This paper examines the relative importance of the global and regional markets for financial markets in developing countries, particularly during the US financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. Specifically, we examine the way in which the degree of regional (seven African markets combined), global (China, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US), commodity (gold and petroleum), and nominal effective exchange rate (Euro and US dollar) spillovers to individual African countries evolved during the two crises through the econometric method introduced by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012). We find that African markets are most severely affected by spillovers from global markets and only modestly from commodity and currency markets. Conversely, regional spillovers within Africa are smaller than global ones, and hence, African markets are insulated from global crises. We also find that the aggregated spillover effects of European countries to the African markets exceeded the corresponding effects of the US, even in the wake of the US financial crisis. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.