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Stigma and superstition surround those with disabilities such as Down’s syndrome and cerebral palsy. But there is a growing move to raise awareness and increase inclusivityWhen Fatima Muhammad was told to drown her infant son or abandon him in the forest to die, she brushed off the ludicrous suggestions fuelled by superstition. But when people began to run away, some screaming profanities at the sight of him, she knew they meant it. His crime was being born with Down’s syndrome.Alameen was born in 2015, the fourth of Muhammad’s six children. He is happy and playful at home, his mother says;... Read more

Whistleblower suggests internal security services deployed spyware from 2017 against key domestic and foreign targetsA former member of Morocco’s domestic intelligence service has helped to provide an unprecedented insight into how the north African state used hacking software – including Pegasus spyware – to target journalists, human rights defenders, French politicians and Spanish cabinet ministers and police officers.Pegasus, which is manufactured by the Israel-based NSO Group, allows its operator to access everything on a target’s mobile phone, including emails, text messages and photographs. It can also activate the phone’s recorder and camera, turning it into a listening device. Continue reading...... Read more

Adaptation to frightening new normal and reducing emissions further and faster is critical, scientists warnDozens of people drowned, hundreds had to be rescued and thousands were displaced when floods struck the coasts of west Africa last month.Now scientists have concluded that the rains that caused the floods were supercharged by climate breakdown. Global heating, they say, turned what should have been a routine weather event into a climate catastrophe. Continue reading...... Read more

Whether it is our ‘identity maths’, naked nostalgia or diaspora experience. All seem scarred by the political contexts bearing down on this tournamentDon’t already get The Long Wave in your inbox? Sign up hereI have measured my life in World Cups. The first blurry moments of childhood memory, the passing into adolescence, starting university. Each tournament marks a season of life. Each one is also associated with potent, formative emotional events: Roger Milla dancing around the corner flag when Cameroon became the first African team to reach the quarter-finals in 1990; Roberto Baggio’s devastating goal that knocked out a Nigeria... Read more

Robin Bernstein’s debut book Mapalakata takes us to the edge of the South African frontier to tell a story inspired by folk tales and historical artefacts Continue reading...... Read more

Project a Black Planet: Film, a new season of screenings at the Barbican in London exemplifies how the movement was an act of solidarity, resistance and fierce creativityAlgiers, 1969. What had, for seven years, been the metropolis of a newly independent country became, over the course of 12 days in July, the cosmopolitan centre of an entire continent. That summer, Algeria played host to the first Pan-African Cultural festival (Panaf) and the capital’s streets were transformed into a vista of energising performers, flanked by placards announcing each country’s delegation: Ethiopia, Liberia, Mali.Picture an Olympics-style opening ceremony, then discard it, for... Read more