Kennedy Johnson was 15 years old when she gave birth to a baby girl in a Detroit foster home for teen moms, in February 1996. Twenty-five years later, when Johnson found herself in northern Ghana being made a queen, she couldn’t quite believe where life had led her.

In front of an adoring crowd in Tamale, the largest city in northern Ghana, Johnson was given her honorary title of “Zosimli Naa” in October 2021. It was conferred on her by the Dakpema, Abdul-Razik Salifu, a local spiritual leader, with Zosimli Naa roughly translating as “Friendship Queen” — effectively making her the Dakpema’s head of development in the area.

Thousands of miles from home, riding on a horse and dressed in traditional royal attire, Johnson would have been forgiven for thinking she was in a dream.

‘I had to abandon a lot of my childhood goals’

Johnson’s journey began as a young mother in 1990s Detroit, a time she remembers as “a bit of a challenge.” It’s an understatement. She recalled a relative dropping her off, a pregnant 15-year-old, at the foster home, and promising to pick her up when the child was born. They never returned.

“I had to abandon a lot of my childhood goals,” she said. “I just had to dig deep and find some sort of strength.”

When her daughter D’Kiya was 11, Johnson started taking her on trips abroad — first to the Bahamas, then Hong Kong, then South America. The pair fell in love with seeing the world, and Johnson began documenting her trips online “to show people that minorities can travel.”

“I would meet other people in my age group, but not my demographic,” she said. “I was going places and people would stop me and be like: ‘Beyoncé!’ They would automatically assume I was in the entertainment industry and not taking a holiday, because people of color weren’t really traveling like that.”

Years later, once D’Kiya had left home, Johnson took a DNA test that determined that she had Nigerian and Ghanaian heritage. For the first time, her travels took her to West Africa. Her arrival there — which she describes as a “return” — “felt like a huge sigh of relief,” she said.

Soon after her first journey, Johnson founded Green Book Travel in 2018, a company that organizes trips to West Africa for members of the diaspora. Named after the annual travel guide that provided Black people with information to keep them safe in Jim Crow America, Green Book Travel takes people to historically significant locations including sites of deportation in the transatlantic slave trade.

The trips immediately attracted hundreds of people, Johnson said, and her travels to West Africa became more frequent. On one trip, she found herself physically compelled — her “body was on fire” — to visit northern Ghana.

On her second day in the region, she was asked to pay a customary visit to the Dakpema and his elders in Tamale. She quickly realized that this was no ordinary meeting.

“They started consulting amongst each other,” she said, “and then they said ‘we want you to go to prepare to be the Queen.’”

Becoming royalty

Initially, Johnson did not understand the significance of the offer. But when she recounted the meeting to a village elder, he nearly crashed his car.

Four months later, with her daughter and best friend alongside her, Johnson was “enskinned” in Tamale — officially recognized as Friendship Queen — before being introduced to the community in a parade at the annual Damba festival, in which she rode on a horse to cheers from the crowd.

“It was overwhelming because the crowd was so big,” said Kendall Jones, Johnson’s best friend who was by her side at the event. “It was my first time ever experiencing having people chase your car down as you’re driving away.”

The role of Friendship Queen comes with an elevated status and practical responsibilities to the community. Johnson works together with elders of the Dagbon Kingdom, which dates back to the 14th century and comprises around five million people, to run positive initiatives in Tamale, where she now lives. So far, together with her charitable foundation Kith and Kin, she has worked to provide clean water, sanitary products, and shoes to the community, and is working on a scheme to support orphans. Locally, she is revered.

“You are put on a pedestal,” she said, “There are all the formalities — the bowing, the ‘Her Royal Majesty,’ making sure that you’re taken care of.”

From Detroit to Tamale

It’s a difficult adjustment for someone unfamiliar with celebrity. But to Johnson, the role comes naturally. “She represents peace, unity, hope and the connection of our past to the future,” said the Dakpema, who was instantly impressed by Johnson upon her first visit to his palace. “She is very popular within Dagbon and highly respected. The people admire her.”

Kennedy Johnson is not the first Zosimli Naa to be enskinned by the Dakpema. Dr Susan Herlin, an academic from Kentucky, had her title conferred in 1995 and died in 2014. Seven years later, Johnson became the next person to receive the title from the Dakpema Palace.

“We felt she was the right choice based on her qualities and her connection to both the Dagbon Kingdom and the diaspora,” said the Dakpema. “By having a Queen who embodies both our rich cultural heritage and strong ties to the world, we open the door to cultural exchange, investment and global awareness.”

