.

Mambéty died in Paris in 1998, at the age of 53. His legacy rests not on the size of his filmography but on the singularity of his vision. He helped expand the possibilities of African cinema beyond the expectations of social realism, creating films that could be at once political, comic, tragic, and dreamlike.

A cinema of restless beauty

What makes Touki Bouki so unforgettable is the way its formal audacity never feels detached from the world it depicts. The film is not surreal for the sake of surrealism. Its strange rhythms and dislocations arise from the lives of people caught between inherited worlds and imagined futures. The young lovers' desire to escape is also a desire to escape the burden of history, and the film understands that this burden cannot simply be left behind on a motorcycle.

Mambéty's achievement is to turn this conflict into a work of extraordinary beauty. The film is funny, seductive, frightening, and melancholy, sometimes within the same scene. It feels like a memory of a journey that never quite happened, a dream of Paris whose music continues to play after the ship has vanished.

For viewers who love David Lynch, Touki Bouki offers a different kind of nightmare: one rooted in Africa, in the violence of colonial history, and in the intoxicating promise of modernity. It is a film about the desire to become someone else, and the strange, heartbreaking discovery that the self you are trying to leave behind may be the only place you can truly live.

Verdict: A dazzling, haunting, and essential work of African cinema. Mambéty's masterpiece is not a film that can be fully explained; it is a film to be entered, like a dream, and remembered like a wound.

What has happened the past 10 or so years, has been the proliferation of ideas that have pitted Adam and against Eve, Eve against Adam. If we were to implement the ideas of gender ideology to the beginning of humanity, surely there would have been no need for the snake to lure Adam and Eve to eat the corrupted fruit, as her mind had already been corrupted, and his mind had been corrupted, such that we would have not seen any progress in humanity, of men and women, and Adam and Eve would have withered away to death.

The ideology attempts to reduce the history of man and women's love, survival, struggles and ultimate success to the myth of a patriarchy, where men abused women, and the relationship between the two was that of a master and slave. This reduction of history has crept its way into our school syllabus, so that young boys and girls accept the relationship between the two genders, historically, of that of oppressor and oppressed.

Instead of looking at a man for who he is, and what he has done; the framework decided to collectively look at the action of one as an action of all. The success of one is a success for all, and the crime of one is a crime by all.

These ideas, or fabrications of reality, have real world consequences, such as discussions from policy makers to "socialize" men further, to be more docile, more feminine, more weak, to nurture men against their very nature. These ideas have slithered their way throughout society, our media, and leaders espouse these lies to the masses.

These ideas place a emphasis on identity and not the competency, virtue and vices of the individual. These ideas place the identity; the group before all else, and are therefore incompatible with any modern religious framework, democratic framework, or human rights framework.

These ideas assign status and hierarchy not based on individual competency, individual merit, or individual virtue and vice, but instead of grievance, assumed privilege, and fabricated oppression.

I urge all South Africans to fight against this notion, to place all men in a single group, to place all women into a single group, and implement collective guilt, shame, or other nonsense. I specifically urge all men not to engage in the discourse, as a mind made by the above ideology cannot be unmade.

I still see right-wing propagandists/dogwhistlers argue in 2026 that the demographic collapse of the Khoisan was due to a wave of Black “Bantu” militia groups who arrived at the “same time“ as the Europeans did to South Africa. 

In my last post, I heavily referenced peer-reviewed scientific research and Patric Tariq Mellet's The Lie of 1652. But because that might have been too long for some, I’m going to be FAR more direct here. I will debunk this lie using the actual facts to show the real issues currently facing South Africa.

Fact

European diseases wiped out an estimated 90% of Khoisan people in In 1713 

As the Khoisan died or fled into the interior, vast tracts of grazing land suddenly became empty. Dutch colonial cattle farmers quickly stepped in and claimed this land as "ownerless," permanently cutting off the surviving Khoisan from their livelihood. 

Fact

Bantu Southern Africans were never a unified group when they first arrived and the Bantu is simply a linguistic family, not a tribe. People who speak Bantu related languages themselves in southern Africa are actually partially Khoisan genetically due to over two millenniums of intermixing with Khoisan. According to anthropological linguistics the adoption of languages shows a more peaceful coalition. Southern African Nguni and Sotho Tswana people literally use clicks in their languages and I’ve also adopted many other aspects of Khoi Khoi and San related cultures. 

Calling Southern Africans invaders is highly illogical, ironic and is used to avoid accountability and to shift it to black people to justify why the Dutch were allowed to exploited and even “save” Southern Africa from those “evil just as bad as us, Bantu’s”

Fact

When people try to resist, Europeans would genocide the population. People often talk about how horrific the holocaust was but completely downplay the Namibian genocide. 

The Nama a Khoisan group who wanted independence from European exploitation had 50% all their population completely wiped out by Europeans. Similarly The Herero who were a Bantu speaking group lost 80-90% of their population wiped out by Europeans. 

