Improvements in health care in Eswatini have relied for years on Pepper and the generosity of the American people. During the height of the H.I.V./AIDS pandemic, Eswatini’s population plummeted, and life expectancy dropped from 61 in 1988 to 44 by 2003.

President Donald Trump said that he would hold South Africa accountable for rights violations against white Afrikaners, a group of people he described as “innocent disfavored minority farmers.

Approximately six million people have died in the conflict in the eastern D.R.C. since 1996. For decades, numerous armed groups have competed for power and control of this vast nation’s potential fortune.

In the small town of Stilfontein, some 90 miles from the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, hundreds, possibly thousands, of illegal miners have been underground in an abandoned mine shaft for more than a month.

After another disputed election, street protests wrack Mozambique. while a northern province, Cabo Delgado, endures a deadly Islamist insurrection.

One South African theologian described “a deep sense of disillusionment that the church, on the one hand, is saying we need to be a synodal listening church, and has yet again taken the diaconate for women off the table.”

“If women are doing practically everything that a deacon is doing ... [why] do we want to draw women into clericalism when we are having so many problems with it?”

Polls abound, and the political ground keeps shifting, but one thing is sure: South Africa is likely to experience a significant political realignment on May 29.

The spokesperson for the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference said that the conference “has taken a slightly different stand from the rest of Africa” on the Vatican declaration “Fiducia Supplicans.”

For many in South Africa, there is a symbolic significance in the decision to pursue the genocide charge. In 2024, South Africa celebrates 30 years of democracy, yet vast injustices still permeate South African society because of its traumatic history.