The Warlord vs. the Hipsters
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 […]
Africa’s Eye On the Sky
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 […]
How the ANC Lost Its Way
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 […]
Threat Level Rising: How African Terrorist Groups Inspired by al-Qaeda Are Gaining Strength
The moment Nigeria’s Islamists graduated from local to international threat can be dated almost precisely, to just before 11 a.m. on Aug. 26. Mohammed Abul Barra, 27, a car mechanic and father of one from Maiduguri in Nigeria’s northeast, had just turned into the diplomatic enclave in Nigeria’s hot, dusty capital, Abuja. As he passed […]
Africa Blossoms: A Continent On the Verge of an Agricultural Revolution
It’s a slow day on the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, so the dealers are trading stories instead. “I love the money, and I love the atmosphere,” says sesame and coffee dealer Takele Chemeda, 38, surveying the octagonal trading pit and the giant screens hanging from the ceiling. “What happens on the floor stays on the floor, […]
Malaria: Epidemic On the Run
In the most malarious town on earth, I find Dr. Matthew Emer at his desk behind two sets of fly screens and under a ceiling fan. I introduce myself and tell Emer I am reporting on a campaign to wipe malaria off the planet. If I want to know why that is important and how […]
The Collateral Crisis in Somalia
By late June and early July, when their goats were all gone and the last of their cows had sunk to their knees and died, the men told their families it was time to leave. In Daynunay, Haji Hassan and his children packed up what they had — a few rags, plastic bottles, some old […]
Somalia’s Sea Wolves
I have arranged to meet our pirate, somewhat incongruously, in the desert. I board a 1960s prop airplane that smells of goat and is piloted by four portly Russians. After a series of short hops across Somalia’s northern wastes, we touch down on a red-dirt strip outside the town of Galcayo. The government in the […]
Born in Blood
Sudan’s separation was meant to end decades of civil war. Instead it has created two weak states and more conflict High in the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan lies a green valley of guava, mango and custard-apple trees where the people live in conical grass-roofed huts, tending goats and raising maize and sorghum on steep […]
Silicon Savanna: Mobile Phones Transform Africa
The buzz at Pivot25, a conference for mobile-phone software developers and investors held this June, is all about the future of money. Ben Lyon, the 24-year-old business-development VP of Kopo Kopo, wants $250,000 to produce his app for shops to process payments made by text message. Paul Okwalinga, 28, describes his money app — called […]