Zimbabwean constitutional lawyer Brian Kagoro was removed from a Nairobi-bound flight in Addis Ababa on Tuesday and prevented from reboarding, despite a Kenyan High Court order protecting his right to enter the country.

The Pan African Lawyers Union said Kagoro, 51, had boarded the flight when security personnel took him off the aircraft and questioned him. He was then barred from reboarding, making it impossible to complete the journey.

“The circumstances under which he was removed from the aircraft, questioned and prevented from continuing his journey are deeply concerning, particularly given the existing court order directing that he be granted entry into Kenya,” PALU said. It added that his legal team was seeking urgent clarification from the authorities and taking steps to enforce the order.

Kagoro, who is Africa Director at the Open Society Foundations and a co-founder of the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, was detained for more than ten hours at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on 22 February this year, declared persona non grata and flown back to Johannesburg. Kenyan officials accused him of involvement in a foreign-funded network seeking to coordinate anti-government protests. He denied the allegations, saying he had travelled for a family event and a speaking engagement.

PALU, the East Africa Law Society, the Law Society of Kenya and the Kenyan Section of the International Commission of Jurists filed a constitutional petition challenging the deportation on due process and rule-of-law grounds. In June the Constitutional and Human Rights Division of the High Court issued conservatory orders protecting Kagoro against further arbitrary denial of entry, pending determination of that petition. Tuesday’s trip was made under that order.

Kenyan civil society organisations had planned to receive him at the airport in a public show of solidarity, with a press briefing to follow. Both were cancelled.

More than 20 civil society organisations, professional associations and business figures have since demanded that the government comply with the order and account publicly for what happened, including whether Kenyan officials asked for or caused his removal in Addis Ababa.

“A court order binds every public officer and state agency. Immigration or national security powers cannot lawfully be used, directly or indirectly, to defeat it,” their statement said. They noted the incident fell on the International Day of Democracy.

Sources: Nairobi News; The Eastleigh Voice; Nehanda Radio; Kenyans.co.ke; statement by the Pan African Lawyers Union.

Cassava Technologies, the pan-African digital infrastructure group founded and chaired by Zimbabwean businessman Strive Masiyiwa, has signed two agreements in Cairo that put it at the centre of Egypt’s push to build its own artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The deals were announced on 8 September alongside Vodafone Business and the Egyptian industrial group Elsewedy Electric, in the presence of Egypt’s minister of communications and information technology. Trade publications TechAfrica News and Connecting Africa both reported the partnerships as two separate arrangements rather than a single transaction.

The first establishes Africa Data Centres Egypt, a joint venture bringing together Vodafone Business’s cloud and enterprise services, Elsewedy Electric’s energy and construction capacity, and Cassava’s experience running data centres elsewhere on the continent. The facility is to open with 20 megawatts of capacity over its first three years, with a stated path to 200MW.

The second is a partnership between Vodafone Business and Cassava alone, to build what the two companies describe as Egypt’s first sovereign AI data centre, using Nvidia technology and offering graphics processing unit capacity as a service. The stated aim is to let Egyptian organisations train and run AI systems without sending sensitive data outside the country.

Egypt’s communications minister said the project should draw about US$200 million in foreign direct investment in its first phase, rising to roughly US$1 billion once the targeted capacity is complete, and create up to 200 direct and around 2,000 indirect jobs. Those projections come from the minister rather than from the companies themselves.

For Zimbabwean readers the significance lies less in Egypt than in reach. Cassava, which was spun out of Masiyiwa’s Econet Group, said Egypt was a strategic market for wider plans to build digital infrastructure across Africa and the Middle East — pushing a Zimbabwean-founded company’s footprint well beyond southern Africa.

Sources: TechAfrica News; Connecting Africa; TelcoTitans.

The map most of us grew up with tells a quiet lie. On the Mercator projection — the one on classroom walls, in atlases and behind every TV weather presenter since the 16th century — Greenland looks about the size of Africa. In reality Africa is roughly 14 times larger.

On Friday the United Nations General Assembly voted to do something about it. A resolution put forward by Togo and backed by African Union member states passed with 164 votes in favour. The United States was the only country to vote against; Serbia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine abstained.

The resolution encourages governments, schools and international institutions to move from Mercator to equal-area projections such as Equal Earth, a map developed in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny that shows land masses at their true relative size. It is not legally binding — nobody is banning Mercator — but it puts the weight of the UN behind a campaign that has been building for two years.

What it means for a Zimbabwean in Leeds, Luton or Slough

Take the two countries this readership knows best. Zimbabwe covers 390,757 square kilometres. The United Kingdom covers 243,610. Zimbabwe is 1.6 times the size of the country most of the diaspora now calls home — yet on the Mercator map on your child’s classroom wall, Britain, sitting far north of the equator, is stretched, while Zimbabwe, near the tropics, is squeezed.

Africa as a whole covers 30.37 million square kilometres — enough to hold the United States, China, India and most of Europe with room to spare. On Mercator it looks like an also-ran.

That distortion is what the Correct the Map campaign, run by Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, set out to fix. The African Union endorsed the campaign in August 2025; Friday’s vote takes it to the world.

Why the United States said no

Washington’s delegation called the resolution a distraction that promoted an “ideological agenda”. Campaigners answered that a map which shrinks an entire continent is itself an ideology — one that has shaped how Africa is perceived in media, education and policy for 450 years.

France co-sponsored the resolution. Its foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said of the distortions that hand Western countries disproportionate visual weight: “The time has come to correct them.”

What changes now

Nothing overnight. The resolution asks institutions to switch; it cannot make them. Togo says it hopes to have new geography materials in its schools by the end of 2026. Africa No Filter says it wants accurate maps in schools, textbooks, newsrooms, businesses and on the digital platforms billions of people use every day.

The practical test will be whether Google, Apple, the BBC and school publishers follow — and whether readers push them to.

Three things you can do this week

1. Ask your child’s school which projection is on the wall. If it is Mercator, point them to the Equal Earth wall maps, which are public domain and free to download and print (equal-earth.com).
2. See your own country at true size. Use the AiZ comparison tool above to put Zimbabwe next to the UK, France or Germany.
3. Put the real map on your wall. Our “Zimbabwe is bigger than Britain” print is on sale now — real borders, an equal-area projection and the exact figures set out above, printed to order in the UK/EU. Get the print — or see Nigeria and Kenya too. If you would rather print your own, the Equal Earth wall maps are public domain and free to download at full resolution.

AllInZimbabwe uses the Equal Earth projection in all its maps from today.

Go deeper: How big is Africa really? Every African country next to its European equivalent — our permanent reference page, with the full figures and the interactive comparison tool.