Clooney’s War
CHAPTER 1: A bar on the Nile Mid-morning and the staff were still wiping down the bar and clearing away the empties when George Clooney ambled over to my table. George had a couple of hours before he headed north to the fighting and we’d agreed to meet by the Nile, at the aid worker hotel […]
The Hunt for Boko Haram
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 […]
Nelson Mandela: Protester, Prisoner, Peacemaker 1918-2013
Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, into the royal house of Thembu of the Madiba clan, in the village of Mvezo, which sits on a bare, rocky hill above a bend in the Mbashe River, a day’s walk from the town of Umtata in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. Though he didn’t believe […]
Pistorius And South Africa’s Culture Of Violence
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 […]
Saving Somalia: Can President Hassan Fix the World’s Most Failed State?
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 […]
The New Struggle for the ANC
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 […]
Africa Rising
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 Cocaine Crisis: How the Drug Trade Is Ruining West Africa
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 […]
President Paul Kagame: Rwanda’s Strong Man
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 […]
Somalia’s Chance: Can a U.S.-Backed African Force Bring Peace?
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 […]