In November 2024, Johnson was granted full Ghanaian citizenship. In the same month, she was also included in the Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD) class of 2024 top 100 futurists and innovators.

“It just unfolded to something beyond my dreams,” she said.

‘Swagger Queen’

Johnson is especially popular with the young people of Tamale, who call her “The Swagger Queen,” due to her striking fashion sense that makes full use of colorful Ghanaian fabrics.

But no one admires her more than her own daughter, now 28. “It’s the story of a person with everything against them being blessed with everything from the universe,” D’Kiya said. “You can say you’ve seen everything when you’ve seen your mom grow up with a lack of family, and then grow to gain millions of people as her family.”

As daughter of the Zosimli Naa, D’Kiya is now considered a princess. “I remember growing up and thinking, maybe one day I’ll play a Disney princess,” recalled D’Kiya, known by her rapper name Stunna Dior. “It’s still a hard thing to conceptualize.”

And what would the teenage Kennedy Johnson in Detroit think of the current Queen in Tamale? “I think she would feel inspired,” Johnson said. “If the young version met the current me, she would know to keep going and to keep pushing.”

A former South Korean defense minister was formally arrested Wednesday (local time) over his alleged collusion with President Yoon Suk Yeol and others in imposing martial law last week, as authorities investigate whether their acts amount to rebellion.

Martial law, the first in more than 40 years, lasted only about six hours but has triggered a domestic firestorm and large street protests. Yoon and his associates face criminal investigations and impeachment attempts. The Justice Ministry has banned Yoon and eight others from leaving the country as authorities see them as key suspects in the martial law case. It’s the first time that a sitting president in South Korea has received a travel ban.

The Seoul Central District Court said it approved an arrest warrant for former Defense Minister Kim Yong Hyun on charges of rebellion and abuse of power.

Kim has been detained since Sunday. Prosecutors have up to 20 days to determine whether to indict him. A conviction on the charge of rebellion carries a maximum death sentence.

Kim became the first person arrested over the case. He has been accused of recommending martial law to Yoon and sending troops to the National Assembly to block lawmakers from voting on it. Enough lawmakers eventually managed to enter a parliament chamber and unanimously rejected Yoon’s decree, forcing the Cabinet to lift it before daybreak on Dec. 4.

Kim said in a statement Tuesday that he “deeply apologizes for causing significant anxiety and inconvenience.” He said all responsibility for the imposition of martial law rests solely with him and pleaded for leniency for soldiers deployed to enforce it, saying they were only following his order.

Prosecutors reportedly accuse Kim of playing a key role in a rebellion and committing abuse of power by staging a riot to disrupt the constitution in collaboration with Yoon and other military and police officers. Prosecutors’ offices in Seoul couldn’t immediately confirm the reports.

The opposition-controlled parliament passed a bill Tuesday to appoint an independent special counsel to investigate Yoon and other top military officials over the martial law introduction. The main opposition Democratic Party had advocated for a special counsel investigation, arguing that public prosecutors cannot be trusted to conduct a thorough investigation of Yoon, a former prosecutor-general.

During a parliamentary hearing Tuesday, Kwak Jong-keun, commander of the Army Special Warfare Command whose troops were sent to parliament, testified that he received direct instructions from Kim Yong Hyun to obstruct lawmakers from entering the National Assembly’s main chamber. Kwak said the purpose of Kim’s instructions was to prevent the 300-member parliament from gathering the 150 votes necessary to overturn Yoon’s martial law order.

Kwak said Yoon later called him directly and asked for the troops to “quickly destroy the door and drag out the lawmakers who are inside.” Kwak said he discussed Yoon’s order with the commander at the scene and that they concluded there was nothing that could be done, ruling out the possibility of threatening the lawmakers by shooting blanks or cutting off electricity.

At the same hearing, senior officer Kim Dae-woo of the military’s counterintelligence agency said his commander, Yeo In-hyung, asked him if an army bunker in Seoul had space to detain politicians and other figures after martial law was imposed. Yeo is considered a close associate of Kim Yong Hyun. Last week, Hong Jang-won, a deputy director of the country’s spy agency, said Yoon ordered him to help Yeo’s command to detain some of his political rivals but he ignored the president’s order.

Kwak and Yeo are among those who face opposition-raised rebellion charges along with Yoon and Kim, and the Defense Ministry suspended them last week.

