Africa’s Dictators Are on a Killing Spree. Who Is Giving Them Cover?

This year has, already, been a bloody one for dissenters across the African continent.

On January 20, King Mswati III of the southern African nation of Eswatini, said that “people should not shed tears and complain” about the extrajudicial murders of political activists in the country, because the activists “started the violence first.” Just hours later, my friend Thulani Rudolph Maseko, a human-rights lawyer and democracy activist, was shot and killed at close range in his living room.