Articles

CHAPTER I   It’s 50 days since the Islamist militants of Boko Haram kidnapped an entire girls’ school in northeastern Nigeria and the general wants me to see what he’s up against. He invites me to his office in the capital, Abuja, and opens his laptop.   The general clicks on one folder entitled “Abubakar …

The Olympian and his girlfriend seemed to have the perfect romance – until he killed her Four days before Oscar Pistorius shot her in the elbow, hip and head through the bathroom door at his home in Pretoria, Reeva Steenkamp tweeted a message about violence against women in South Africa. “I woke up in a …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Nestled in the golden bush grass of an open savanna, a black rhinoceros lies on her side. Her head is haloed by a dried pool of blood. The animal’s horns have been sawed off at the stump. Her eyes have been gouged out. “That’s a new thing,” notes Rusty Hustler, the manager of South Africa’s …

In his epic 1976 anthem “Go Slow,” Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti described the traffic in his hometown of Lagos, casting it as a metaphor for Nigeria’s spiritual standstill. “Then your head start to ache because car crush they for your head,” he sang. “Lorry they for your front, tipper they for your back, motorcycle they …

To meet the future of retail banking, cross Moi Avenue into the rougher part of downtown Nairobi, pass the Chicken Spot restaurant and squeeze between four stalls selling counterfeit mobile phones, and you’ll reach a door — and behind it a tiny room containing a hat stand, a wall calendar, a strip light and a …

Fed by drought, Africa’s deserts are spreading, bringing with them hunger, disease and tribal conflict. But innovative policies can push the deserts back Head north from Nairobi toward Mount Kenya and almost invariably you’ll hit weather. Fog, rain, hail, even snow, all unusual for the equator but a blessing for Mount Kenya’s farmers, who export …

New mines in Zimbabwe help keep the despotic Robert Mugabe in power and threaten to undermine global efforts to eliminate blood diamonds Searching for the world’s newest blood-diamond bazaar, I arrive in Manica, Mozambique, near the border with Zimbabwe. It’s a sunny provincial town of shady bungalows and bright purple bougainvillea set around a central …

If you want to see what’s wrong with Africa, take a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The size of Western Europe, with almost no paved roads, Congo is the sucking vortex where Africa’s heart should be. Independent Congo gave the world Mobutu Sese Seko, who for 32 years impoverished his people while traveling …

Two of the most godforsaken soccer pitches in the world are on Robben Island, a flat rock battered by Antarctic winds and icy waves in the southern Atlantic, 6 miles (about 10 km) off Cape Town on the tip of Africa. The island’s isolation made it a natural prison for British colonists, who kept their …

Jailed for reporting, a TIME reporter sees that for most of its citizens, Robert Mugabe’s nation is itself a prison A bad jail wastes a body quickly. When I entered Cell 6 at Gwanda police station, I was fit. After five days in a concrete and iron-bar tank, with no food and only a few …