Nigeria's elite sipped champagne and splashed thousands of dollars on contemporary paintings at a fair in Lagos this week, an early step into the international art world for Africa's most populous nation.

Botswana is moving ahead to ring-fence business activities for locals, including businesses ranging from bread and confectionery to furniture. An economics lecturer believes taxing foreigners more could work better than blocking them.

For the first time, three prison inmates in Tunisia were allowed a brief taste of freedom for the sake of art.

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Proudly displaying her freshly picked pomegranates, Tunisian farmer Sarah Shili says going organic is "the future of farming" -- and as demand surges in North Africa and beyond, the sector is blooming.

Hakim Alileche left a successful career in graphic design and moved to the Algerian countryside to produce "magic potion" -- organic olive oil that has won him international recognition.

Pro-democracy protesters have prepared to launch two more days of civil disobedience against Sudan's military coup, as Arab League mediators arrived in Khartoum.

Ninety-one people were killed in the capital of Sierra Leone on Friday when a fuel tanker exploded following a collision, the central morgue and local authorities said.

On the site of a luxury shopping centre under construction in Nigeria's economic capital Lagos, a young builder steps gingerly along the top of bamboo scaffolding. Barefoot, with no rope to protect him.

Gunmen killed up to 15 soldiers in an attack on a military outpost in a remote part of south west Niger where Islamist militants operate, officials and security sources said.

Nigerian security forces on Friday rescued six people who had been seized at a university near the capital's international airport, police said.

African and Western nations called for an immediate ceasefire in Ethiopia on Thursday after Tigrayan forces from the country's North said they made advances towards the capital this week.

A ground-breaking vaccine against malaria has stoked hopes in Africa of rolling back a disease that claims hundreds of thousands of lives a year, many of them youngsters.

At least 69 people, including a local mayor, have been killed in an attack in Niger's volatile "tri-border" zone with Burkina Faso and Mali, the interior ministry said on Thursday.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed urged citizens to defend themselves against the rebellious forces after reports that they had taken control of two towns.

The move is part of a broader plan to sell about 14% of the parent company’s holding in its largest and most profitable unit.

The European Union on Wednesday launched a military training mission in Mozambique to help local troops fight a jihadist insurgency in its gas-rich north.

Rescuers in Nigeria on Wednesday raced to find survivors, two days after a high-rise building under construction collapsed and trapped scores of people in the commercial capital Lagos, as the death toll rose to 22, an emergency official said.

In the heyday of the Ein Gedi spa in the 1960s, holidaymakers could marinate in heated pools and then slip into the briny Dead Sea. Now the same beach is punctured by craters.

A report on abuses committed during war in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region will be published on Wednesday, but a spokesperson for the party controlling Tigray said investigators did not visit many sites where violence occurred.