Opposition parties and many experts say the martial law decree was unconstitutional. They say a president is by law allowed to declare martial law only during “wartime, war-like situations or other comparable national emergency states” and South Korea wasn’t in such a situation. They argue that deploying troops to seal the National Assembly to suspend its political activities amounted to rebellion because the South Korean Constitution doesn’t allow a president to use the military to suspend parliament in any situation.

In his martial law announcement, the conservative Yoon stressed a need to rebuild the country by eliminating “shameless North Korea followers and anti-state forces,” a reference to his liberal rivals who control parliament.

Yoon avoided impeachment on Saturday after most governing party lawmakers boycotted a floor vote in the National Assembly.

The Democratic Party said it would prepare for a new vote on Yoon’s impeachment on Saturday. The party on Tuesday submitted motions to impeach Yoon’s police chief and justice minister as well. It pushed to impeach Kim Yong Hyun and the safety minister, but they resigned before parliament took a vote.

If Yoon is impeached, his presidential powers would be suspended until the Constitutional Court decides whether to restore his powers or remove him from office. If it voted for removal, a new presidential election would be required.

The collapse of the Assad regime has prompted a punishing military response from Israel, which has launched airstrikes at military targets across Syria and deployed ground troops both into and beyond a demilitarized buffer zone for the first time in 50 years.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a rare press conference on Monday evening that the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime was “a new and dramatic chapter.”

“The collapse of the Syrian regime is a direct result of the severe blows with which we have struck Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran,” he said. “The axis has not yet disappeared but as I promised – we are changing the face of the Middle East.”

Israeli officials have reveled in the downfall of Assad, a staunch ally of Iran who allowed his country to be used as a resupply route for Hezbollah in Lebanon. But they also fear what could come from radical Islamists governing Syria, which borders Israel in the occupied Golan Heights.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told journalists on Monday that Israel was bombing Syrian military facilities housing chemical weapons stocks and long-range missiles to prevent them from falling “into the hands of extremists.”

“With regard to what will be in the future, I’m not a prophet,” he said. “It is important right now to take all necessary steps in the context of the security of Israel.”

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Tuesday that the navy destroyed the Syrian naval fleet overnight, hailing it as “a great success.” An AFP photographer showed large scale destruction of military vessels at the Syrian naval port in Latakia.

Images taken by an AFP journalist at Mezzeh Air Base southwest of Damascus also showed destroyed Syrian military helicopters.

Meanwhile, several Arab states have accused Israel of exploiting instability in Syria to execute a land grab.

The Arab League, a grouping of Arab nations, said Israel was “taking advantage of the developments in the internal situation in Syria,” and Egypt said its moves “constitute an exploitation of the state of fluidity and vacuum… to occupy more Syrian territories.”

‘Beyond the buffer zone’

Nadav Shoshani, a spokesperson for the Israeli military, denied that forces were “advancing toward” Damascus, but acknowledged they were operating in Syria beyond the buffer zone. The Israeli military has insisted that it “is not interfering with the internal events in Syria.”

Katz said in a statement on Monday that Israel was creating a “security zone free of heavy strategic weapons and terrorist infrastructures” in southern Syria, “beyond the buffer zone.”

Israeli ground forces entered Syrian territory after Netanyahu on Sunday ordered the military to seize that demilitarized “area of separation” between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the rest of Syria. That zone was established in 1974, after Israeli forces – responding to a Syrian attack – captured the Golan Heights in 1967. Israel annexed the territory in 1981, but it is still considered to be occupied Syria under international law.

Israeli officials have refused to give details on how far Israeli forces will advance, or how long they will stay there. Danny Dannon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the Security Council in a letter on Monday that his country had “deployed temporarily in few points.” He said they were “limited and temporary measures to counter any further threat to its citizens.”

Eyad Kourdi and Dana Karni contributed to this report.

The sound of celebratory gunfire filled the streets of Damascus in the hours following the collapse of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

But the jubilant scenes at the weekend that greeted the end of half a century of tyranny could not mask the scale of the challenge facing the victorious Islamist rebels whose lightning advance on the Syrian capital captured the world’s attention.

Those rebels – led by the group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) – must now try to unite a country cleaved apart by more than a decade of civil war, one in which dozens of heavily armed militias and remnants of the old regime linger.

The chaos that followed in the hours after the capital’s fall gave a stark reminder of the enormity of that task.

