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Let’s get one thing clear. Is ‘The Spear,’ a picture by the South African artist Brett Murray representing South African President Jacob Zuma in heroic revolutionary pose — with his penis hanging out — good art? No. The pose is striking. But the black, red and yellow coloring is derivative, borrowed not only from the [...]
For a journalist, Special Operations are problematic. They work in secret and tend to consider the press, at best, an annoyance and, at worst, a hindrance and a danger. In January, TIME photographer Dominic Nahr and I visited Obo, the town in southeastern Central African Republic (CAR) where 30 U.S. special forces soldiers hunting Lord’s Resistance [...]
I traveled with Ryan Boyette for a week last month in Sudan‘s Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan. Boyette is an American and former aid worker who has lived in the Nuba for nine years. He built his own house there and, last year, married a Nuba woman, Jazira. He has testified before Congress and the National Security Council. [...]
If you wanted a celebrity to adopt your cause, you’d pray for George Clooney. The 50-year-old gets to address Congress, the National Security Council and the U.N. General Assembly, meet U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and have dinner with President Barack Obama. He is resourceful enough to rent a [...]
An international court’s conviction of former Liberian President Charles Taylor for aiding and abetting war crimes marks the first time in the modern era that a former head of state has been found guilty of human rights violations and represents an acceleration in the establishment of global justice. At the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Leidschendam in the [...]
At the Mother of Mercy Hospital, deep in rebel-held territory in southern Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, 14-year-old Daniel Omar describes how, on a bright clear day in early March, a bomb dropped by his own government blew off both his hands. “I was at El Dar, taking care of our cows,” he says. “I heard the [...]
In the shade of a thorn tree on a plain of cracked earth and yellow grass, Brigadier General Namiri Murrad lays out how the rebels of southern Sudan plan to unite and overthrow President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and his Islamist regime in Khartoum. “Right now, our work is to clean our house,” he tells TIME [...]
Senegal’s ejection of 85-year-old President Abdoulaye Wade at the polls Sunday is a resounding victory for African democracy. The loss ended his attempts to cling to power for a third term and establish a dynastic succession. According to the Senegalese press agency, Wade telephoned his rival, 50-year-old former Prime Minister Macky Sall, Sunday evening to concede defeat. Official results are [...]
I spoke to Jason Russell for the second time last week as one of my final interviews in over two months of reporting for a TIME piece on Joseph Kony, his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the anti-L.R.A. activist group Russell co-founded with two friends in 2003, Invisible Children. In the time since we’d first [...]
The African National Congress’ expulsion of its enfant terrible, Julius Malema, answers one question: Yes, the party of Nelson Mandela, the party which overthrew apartheid, still finds racism and hate speech intolerable. But it also poses another: Who now proposes to lead South Africa’s millions of poor, young and unemployed?
