#31: The Desertification of Mali
By Alex Shoumatoff
January 10, 2006. A somewhat different version of this appeared in the winter 2006 Onearth magazine.
Five of the ten days I was in Mali last March, I never saw the sun. It was blotted out by an epic dust cloud that spread hundreds of miles in every direction, borne by the harmattan, the …Read More
#28: The Fall of General Stroessner
By Alex Shoumatoff
And now, for a change of pace, a blast from the past: a piece called “The End of the Tyrannosaur,” about the overthrow of Paraguay’s long-time despot, General Alfredo Stroessner, that was published in the September, l989 Vanity Fair, with Goldie Hawn doing an exuberant shimmie on the cover. Not many American journalists …Read More
#24: A Slideshow from the Congo
By Craig Lapp
The collection of slideshows are in Apple Quicktime. Click here to download Quicktime if you don’t already have it.
The best way to view these slideshows is to Right click, and select “save target as” or “save file” and save these to your hard drive.
If you are using a Mac, hold the “option” key …Read More
#18: Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide
Ten years after arguably the most savage genocide in human history, the comprehension of how such an unspeakably horrible thing could have happened is still anything but clear. The chain of causes is long and complex, and how far back into Rwanda’s history one chooses to trace it, and the relative importance one gives to …Read More
#4: E-Postcards from Abroad
By Elizabeth Fisk
These Dispatches could use a voice and a take or two other than my own, particularly since I am really cranking on my Rwanda book and am not traveling and don’t have the time until around March 1st to post anything substantial except for old work myself. Fortuitously, Liz Fisk has gloriously and …Read More
#3: Europe’s African Art Treasures
Twenty years ago, I spent two months traveling around Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Having spent some time in the Amazon, I wanted to see how the world’s second-largest rainforest compared. It was my first trip to Africa, and the unfettered joie de vivre and creativity of the Zairois (who are actually …Read More
#2: A Report on the Wildlife of Eastern Congo
The original version for the United Nations Foundation
For those who want to go more deeply into the situation in eastern Congo, here is the 26,000-word site report I delivered to the United Nations Foundaton in October of last year. It contains the greatest detail on the status of the parks and their wildlife and on …Read More
#2 : A Report on the Wildlife of Eastern Congo
Rolling Stone Edit
This has been distilled and adapted from the original report for the United Nations Foundation, and has benefited from deft editing by Rolling Stone’s Bill Tonelli.
–AS
Kahuzi Biega was supposed to be the safest of the parks on my itinerary. The last one, Virungas, was totally overrun by “negative forces,” as the various …Read More