Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: U.S. President Donald Trump hosts a surprise African leaders’ summit in Washington, anti-government protests turn deadly in Kenya, and Nigerian ride-hailing start-up Moove eyes the U.S. market.
Trump’s Surprise Africa Summit
U.S. President Donald Trump is set to host leaders from Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal for lunch at the White House today. Analysts expect the surprise mini summit to focus on trade, security, migration, and critical minerals.
Although the Trump administration has largely withdrawn from Africa, cutting aid and issuing visa bans on several countries, it’s clear that the United States is still prioritizing ties with some African nations, particularly as it seeks to compete with China on critical minerals.
“Trade, not aid, a slogan we’ve seen thrown around for years, is now truly our policy for Africa,” Troy Fitrell, Trump’s outgoing top Africa diplomat, said in May.
The administration’s strategy on the continent has been influenced by Massad Boulos, Trump’s senior Africa advisor, who is the father-in-law to one of the president’s daughters. Boulos is credited with negotiating the terms of a recent peace deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which could bring about more U.S. investments in the latter’s critical minerals sector.
The Central and West African nations attending Trump’s summit may have relatively small GDPs, but they are rich in untapped rare earths and critical minerals, including manganese, bauxite, and copper. These reserves provide fresh opportunities for U.S. businesses in African nations where China does not already have a monopoly on the mining sector.
In theory, focusing on these smaller nations is a smart move for the Trump administration. In practice, the success of these talks depends on how much private U.S. companies are prepared to invest in mining in these countries.
So far, Western companies have shied away from operations in the Sahel—where several of the summit’s countries are located—due to ongoing Islamist insurgencies. Instead, these companies have invested in established minerals industries in countries such as Zambia and South Africa with better security guarantees.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military has been forced to withdraw from the Sahel, where it had supported counterterrorism operations for around two decades. Since 2020, the military juntas of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have ejected Western troops, including those from the United States, and partnered with Russia instead.
But the Sahel is becoming increasingly important to U.S. counterterrorism interests, particularly as al Qaeda-affiliated group Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin has ramped up attacks in the region.
In May, Gen. Michael Langley, the head of the U.S. Africa Command, warned that the Sahel is now a “flash point of prolonged conflict” and the “epicenter of terrorism on the globe.”
The United States is especially concerned about terrorist activity spreading into coastal West African nations, which may explain the country’s push to bolster diplomatic ties in the region. Washington, Langley added, is “keeping a good eye on this because they [terrorists] could have the capacity to attack the homeland.”
Trump may also be looking to some of these nations as potential new partners in his effort to deport migrants from the United States—including to places other than their home countries, as it recently did with South Sudan. African migration via the U.S.-Mexico border, especially from Mauritania and Senegal, has increased in recent years as Europe has cracked down on migration.
Already, the Trump administration issued a travel ban on seven African nations in June and gave 36 countries—including Gabon, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal—60 days to fix vetting concerns and high visa overstay rates or face a travel ban. Last month, the Senegalese women’s basketball team canceled a training camp in the United States after some members of the squad were denied U.S. visas.
The Week Ahead
Wednesday, July 9: Trump to host a three-day summit of leaders from Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal to discuss critical minerals.
Thursday, July 10: The International Criminal Court briefs the United Nations Security Council on the situation in Darfur.
Saturday, July 12: São Tomé and Príncipe celebrates 50 years of independence from Portugal.
What We’re Watching
BRICS summit. Chinese President Xi Jinping did not attend the BRICS annual summit over the weekend, skipping it for the first time in the bloc’s history. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin only attended the gathering in Brazil via video conference due to an outstanding International Criminal Court arrest warrant for him.
The no-shows prompted several analysts to speculate that the group—whose five original members were Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—is losing its relevance as an ideological opponent to U.S hegemony, particularly as it has expanded in the past couple years.
BRICS nations now represent more than half of the world’s population, and the bloc’s expansion has led to more internal disagreement. In April, new members Egypt and Ethiopia blocked a BRICS declaration that would have backed South Africa for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.
