The campaign that came to prominence when 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from their classes in 2014 has had an impact beyond its first rallying cries

It was a kidnapping that changed Nigeria’s image internationally. For many, the first inkling of what was going on in the country’s north-east was after April 2014, when 276 girls were snatched from a school in Chibok by the Islamist militia group Boko Haram. It came from social media postings from the then US first lady, Michelle Obama, from the actor Angelina Jolie and Pope Francis, holding up #BringBackOurGirls signs . That became the name of a movement, and a rallying cry for the girls’ release. Ten years on, the girls are not all back home. But some things have been achieved.

The Nigerian government, under President Goodluck Jonathan, saw the new movement as opposition. The actual opposition, the All Progressives Congress (APC) party, was smart enough to ally itself with #BBOG, quickly embracing the message. It was partly due to the movement’s ability to mobilise its increasingly vast online following to vote for the APC’s candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, that Jonathan lost the 2015 election – the first time in Nigeria’s postcolonial history that an incumbent had lost a re-election bid.

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Workers in Africa have been exploited first by being paid a pittance to help make chatbots, then by having their own words become AI-ese. Plus, new AI gadgets are coming for your smartphones

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We’re witnessing the birth of AI-ese, and it’s not what anyone could have guessed. Let’s delve deeper.

If you’ve spent enough time using AI assistants, you’ll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated. Without a concerted effort to break the systems out of their default register, the text they spit out is, while grammatically and semantically sound, ineffably generated.

The images pop up in Mophat Okinyi’s mind when he’s alone, or when he’s about to sleep. Okinyi, a former content moderator for Open AI’s ChatGPT in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of four people in that role who have filed a petition to the Kenyan government calling for an investigation into what they describe as exploitative conditions for contractors reviewing the content that powers artificial intelligence programs.

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More than 80,000 Nigerian women died from pregnancy-related complications in 2020, a statistic activists say reflects a lack of political will to fix a broken medical system

Despite having the largest economy in Africa, Nigeria also loses more women to death in childbirth than most other countries in the world. In 2020, about 82,000 Nigerian women died due to pregnancy-related complications, a slight improvement on the previous year, but an increase on previous decades.

The causes of death included severe haemorrhage, high blood pressure (pre-eclampsia and eclampsia), unsafe abortion and obstructed labour. Doctors and activists say high maternal mortality rates reflect a lack of trust in a broken public healthcare system and little political will to fix it.

Lawal Arinola being brought up to surgery at Lagos Island maternity hospital

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It has gone from the sidelines of American sport to become a competitive global phenomenon that might one day make the Olympics. We meet the international teams bringing the cheer

When photographer Christian Sinibaldi first visited world champion cheerleaders London’s Unity Allstars Black , in January 2020, he had no expectations. In fact, he admits , he had “a few stigmas associated with cheerleaders”. What he learned that day surprised him. “I loved the energy, the connection between people,” he says. It kickstarted a fascination that would take him around the world to capture a sport on the cusp of global popularity, a project that took him from the markets of Ho Chi Minh City to the tunnels of Lagos stadium.

Cheerleading has long been associated with high school movies and glittery sideline entertainment, but it has a rich history – one that has fascinated me since I cheered at high school in the 90s. My master’s thesis was an ethnography of cheerleading, following a squad throughout a season. For my doctoral dissertation, I wrote a cultural history of the sport. Cheerleading began in the US in the late 19th century, growing out of the civil war and finding a place among the sidelines of elite all-male higher education institutions. There were almost no women cheerleaders until men went to war in the 40s. In the latter half of the 20th century it was feminised and sexualised, before evolving into a competitive athletic endeavour of its own as a result of second wave feminism. It has since been further democratised and radicalised – there are squads of all ages and genders, advocating for all manner of social justice causes.

Main image: junior members of Kazakhstan’s Cheer Republic team perform in Independence Square in the capital city, Astana, in front of the Hazrat Sultan mosque. Above: members of Athens’ Amazons cheerleading team practise in the seaside suburb of Vouliagmeni

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This year’s ‘Olympics of the art world’ features many artists wrestling with ideas of colonialism and its lingering influence

This year’s Venice Biennale is being billed as an event rooted in the now, in a world of conflict and division – or, as one newspaper put it, the celebration of global art will be full of “ war, refugees, destruction ”.

Another theme that runs through many of the pavilions is colonialism: both its legacy in the form of restitution debates, and Europe’s lingering presence – physically and psychologically – in those countries that were formerly colonised.

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While some were freed or escaped, the authorities’ waning interest and ongoing mass abductions by militants has left campaigners and families of missing pupils in despair

When her Boko Haram captors told Margret Yama she would be going home, she thought it was a trick. She and the other girls kidnapped from their school in Chibok , in north-east Nigeria’s Borno state, had been held for three years and had been taunted before about the possibility of release.

Conditions where they were being held in Sambisa Forest were harsh. Food and water were limited, the work was hard and the surveillance from the Islamist militants was suffocating. But then came the day in May 2017 when the girls were escorted to a Red Cross convoy on the edges of the forest.

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In 1979, my father Roy Ayers went on an extraordinary three-week tour with the Afrobeat pioneer amid extreme violence in Nigeria. Three band members recount the unforgettable trip

In 1977, after Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti criticised the military regime in his native Nigeria, 1,000 government soldiers raided his compound, Kalakuta Republic. They beat and raped its inhabitants and threw Kuti’s 78-year-old mother from a second-storey window, ultimately killing her. Despite the attack, Kuti continued to use his music as a way to speak out.

Meanwhile, Roy Ayers – my father, with whom I have never had a relationship – was riding high on his 1976 hit song Everybody Loves the Sunshine . While he wasn’t especially political, he and Kuti had common ground in their pan-African beliefs. Ayers’s lawyer, who was Nigerian, convinced him that he and Kuti should link up. “You should go to Africa,” he said, “because there’s a musician I want you to meet.”

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Students and staff snatched by gunmen from school in Kaduna state freed days before ransom deadline

The Nigerian army has rescued students and staff who were abducted by gunmen from a school in the country’s north earlier this month, the military said, days before the deadline for a ransom payment.

School officials and residents had said 287 students were taken on 7 March in the town of Kuriga, in the north-western state of Kaduna. A military spokesperson said 137 hostages – 76 female and 61 male – were rescued in the early hours of Sunday in the neighbouring state of Zamfara.

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Seventeen students and a woman freed after operation in north-west of country

Nigeria’s army has rescued 17 students and a woman who were kidnapped in a dawn raid by armed men two weeks ago in north-west Sokoto state, the state governor said.

The attack at Tsangaya school on 9 March came two days after the mass abduction of schoolchildren in Kaduna, also in the north. Those students are still missing.

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