This issue owes its origins to a day—last Easter, in fact—spent watching the cable news networks report on the fatal shooting of three Somali pirates who had kidnapped Richard Phillips, captain of the MV Maersk Alabama.
Mustafa al-Farkhani stops outside the closed gate of the Tijaniyya shrine in Tetouan, Morocco, and holds a finger to his lips. His eyes go dim as he places his ear against the whitewashed limestone wall of the house that abuts the shrine.
Elephants don’t belong here. But that doesn’t deter Amadou, a local guide who assures me that this, the barren badlands of north-central Mali, is prime elephant country. He saw them, the last remaining elephants along the Sahara’s southern...
In the late afternoon, the Soumbe-dioune Market in Dakar is mostly empty—populated by women rolling peanuts into bags as snacks, a few people brewing up vats of Cafe Touba (a spiced and sugary coffee), and others wiping down their cleaning...
A frantic voice came over the radio: a blast had just destroyed Guinea-Bissau’s military headquarters. I drove toward the compound and, when I arrived, everyone was still shouting and running through the smoking ruins of the building...
