Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Somalia’s president makes a surprise visit to Ethiopia, Chad’s “charade” election, and a forgotten independence-era heroine.

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Turkey has turned its mediation efforts to Sudan’s civil war after settling a diplomatic dispute between Ethiopia and Somalia. Sudan has been locked in a power struggle between two rival generals for nearly two years. More than 11 million people have fled their homes, and tens of thousands are dead.

In early January, Sudan’s military leader, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, welcomed Turkey’s offer to mediate between Sudan and the United Arab Emirates. Burhan’s generals have repeatedly accused the UAE of supporting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo. A United Nations report and several media investigations have found that Abu Dhabi is funding and arming the RSF. Washington last Tuesday issued sanctions targeting Hemeti and seven Emirati companies. Turkey’s reported proposal would persuade Abu Dhabi to cease RSF support in exchange for Sudan withdrawing its complaints against the UAE at the U.N. Security Council.

Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Burhanettin Duran visited Port Sudan on Jan. 4 with an ambitious set of plans to open a bank and an aid agency there. Three ships carrying 8,000 metric tons of humanitarian aid were reportedly en route to Sudan, according to Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Yousif.

“Sudan needs brothers and friends like Turkey,” Yousif said. “This initiative can lead to real efforts to achieve peace in Sudan.”

Turkey has been looking to fill the void left by the United States across the Horn of Africa and into the Sahel. It has sold drones to Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The relationship gives potential access to Niger’s abundant uranium deposits, which Ankara needs to power its first nuclear power station, scheduled to open late this year.

Africa Brief first wrote about Ankara’s bid for influence in Africa three years ago. Since then, Turkey has signed military agreements with Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and most recently Somalia. Last October, it launched oil and gas exploration off the coast of Somalia.

After Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power 22 years ago, Turkey’s trade with Africa rose—reaching $35 billion in 2023, from just $5.4 billion in 2003. Its investments on the continent include a mosque in Mali, a hospital in Niger, and an army base in Somalia training 10,000 local troops.

“Those numbers tell us something about Turkey’s increasing presence in the continent because until the last few years, we were not talking that much about Turkey’s involvement in the Sahel, much less Africa,” said Elem Eyrice Tepeciklioglu, an associate professor at the Social Sciences University of Ankara who has written a book on Turkey’s expanding influence across Africa.

African nations “do not see Turkey as a country following hard power-based policies because, yes, security cooperation is also there, but Turkey’s Africa policy initially relied on the use of different soft power tools and strategies,” she added.

Turkey hosted its third ministerial review conference jointly with the African Union in Djibouti last year and provided a platform to tout defense and energy cooperation. Ankara, like many emerging middle powers in Africa, has closely watched China—seeking to replicate its strategy on soft power and infrastructure development. Turkish Airlines flies to some 60 African destinations. Like Chinese leaders, Turkish officials regularly remind their African counterparts that the country does not share the West’s colonial baggage in the region and therefore is a better, more neutral partner.

In 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron said Turkey was turning African public opinion against Paris by playing on “post-colonial resentment.”

“Turkey has never been in a colonial position or relationship with the Continent. On the contrary, African nations looked for help from Ottomans in their struggle against colonial oppressors,” then-Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu wrote in 2014.

However, some of this is revisionist history, which Turkish state media have helped spread. Turkey was a colonial ruler in Sudan and heavily involved in the enslavement of Africans from the Great Lakes and Central Africa during the Ottoman Empire, leading to an invisible community of Afro-Turks today.

Volkan Ipek, a professor of political science and international relations at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, said Turkey was looking to replicate a “neo-Ottomanist and humanitarian foreign policy” in Sudan.

“Turkey would like to get rid of what is going on now in Sudan, which naturally and negatively affects Turkish investments” and Ankara’s prewar development efforts there, Ipek added.

Thanks to the near-total absence of the AU in mediation efforts for various disputes across Africa, Turkey’s influence has grown stronger in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan.

Meanwhile, the UAE appears open to Turkish intervention. In late December, the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement welcoming Turkey’s “diplomatic efforts” to “resolve the ongoing crisis in Sudan.”

