Eskom is one of the biggest power utilities in the world, providing 90% of supply in South Africa, the most industrialised country in Africa.

The firm generates almost all its electricity from coal, an abundant resource in South Africa.

However, it has also been plagued by a number of mismanagement and corruption scandals over the years, which have contributed to its serious financial issues.

Last week, after the country's biggest power outage in more than a decade, the state-owned firm had to implement some of the most far-reaching planned blackouts in years.

Scheduled blackouts are designed to prevent a total collapse of an overstretched power grid. Similar measures were put in place in February this year, as well as in 2018, 2015 and 2008.

Ratings agencies often cite the country's frequent power outages as one of the main risks to the South African economy.

German-born evangelist Reinhard Bonnke, who attracted massive crowds in Africa during decades of preaching, is being mourned by millions of Christians across the continent following his death aged 79. Kenyan writer Jesse Masai looks back at his influence.

With comparisons ranging from British "Prince of Preachers" Charles Spurgeon to American televangelist Billy Graham, Bonnke's status as the father of modern-day crusade preaching and healing in Africa is not in dispute.

Across the continent, huge week-long church rallies are now commonplace, characterised by mass mobilisation, big tents, colourful podiums, sophisticated public address systems, local language translators and, in some instances, evangelists who mimic Bonnke's oratory and stage antics, including how he firmly gripped microphones. //

Dr Mutua avers that while Bonnke may have inspired other teachers, pastors, apostles and prophets in Africa and beyond, the evangelist's work remains unfinished.

And while the Associated Press news agency reported in 2014 that Bonnke was living in a $3m (£2.3m) apartment near Palm Beach, Florida, Dr Mutua argues the evangelist was committed to transparency.

However, Prof Esther Mombo from the university's Center for Christian-Muslim Relations in Eastleigh (CCMRE), says that Bonnke's impact on Africa is complex and may take researchers some time to properly evaluate.

Established in 2010, the CCMRE has been at the heart of several attempts to build inter-religious relationships between Muslims and Christians in the African context.

Prof Mombo argues that Bonnke's preaching did not always foster peaceful co-existence, but rather rivalry and hatred.

"The people who suffered through such utterances were the ordinary people. There are also those who were exploited," she says.

"His healing ministries appeared to be strange, and to an extent a circus. Yet I am sure that through his ministry, some people met Christ and grew in faith."

Bonnke held a farewell gospel campaign in 2017 in Nigeria, after which he stepped down as the organisation's leader because of poor health.

Air Peace, a fascinating airline based in Nigeria, is launching long haul flights to Sharjah. They even have a first class cabin. How cool is that?

Air Peace, a privatly owned Nigerian airline, plans to launch flights to Houston, London, Guangzhou, and more. Here are the details.

The founder of Air Peace, a private Nigerian airline, has been indicted for bank fraud and money laundering, in a scheme that involves US bank accounts.

He persuaded one of the nuns who had the disease to fly with him to Kinshasa. He took blood samples before she died and sent them to Belgium, where they had an electron microscope to try to identify the culprit. Scientists there and in the United States saw this was a new virus that caused hemorrhagic fever.

They named it Ebola, after a river near the village.

The discovery, says Muyembe, was thanks to a "consortium of research."

But Google "Who discovered Ebola?" and you get a bunch of names — all of them white Western males. Dr. Jean Jacques Muyembe has been written out of history.

"Yes, but it is ..." he pauses. He takes a breath and laughs, looking for the right way to respond.

"Yes. It is not correct," he says. "It is not correct." //

When asked if he feels responsible for writing Muyembe out of history, Piot pauses.

"I think that's a fair comment," he says. "But my book was not an attempt to write the history of Ebola, but more my personal experience."

Piot says at the time of that first Ebola outbreak, African scientists were simply excluded. White scientists — with a colonial mentality — parachuted in, took samples, wrote papers that were published in the West and took all of the credit.

But things are changing, he says. Muyembe, for example, is finally starting to get his due. He was recently given a patent for pioneering the first treatment for Ebola and he has received several international awards, including the Royal Society Africa Prize and, just this year, the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize.

"That reflects, I think, the [change in] power relations in global health and science in general," he said.

During this outbreak, Muyembe has also made a decision many thought unthinkable even a few years ago. He decided that all of the blood samples collected during this Ebola epidemic will stay in Congo. Anyone who wants to study this outbreak will have to come to his institute. //

In 1995, during another outbreak, he wondered whether antibodies developed by Ebola survivors could be siphoned from their blood and used to treat new cases. So he injected Ebola patients with the blood of survivors, taking inspiration from a practice used before sophisticated advances in vaccine-making.

