5 cases from Africa
Convicted: Anna Vadimovna Sorokin
When Rachel DeLoache Williams returned from a luxury week at the Surf Club in Marrakech in the spring of 2017, she was $62,000 poorer. Her friend had promised the wire transfer was coming. It never came. The friend was Anna Sorokin, the 26-year-old daughter of a Russian truck driver who had spent four years convincing Manhattan's elite that she controlled a 60-million-euro European trust fund. Operating under the alias Anna Delvey, she defrauded banks, luxury hotels, and private individuals of approximately $275,000, forged financial documents, bounced checks, and nearly secured a $22 million bank loan using fabricated paperwork. When she was arrested, tried, and convicted in 2019, she hired a courtroom stylist and showed up in Saint Laurent and Victoria Beckham, making international headlines for her courtroom looks as much as her crimes. Netflix paid $320,000 for her story. The state took most of it under the Son of Sam law. She was released from prison, immediately detained by ICE, held for nineteen months, then released to house arrest in a 470-square-foot East Village apartment. She started selling art and made $340,000. She appeared on Dancing With the Stars wearing a bedazzled ankle monitor. Her deportation case remains unresolved. Anna Delvey, it turns out, is very hard to get rid of.
Convicted: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was a Rwandan politician who served as the Minister for Family Welfare and the Advancement of Women. She was tried and convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for inciting troops and militia to carry out rape during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This makes her the first woman to be convicted of genocide by the ICTR and the first woman ever to be convicted of genocidal rape. In June 2011, she was sentenced to life imprisonment on seven charges.
Convicted: Daisy Louisa C. de Melker
Daisy Louisa C. de Melker, commonly known as Daisy de Melker, was a South African nurse accused of poisoning two of her husbands with strychnine to claim their life insurance. However, she was only found guilty of poisoning her only son with arsenic, the reason for which remains unclear. De Melker was the second woman in South African criminal history to be executed.
Accused: Ranavalona I (born Rabodonandrianampoinimerina; also known as Ramavo, Ranavalo-Manjaka I, and Ranavalona reniny)
In a single year, 1838, an estimated 100,000 people died by her command, forced to swallow poison from the tangena nut and then prove their innocence by vomiting chicken skin. She ruled Madagascar for thirty-three years, expelled every Christian missionary on the island, mounted the skulls of approximately twenty-one Europeans on pikes along her coastline, and oversaw a population collapse that cut her island's people nearly in half. Her name was Ranavalona I, and for three decades she was the most feared sovereign in the Indian Ocean world. Western contemporaries called her the 'Mad Monarch of Madagascar,' the 'Bloody Mary of Madagascar,' the 'Female Caligula.' Revisionist historians see something else entirely: a pragmatic anti-colonial strategist who kept her island free from European domination at any cost. Both portraits carry weight. Born a commoner around 1778, she seized absolute power through a palace coup, eliminated the legitimate royal heir and his entire family, and never looked back. She died quietly, in her own bed, in her own palace, at approximately eighty-three years of age. France did not colonize Madagascar until 1896, thirty-five years after her death. The full story of her reign is one of blood, genius, and the terrible arithmetic of survival at the height of empire.
Convicted: Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was a South African politician and anti-apartheid activist who was convicted of kidnapping and fraud. In 1991, she was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault in relation to the death of 14-year-old activist Stompie Seipei. In 2003, she was convicted of fraud and theft related to a loan scheme.
