Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: A landmark decision deals a fresh blow to the U.K.-Mauritius Chagos Islands deal, the Democratic Republic of the Congo inks a third-country migrant deal with the United States, and the Mali-Mauritania rift deepens amid rising border violence.
A landmark legal ruling has dealt a fresh setback to the United Kingdom’s deal with Mauritius to hand back the Chagos Islands, Britain’s last African colony, after a bitter, decades-long battle.
Last week, the Supreme Court of the Chagos Archipelago—officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory—overturned the ban on Chagossians living on the outer islands.
No Chagossian has lived permanently on any of the islands in more than 50 years. The United Kingdom detached Chagos from Mauritius three years before the latter’s independence in 1968. At the time, Britain forcibly removed thousands of Chagossians in order to build a joint U.S.-U.K. military base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the 58 islands. Most of them were resettled to Mauritius or Britain.
The military base, which is strategically located roughly halfway between Africa and Asia, aids in surveillance of the Middle East and has been critical to defensive operations in the Iran conflict and previous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In February, four Chagossians arrived on Île du Coin—an atoll of the archipelago located around 135 miles from Diego Garcia—and announced their intention to live there. The British government issued eviction notices to the Chagossians and threatened fines and up to three years in prison for noncompliance, prompting the recent court case.
The judge stated that a “claimed power to exclude a whole population must be justified by legal source, not administrative necessity,” adding that it is “not possible to say that the outer islands are required for the defence purposes” of Britain and the United States. He did, however, warn that settlers must secure the necessary permits to live there permanently.
The ruling poses a threat to the U.K.-Mauritius deal signed in 2024, whereby Britain agreed to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and lease Diego Garcia for 99 years for around $4.5 billion. The deal restricted resettlement to Diego Garcia, but the judge determined that the United Kingdom’s arguments that Chagossians’ return is not “feasible on economic grounds” and security grounds were invalid.
While the ruling focuses on the outer islands, it is unclear what the decision could mean for future claims on Diego Garcia, which formerly had the largest population of all the islands. The judge found clear evidence of a settled population living in the Chagos Islands before the military base was built, despite Britain’s claims that it was uninhabited, potentially strengthening Chagossians’ future legal claims to return.
Even before the ruling, the Chagos Islands deal was in a precarious position. From the start, it failed to address the right of return for Chagossians. In recent months, it has drawn serious criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump, which reportedly contributed to a pause in the ratification process in the U.K. Parliament.
The United Kingdom increasingly felt pressure to strike a deal after the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in 2019 stating that Britain’s separation of Chagos before granting Mauritius independence broke international law. A nonbinding U.N. General Assembly resolution that year also demanded that Britain hand back the islands.
With growing calls from Mauritius and the African Union for the islands’ return, there were worries among some British politicians that failing to act would strengthen China’s influence in the country, especially as Beijing has sought to project itself as an anti-imperialist partner. (Mauritius is one of only two African nations, alongside Eswatini, that are not part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.)
Meanwhile, critics of the deal, including many U.S. Republicans as well as Britain’s Conservative Party and right-wing Reform party, have argued that ceding the territory to Mauritius could embolden China to build a surveillance operation there.
Compounding this, the Maldives opposes Mauritius’s control of the Chagos Islands and is threatening to put forth its own sovereignty claims, the BBC recently reported. And some Chagossians told me in 2024, when the deal was announced, that they wanted to be allowed to settle on Diego Garcia and intended to push for the right to self-determination.
Mauritius, for its part, maintains that its sovereignty over the Chagos Islands “should no longer be subject to debate.” Expect further legal challenges to the deal.
Friday, April 10: Djibouti holds a presidential election. President Ismail Omar Guelleh is predicted to extend his near three-decade rule.
Sunday, April 12: Benin holds a presidential election. President Patrice Talon’s designated successor, Finance Minister Romuald Wadagni, is predicted to win.
