Alex Perry

To meet the man with one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, I must pass 10 separate security checkpoints. Five groups of Somali soldiers, three of Ugandan soldiers, one of Somali presidential bodyguards and finally a Ugandan close-protection officer all ask for my pistol. (To general bewilderment, I don’t have one.) They then …

All day a lookout sat in the waiting room outside Sbu Sibiya’s office at the African National Congress (ANC) city headquarters in downtown Durban. Across town, next to the 40-year-old ANC regional secretary’s suburban home, a hit man waited behind a hedge. When Sibiya left work for the day at 8:30 p.m., the lookout in …

Boniface Mwangi’s first camera was an old Japanese film model, bought with $220 borrowed from a friend. He’d been selling books at his mother’s roadside stall in Nairobi since he was 15. Then one day in 2003 he came across a biography of Kenyan photographer Mohamed Amin, whose pictures of the 1984 Ethiopian famine, the …

The first indication that the men cutting down cashew trees and filling in the ditch outside Quinta’s house in central Guinea-Bissau were not, as they told her, evangelicals making a clearing for a Christmas Day parade came at 9 p.m. on Dec. 18, when they returned in several cars accompanied by four white men and …

Rwanda sits at the heart of Africa, Kigali is at the center of Rwanda, and on a wooded ridge bisecting the city sits a single-story complex of government buildings where, at most hours of most days, you’ll find President Paul Kagame at his desk. But it isn’t just geography and hard work that make Kagame …

Sometime during the past 21 years of Somalia’s wars, there came a moment when the destruction reached such an epic level that survival became incongruous. In downtown Mogadishu, where houses spill their stone guts into the street and roads are buried under two decades of rubble, 250,000 people live in egg-shaped pods of brushwood and …

On a wide plain of cracked earth and yellow grass deep in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, rebel commander Brigadier General Namiri Murrad raises a pair of binoculars and studies his objective, the government-held town of Talodi, some 4 km away. “They have three tanks, you see?” he says, passing over the field glasses. “They had six, …

How a group of American filmmakers and 100 special-operations troops are pursuing Africa’s most-wanted war criminal The town of Obo lies on a bend of a remote river in a nameless forest in a country whose name–Central African Republic–is generic. A few miles from Africa’s pole of inaccessibility, its farthest point from any ocean, Obo’s …

For someone whose job title could read Man Most Likely to Blow Your Mind, Bernie Fanaroff looks pretty conventional. Short, affable and 64, Fanaroff is wearing a V neck and gray slacks and offers coffee and sandwiches when we meet in his windowless office on a busy thoroughfare in central Johannesburg. Then he opens his …

The legendary liberation movement celebrates its centenary, but the party of Mandela has done far too little for a still divided South Africa It has been exactly 99 years and 11 months since the world’s most storied liberation movement, the African National Congress, was born, and I am looking for its birthplace. In Bloemfontein, the …