What Congo has that America doesn’t
On my taxi ride to the border, my Congolese driver asked me how the Democratic Republic of Congo compares to America. The dichotomy struck…
Read MorePlaces
Sweat equity
Near Kinshasa’s biggest airport, I happened to catch sight of what might be its only train. It makes the blue metal boxes clanking through…
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All Things Must Fight To Live
In Congo brutality seems to be everywhere: history, war, politics; in the landscape and the poverty and the desperate chug of locals’ day-to-day lives….
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Through the River and Over The Falls
Umwenda, the village along the Nile River where Mr. Wasige was born, is unremarkable, which is to say it has as little as most…
Read MoreStill in Africa. More soon.
I’ve been in eastern Congo for the last 3 weeks, and the internet here is terrible. This is, in fact, the first day it…
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Rwandans Opt to Redefine Beauty
BUTARE, RWANDA — Sandra Uwimbabazi knows runways – she’s modeled for years – but she stumbled on a recent Saturday here. A tall, slender…
Read MoreBurundi rebels’ unintentional allies
The peace is shaky again in Burundi, where the government is accusing the FNL rebels of plotting further attacks, and the FNL are saying–as…
Read MoreA New York post
This has nothing to do with Africa, but my mom sent me a link to this illustrated story in the Times—it’s kind of like…
Read More“It is finished in my heart,” or, how to forgive the man who cut off your arm
I don’t have any idea. But here’s what Temba Kekura told me (this is the last part of my Sierra Leone series; if you…
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A Former Rebel Faces the Farmer He Mained
GPAINGBANKORDU, SIERRA LEONE — Before the war, when his village and his family and his body were whole, Temba Kekura was a farmer. He…
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