Congo’s migrant deal. The Democratic Republic of the Congo announced on Sunday that it had agreed a third-country migrant deal with the Trump administration. Beginning this month, Congo said that it will temporarily hold migrants deported from the United States at a facility in the capital of Kinshasa. Congo did not provide details on the number of migrants that it would accept.
As of the end of January, the Trump administration had spent an estimated minimum of $40 million—more than $1 million per person in some cases—to deport about 300 migrants to countries other than their own, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report.
Energy summit boycott. Ghana and Mozambique have withdrawn from the Africa Energies Summit being held in London next month, citing the alleged exclusion of African experts and the treatment of Black professionals by conference organizers.
Energy Chamber Ghana, an industry association, said the country was not a “spectator” in the continent’s energy industry. “Africa cannot be treated as a marketplace for attendance while Africans are treated as optional participants in execution,” the body said.
“Our narrative and voices matter. Any company that wants to operate in the continent with a mindset of excluding Africans will fail. That’s why Africans are staying away from Africa Energies Summit 2026,” said N.J. Ayuk, the executive chairman of the African Energy Chamber, which called for a widespread boycott.
Algeria’s constitutional changes. At the end of March, the Algerian Parliament approved constitutional revisions that legal experts argue extend President Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s powers over judicial appointments and elections. Tebboune’s administration said the changes were “technical” and therefore did not require a referendum.
The package includes an amendment that grants the president the ability to call early local elections, which critics argue will allow the central government to dissolve local assemblies that are dominated by opposition parties or deemed uncooperative.
Mauritania-Mali rift. Yearslong tensions between Mauritania and Mali have heightened in recent weeks, driven by civilian casualties as Malian armed forces, along with contractors from the Russian state-controlled paramilitary group Africa Corps, fight Islamist armed groups and Tuareg separatists.
Mauritania recently accused Malian forces of killing five Mauritian civilians “in Malian territory, near the border” between the two countries on March 26. Mali has not yet officially responded to the accusations.
Mauritania hosts hundreds of thousands of Malian refugees. Last month, Mali’s army said that two of its soldiers had been “held by terrorist armed groups” in Mauritania’s Mbera refugee camp before later escaping—an accusation that the Mauritanian government found “deeply offensive” and denied.
A print of Malick Sidibé’s 1962 photograph, Regardez-moi!, printed in 2003.MOMA
An exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, titled Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, features the work of mid-20th-century photographers who were critical in documenting post-independence Africa.
The exhibit, which opened in December and runs until July 25, takes inspiration from Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe’s 1994 book The Idea of Africa, which argued that “Africa” was a construct shaped by Western intellectual discourse and called for a redefinition of the continent on African terms.
The curators have sought to highlight how photography helped visually define pan-African ideas of identity and representation. J.D. Okhai Ojeikere’s images, for instance, depicted a newly independent Nigeria through the lavish hairstyles of women in Lagos, while Sanlé Sory’s work captured the vibrant nightlife and youth culture of Burkina Faso’s city of Bobo-Dioulasso.
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Egypt’s Ukrainian grain. For the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Ukrainian investigative outlet Slidstvo.info, Oleh Kotiuzhanskyi and Maksym Savchuk report that a pair of relatives behind a Russian drone manufacturer are also running a company that exports wheat from occupied Ukrainian territory.
They allege that the company, Nika LLC, ships grain from the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol to Turkey and Egypt, Africa’s largest wheat consumer. “Ukraine’s government has long insisted that Russian export of Ukrainian grain is pillage, a war crime under international law,” Kotiuzhanskyi and Savchuk write.
Sudan’s war atrocities. A new report by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has found that rape is being used as a weapon of war in Sudan’s civil war. “Sexual violence has become a pervasive and defining feature of the conflict while also persisting beyond active front lines,” Vickie Hawkins, the general director of MSF Netherlands, states in the report.
More than 3,396 survivors of sexual violence, many of whom were children, sought treatment in MSF-supported clinics across North and South Darfur between January 2024 and November 2025.
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