Wednesday, Jan. 15: Mozambique inaugurates its new president, Daniel Chapo, of the ruling Frelimo party amid ongoing protests of alleged election rigging.

The U.N. Security Council is scheduled to review sanctions and a panel of experts report on Libya.

Tuesday, Jan. 21: The Security Council is set to have an open debate on countering terrorism in Africa.

Somalia’s president visits Ethiopia. Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed have agreed to restore full diplomatic relations. It followed a surprise visit by Mohamud to Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa on Saturday after a Turkish-brokered peace deal last month resolved a yearlong dispute. Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland last year on port access but will now seek an agreement with Somalia.

U.S. returns laundered money. The United States agreed Friday to return to Nigeria nearly $53 million in assets seized from former Nigerian Oil Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke, who faces corruption charges in the country. Alison-Madueke served as oil minister from 2010 to 2015 under former President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration.

She was arrested in London in 2015 on charges of accepting financial bribes for awarding lucrative gas and oil contracts and has been on bail since, awaiting extradition. In August 2023, U.K. authorities charged Alison-Madueke with corruption—including the use of bribe money to pay private school fees in London. (Britain’s private education sector is a key destination for illicit investments in the United Kingdom from corrupt Nigerian elites.)

Power outage in Sudan. Port Sudan is without electricity on Monday after a drone attack hit a major hydroelectric facility—the Merowe Dam—which Sudan’s army blamed on the RSF. The latest attack came just days after the army recaptured a town and the capital of Al-Jazira state. “Sanctioning the group’s leader, and not his sponsor, will probably have little effect in forcing the UAE to sever its relationship with the RSF,” Nesrine Malik wrote this week in the Guardian about U.S. sanctions on the RSF.

Chad’s ostensible democracy. Chad’s ruling party won a two-thirds parliamentary majority in the Dec. 29 elections, according to provisional results released on Saturday. President Mahamat Idriss Deby’s party, the Patriotic Salvation Movement, secured 124 of the 188 seats in the National Assembly, in an election widely denounced as a “charade” and largely boycotted by opposition parties.

On Saturday, France handed a second military base back to Chad within an agreement to withdraw its troops by the end of January. The handover comes days after a storming of the presidential palace, which authorities said was a foiled “attempt at destabilization.” About 18 assailants and one soldier were killed during the attack.

Ethiopia launched its first stock exchange in 50 years on Friday as part of wide-ranging market reforms to Africa’s second-most populous nation. The private Wegagen Bank was the first to be listed on the Ethiopian Securities Exchange, which was shuttered in 1974 after a socialist military takeover. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed intends to next float 10 percent of state-owned Ethio Telecom to raise some $234 million. Ethiopia wants to list at least 50 companies within five or six years to attract foreign pension fund investors. Abiy’s ambitious goal is to secure $27 billion in investment, equivalent to 16 percent of Ethiopia’s GDP, from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, China, and the UAE.

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Africa’s overlooked independence-era heroine. For BBC Africa, Wedaeli Chibelushi revisits Andrée Blouin’s autobiography, My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, first published in 1983 and rereleased this month.

Blouin, born in the French-occupied Central African Republic (then Ubangi-Shari), played a key role in African independence movements during the 1950s and 1960s. She advised the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba; Ghana’s first head of state, Kwame Nkrumah; as well as Guinea’s Sékou Touré and Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella. She died in 1986, disappointed that African freedom remained suppressed. “It is not the outsiders who have damaged Africa the most, but the mutilated will of the people and the selfishness of some of our own leaders,” Blouin wrote.

Nigeria’s bombing of citizens. The Dec. 25 bombing of Nigerians by its own army makes Blouin’s remarks all the more poignant. In HumAngle, Abiodun Jamiu interviews residents in the Silame area of Sokoto state, northern Nigeria, where an airstrike targeting terrorists mistakenly killed at least 10 civilians. The Nigerian military frequently bombs innocent citizens accidentally using U.S.-supplied weapons. On Monday, the Nigerian Air Force launched an investigation into another accidental bombing of civilians in Zamfara, which killed at least 16 people on Saturday.