"We did eight patients and seven survived," he says.

The medical establishment wrote him off. He didn't have a control group, they told him. But Muyembe knew that in this village, Ebola was killing 81% of people. Just this year, however, that science became the foundation of what is now proven to be the first effective treatment against Ebola, saving about 70% of patients.
His biggest legacy, he says, won't be that he helped to discover Ebola or a cure for it. It'll be that if another young Congolese scientist finds himself with an interesting blood sample, he'll be able to investigate it right here in Congo.

"But if this idea was accepted by scientists, we [could have] saved a lot of people, a lot of lives," he says.

Colophospermum mopane

mopani tree

The Krio people of Sierra Leone are partly descended from former enslaved Africans who fought for their British in the American War of Independence, in exchange for promises of freedom.

After the American victory in 1783, they fled with the British to the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, from where they were sent back to Africa, and the British colony of Sierra Leone. This had been founded for freed slaves, even before the slave trade was abolished in 1807.

Others who make up Sierra Leone's Krio population include descendants of black Londoners and Maroons - escaped slaves who fought against the British in Jamaica - and those who were freed from slave-carrying ships along the Atlantic route, who were all sent to Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown.

An 18th Century Ethiopian crown will finally be returned home after being hidden in a Dutch flat for 21 years.

Ethiopian Sirak Asfaw, who fled to the Netherlands in the late 1970s, discovered the crown in the suitcase of a visitor and realised it was stolen.

The management consultant has protected it until he felt safe to send it back.

"Finally it is the right time to bring back the crown to its owners - and the owners of the crown are all Ethiopians," he told the BBC.

The crown is thought to be one of just 20 in existence. It has depictions of Jesus Christ, God and the Holy Spirit, as well as Jesus' disciples, and was likely gifted to a church by the powerful warlord Welde Sellase hundreds of years ago.

It is currently being stored at a high security facility until it can be safely returned.

• Before independence:

"He was a very nice guy. At that stage, he was not too sure of himself. There were very strong people in Zanu who were not afraid to oppose him. He would never take a decision on his own" - Dumiso Dabengwa

• 1980-90:

"He did everything he could to improve the lives of his people. He wanted education for all. He wanted health for all. He introduced a leadership code limiting Zanu-PF cadres to 50 acres of land" - Wilf Mbanga

• 1990-2000:

"I worked very harmoniously with him and discussed issues. He would let me have my way or we would reach a compromise" - Dumiso Dabengwa

• 2000 - 2017:

"After 2000, he started flexing his muscles. He brought in people who he could influence. Several people were compromised - he held something over them" - Dumiso Dabengwa.

"He has become fabulously wealthy. He is not the person I knew. He changed the moment Sally died [in 1992], when he married a young gold-digger [Grace Mugabe]" - Wilf Mbanga

He allowed Ian Smith, the Rhodesian prime minister who had once declared that black people would not rule the country for 1,000 years and who reportedly personally refused to let Mr Mugabe leave prison for the funeral of his then only son, to remain both an MP and on his farm. //

Mugabe timeline

21 February 1924: Born

1964: Jailed after being convicted of sedition

1973: Becomes Zanu leader

1980: Becomes prime minister of Zimbabwe

1987: Becomes president under new constitution agreed under deal to end Matabeleland massacres

1992: Wife Sally dies

1996: Marries Grace Marufu

2000: Loses referendum, land invasions begin

2002: Wins presidential election amid widespread violence and fraud allegations

2005: Launches Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out Rubbish), which forces 700,000 urban residents from their homes - seen as punishment for opposition supporters

2008: Comes second in election, violence leads his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai to withdraw from run-off

2009: Forms coalition government

2013: Resoundingly re-elected, Tsvangirai returns to opposition

2017: Forced to resign after army seizes power

6 September 2019: Dies in Singapore, which he visits for hospital treatment

In our series of letters from African writers, Ghanaian journalist and former government minister Elizabeth Ohene explains why clock-watching in Ghana is a waste of time.

When Japan's Olympics Minister Yoshitaka Sakurada was forced to make a public apology after arriving three minutes late to a parliamentary meeting, I wondered how many ministers of state here in Ghana thanked God they were not Japanese.

It is accepted practice in Ghana that public officials are late to functions. Indeed, they are expected to be late.

Curiosity got the better of me and I called DHL. Of course, I should have guessed: the sender provides the full name and telephone number of the recipient - once the package arrives, arrangements are made between the recipient and the company about where to take or collect the parcel.

Yours, baffled and increasingly exasperated, of somewhere near a petrol station, opposite the hardware shop, just a few feet past the abandoned container, on the highway leading to the airport, Old Yundum, The Gambia.