São Tomé and Príncipe — Uninhabited islands until people were brought to grow sugar
São Tomé and Príncipe has no native population: the archipelago was completely uninhabited until the Portuguese arrived in the 15th century. …
Cameroon — One nation, two legal systems, and the cost of merging them
Cameroon merged from a British region and a French region, so it has two parallel legal systems within the same country.…
Equatorial Guinea — Africa's only Spanish-speaking nation, and the widest gap between GDP and living standards
Equatorial Guinea has among the highest per capita GDP in Africa but its human development indicators are far lower. …
Chad — Where a lake that fed thirty million people has shrunk within a lifetime
Lake Chad has contracted dramatically since the 1960s. It is one of the most striking environmental changes on the planet, and …
DRC — The country with minerals in every phone, and an absolute ban on dual citizenship
The Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies most of the world's cobalt — the metal in nearly every lithium battery. The country also …
Angola — Where migration reversed: Europeans coming to Africa for work
In the early 2010s, tens of thousands of Portuguese came to Angola for work while their economy struggled. This was a …
Republic of the Congo — The smaller country across the river, and a lesson in running out of oil before preparing
The Republic of the Congo is the smaller of the two countries with the same name. Its economy is extremely dependent on oil, and production is declining — …
Gabon — The first country paid for NOT cutting down forests
Gabon has kept nearly 90% of its territory as forest, and was among the first countries to receive international payments based on …
Central African Republic — Africa's first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, then abandoned it
In 2022, the Central African Republic declared Bitcoin legal tender — the second country in the world. Less than two years later,…