At least 28 people were killed by that celebratory gunfire, the Syrian health minister told Al-Arabiya news channel. Meanwhile, civilians broke into Assad’s palaces, looted shops and stole bags of cash from the central bank – prompting the rebels to declare a 13-hour curfew.

By nightfall, other than the occasional stray bullet, the silence was punctuated only by the sound of airstrikes. Israel has since said it struck “strategic weapons systems, residual chemical weapons capabilities and long-ranging rockets” that belonged to Assad’s army.

The rebels had dreamt of this day for years, but even they appear to have been surprised by the speed and ease of their advance.

Now their rush is to keep the lid on Syria’s Pandora’s box, avoid a power vacuum and prevent the sort of chaos that almost inevitably arises when a 50-year regime topples in a matter of days.

Assad planned to ‘abandon the government’

For now, it is not even entirely clear what form the next government will take.

After the capture of Damascus, the rebels instructed Assad’s Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali to continue his duties alongside his cabinet until a transitional team is assigned.

But Jalali had few answers on the future of the city’s governance when he spoke to Sky News Arabia.

His colleagues seemed equally unsure.

The vacuum facing the rebels could even be seen as a parting gift from Assad.

Assad, who has not issued any public statements since the rebel advance began two weeks ago, appeared to have planned to “abandon his government, his people and his country and leave it in chaos” if the situation deteriorated, his prime minister said. “Perhaps to send a message to the people that ‘it is either me, or chaos’.”

Jalali said he had spoken to Assad hours before the president fled to Moscow, to express concern about the rebels’ movements, but the president was indifferent.

“When I told him the situation is critical, people are fleeing Homs toward the coast and the armed forces have collapsed… his response was ‘we’ll attend to it tomorrow,’” the prime minister said. “I was surprised.”

From Al Qaeda to a statesman

For now, the answers to the country’s immediate future appear to lie with the leader of the HTS rebel coalition, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (real name, Ahmad Al Sharaa), who met Jalali, the outgoing prime minister, on Monday morning.

Jolani’s arrival in Damascus Saturday marked his first return to the city where he was raised since leaving two decades ago to join Al Qaeda’s fight against US forces in Iraq. For four years, he had led Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, the Al-Nusra Front but he eventually split from it, declared war on its rival ISIS, and orchestrated the killing of its leader.

The group he leads is among the more organized of the many rebel factions who took part in the offensive, having spent the past few years governing 4 million people in Idlib through a semi-technocratic body called the National Salvation Government. It has already mobilized its politicians to govern the major cities – including Syria’s second-largest, Aleppo – that it captured last week, and has deployed its own police forces to secure the streets of Damascus.

“Keep in mind that Idlib is small with no resources, we were able to do a lot in the past,” Al-Jolani told the prime minister in a briefing on the incoming transitional team.

Still, the Islamist group has never ruled over a large territory with diverse religious and ethnic minorities, numerous armed rebel factions, and scarce resources.

“Idlib is a much smaller territory to govern, and three-fourths of the population are displaced people so there’s a lot of UN and NGO assistance in providing aid,” said Aaron Y. Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute. “HTS only had to focus on a quarter of the population.”

Even in Idlib, Jolani spent years trying to eliminate political threats, while those he governed protested over living conditions and unfair detentions.

He now seeks to create a transitional governing body for 25 million Syrians, and an additional 6 million refugees who fled the country during the civil war.

As if that were not enough, he must at the same time deal with dozens of Turkey-backed militant groups who might refuse to be sidelined in the transitional period, and a powerful armed Kurdish group that controls large territories in northeast Syria.

Then there are the powerful Iran-backed militias in neighboring Iraq to consider.

‘Anyone is better than Assad’

For instance, minority religious groups like Alawites, Ismailis, Druze and Christians, will have to reckon with the potential application of a strict interpretation of Sharia law, which the rebels have said they will seek to implement.

Human rights groups are also concerned, with some having accused HTS and other anti-regime groups of torturing and abusing dissidents in areas under their control – including in the northwestern Idlib, western Homs, and Aleppo governorates.

Even so, there are many in Damascus who like Ranim, a 45-year-old mother-of-two, are cautiously optimistic, saying “anyone is better than Assad.”

Life had not yet returned to normal, Ranim conceded, but she was willing to wait and see.

“There are people worried about Islamic rule and the rebel factions, but in my opinion if we’ve waited through 50 years of Assad’s rule, why not give a chance to those who gave their lives and exerted effort to liberate us,” she said.