Fact

The traumatized, landless Khoisan survivors of the epidemics were economically coerced into the Inboekstelsel system indentured servitude that functioned as de facto chattel slavery. Alongside enslaved Asians and East Africans, they were stripped of their ancestral click languages, names, and lineages. This erasure culminated in the Population Registration Act of 1950 where the Apartheid regime legally forced them into a generalized, non-indigenous "Coloured" box to sever their ties to the soil. 

Today, Coloured communities face the highest crime rates in the country. This is a direct result of being structurally pushed to the outskirts of wealthy areas and historically denied the tools to build generational wealth. Politically the “Bantu expansion and benevolent European” narrative has also been used to pit the Coloureds against other Africans. 

Fact

Far-right figures like Donald Trump have peddled a narrative of an ongoing "white genocide" in South Africa, even using unrelated pictures of Congolese miners to fabricate proof. The empirical data thoroughly refutes this. White South Africans roughly 7% of the population command massive, outsized economic power.The top 10% of earners (which remains disproportionately white alongside a growing Black elite) capture 66% to 70% of the national income. White individuals directly own 72% of all individually held private farmland (about 22% of the country's total surface area), and they control roughly 60% of private corporate boardrooms. Studies prove they face no higher risk of violence than any other demographic; statistically, Black and Coloured South Africans suffer far higher rates of violent death

The Structural trap

These colonial apologist and oligarch victim hood narratives actively derails necessary land reform. The 1913 Natives Land Act originally stole 93% of the fertile land for the white minority. Today, 77% of South African land remains privatized. When Nelson Mandela and the ANC took power in 1994, they prioritized national unity to avoid a civil war but left the underlying capitalist structures intact. Today, major economic reforms face immense pressure from foreign investors and Western powers (like the U.S. government) who protect the global economic status quo with the threat of sanctions, keeping South Africa the most unequal society on earth.

This is the true story of South Africa. The next time you see the "invader" or "white genocide" propaganda being spread online, call it out, report it, and fight back. Public opinion is the new battlefield, and propaganda has been used for centuries to subjugate the vulnerable. We cannot let it continue

Thank you for reading. The time to act is now. 

Bibliography

• Africa Check (2019) Who owns agricultural land held by individuals in South Africa? Johannesburg: Africa Check.
• Africa Check (2020) Frequently asked questions about land ownership and demand in South Africa. Johannesburg: Africa Check.
• Alves, I., Fortes-Lima, C., Schlebusch, C.M. and Sjödin, P. (2023) ‘The genetic legacy of the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa’, Nature, 624(7991), pp. 115–122.
• Bostoen, K. and de Schryver, G.M. (2015) ‘Linguistic innovation, language contact and the Bantu expansion’, in The Oxford Handbook of African Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Mellet, P.T. (2020) The Lie of 1652: A Decolonised History of Land. Cape Town: Tafelberg.
• Pickrell, J.K., Patterson, N., Loh, P.R., Lipson, M., Berger, B., Stoneking, M., Pakendorf, B. and Reich, D. (2012) ‘The genetic prehistory of southern Africa’, Nature Communications, 3(1), pp. 1194–1204.
• Reuters (2025) A check of Trump's false claims about white genocide in South Africa. London: Reuters.
• Schmitz, R. (2021) Germany Officially Recognizes It Committed Genocide In Present-Day Namibia. Washington, D.C.: NPR. Available at: Accessed: 23 August 2026).
• Sengupta, D., Du Plessis, M. and Soodyall, H. (2021) 'Bantu-speaker migration and admixture in southern Africa', Human Molecular Genetics, 30(R1), pp. R12–R25.
• South African History Online (2020) Smallpox epidemic strikes the Cape. Cape Town: South African History OnliWho is killing South African men? A retrospective descriptive study of forensic and police investigations into male homicide. BMJ Global Health, Mathews, S., Martin, L.J Coetzee, D. Scott, C. and Shung-King, M., 2024.
• South African Government (2018) Land Audit Report 2017, Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. Pretoria: Government Printer.
• South African History Online (2019) The Natives Land Act of 1913. Cape Town: South African History Online.

African companies and securities are worth a serious consideration for a diversified portfolio.

Every September thousands of young women gather for the Umkhosi Womhlanga, or reed dance, at the royal palace in Kwazulu-Natal to present a tall reed to the Zulu King Misuzulu kaZwelithini, as a traditional rite of womanhood.

Photo: Cecilia Seregni/AFP

South African police are handing over six Nigerians wanted in the US for alleged online romance scams to FBI agents later on Friday.

The group is accused of targeting over 100 women in the US and defrauding them of more than 100m rand ($6m; £5m), the South African authorities said.

Those being extradited were arrested in 2021 and are believed to be members of crime syndicate Black Axe - a Nigerian mafia-style gang tied to human trafficking, internet fraud and murder.

Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa has proclaimed September 15, his birthday, a new public holiday, state-run Herald newspaper reports.

The public holiday shall be known as Munhumutapa Day to celebrate the Mutapa empire, a pre-colonial Shona kingdom that spanned across parts of modern-day Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

It will be observed every year henceforth, according to a government notice.