But for new nations participating in BRICS—such as Nigeria, which joined as a “partner country,” rather than full member, in January—the bloc still offers an opportunity to diversify their markets and cement allies as they face an unpredictable U.S. administration. On Sunday, Trump threatened an extra 10 percent tariff on any country that aligns itself with BRICS.
Kenyan protests. Police opened fire on anti-government protesters in Nairobi, Kenya, on Monday, killing at least 11 people. The demonstrations marked the 35th anniversary of the Saba Saba march (meaning “7/7” in Swahili), which helped bring an end to single-party rule in the country.
Kenyan security forces blocked all major roads into central Nairobi ahead of the protests. The demonstrations are the latest in a wave of youth-led protests against President William Ruto’s government that began in June 2024. Nearly 20 people were killed on June 25, when another protest was met with violence from the police.
South Sudan deportations. Last Friday, the Trump administration deported eight men to South Sudan, a country on the brink of full-scale civil war, after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted an order blocking their deportation. The migrants had been held in a shipping container for more than a month at a U.S. military base in Djibouti.
All of the men had been convicted of serious crimes in the United States, though many had finished or were near the end of their sentences. Only one is from South Sudan; most of the others come from Southeast Asia.
The South Sudanese government is under U.S. pressure to accept deportations after the Trump administration revoked all visas held by South Sudanese passport holders and implemented a ban on issuing new visas to citizens of the country in April.
USAID cuts. Funding cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) could kill more than 14 million people by 2030—including 4.5 million children younger than 5 years old, according to a new study in the Lancet.
Africa is the region that has benefited the most from USAID programs. According to the study, USAID funding significantly reduced deaths from HIV/AIDS and malaria, among other diseases.
More than 80 percent of USAID programs were canceled in March, and the remainder were absorbed into the State Department last week. “Under the Trump Administration, we will finally have a foreign funding mission in America that prioritizes our national interests,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on Substack.
This Week in Culture and Tech
Egyptian genome sequenced. Scientists from Liverpool John Moores University in England have sequenced the genome of an Egyptian man who lived more than 4,500 years ago, around the age of the first pyramids, according to a study published in Nature last week.
It is generally difficult to extract DNA from ancient Egyptians due to heat and mummification, both of which can accelerate genetic degradation. But the man, who may have lived into his 60s, was buried in a ceramic pot in a rock-cut tomb, which may have preserved his genetic material. The vessel was excavated more than a century ago in Nuwayrat, an archeological site near Cairo.
The researchers’ findings provide evidence of cultural connections across North Africa and the Middle East. They traced around 80 percent of his ancestry to Egypt and neighboring areas, with the other 20 percent linked to Mesopotamia, which largely corresponds to modern-day Iraq. Their analysis suggests that the man had dark to black skin, brown eyes, and brown hair.
The researchers cautioned that one individual genome sequencing cannot be used to make broader conclusions about Egyptian ancestry. Still, “it provides a valuable first glimpse into the ancestry of an early Egyptian in the old kingdom,” said one of the researchers, Pontus Skoglund.
Moove targets U.S. expansion. Nigerian ride-hailing start-up Moove is close to raising $1.2 billion in debt financing to support its expansion into the U.S. market as well as its rollout of self-driving cars with Alphabet’s Waymo.
The firm, which is backed by Uber, was founded in Nigeria by Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi in 2020. It initially focused on ride-hailing vehicles in African nations before expanding into more than a dozen markets, including India, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Israel’s War on Iran Backfired by Sina Toossi
- The End of Modernity by Christopher Clark
- I Was Hacked Because I Work on Russia by Keir Giles
What We’re Reading
New narrative wave. In the Columbia Journalism Review, Maurice Oniang’o examines why narrative podcasts are booming in Africa. Africans have long turned to audio to get their news, he writes, and “in countries like South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, between 50 and 60 percent of people listen to podcasts,” compared with 45 percent in the United States.
Mass plunder. An investigation by the Sentry, a nonprofit policy organization, alleges that in addition to committing atrocities, Eritrean forces carried out “industrial-scale looting” of gold and antiquities from northern Ethiopia during the 2020-22 war in Tigray. Eritrean forces fought alongside Ethiopian federal troops during the conflict and still occupy areas of eastern Tigray.