Imagine a crowd moving through the bush of southern Tanganyika in 1905, carrying spears, bows, a few old rifles, and a new kind of certainty. Not the calm certainty of strategy, but the electric certainty of a story that...
There is a pattern in Congo’s modern wars that keeps repeating like a bad chorus. When the national army looks tired, when commanders panic, when allies bargain, Kinshasa reaches for a familiar shortcut: white mercenaries. They arrive with new...
In eastern Congo, war does not only happen at the front. It also happens in meeting rooms, in decrees, in recruitment drives, and on the roads where armed men decide who passes and who pays.
“Wazalendo” is often described as...
I cannot stop seeing Uvira the way I see a tense football match when the crowd slowly realizes their team is in trouble. At first, it is disbelief. Then a kind of bargaining. Then anger. Then silence. You look...
A rolled leaf, a stolen future
I keep thinking about how a society can collapse quietly. Not with bombs. Not with tanks. With a small rolled leaf passed from hand to hand, smoked in full daylight, and strong enough to...
Why M23’s Warning Should Terrify the Global Economy
“Uvira est tombée. Nous mettons le cap sur le Katanga.”
That was the message attributed to M23 after they captured Uvira, a strategic town hugging Lake Tanganyika. To many Congolese, it sounded like...
What Nyerere Would Have Said Today
I have walked the streets of Dar es Salaam enough times to understand why Tanzanians still whisper Mwalimu’s name with a reverence that borders on spiritual. Julius Kambarage Nyerere was not a man of...
Cotonou at Dawn: A Memory, A Question, A Warning
My only encounter with Benin was brief, almost whispered. I was in transit through the Cotonou Cadjehoun International Airport on my way to Lagos. I was heading there to write two...
On December 9th 2025, the people of Tanzania spoke more powerfully than the government expected. They did not need large crowds or dramatic clashes to express disapproval. Their message came through a national shutdown so complete that it turned...
A Baby in Flight and the Truth Behind a Signature
In the first week of December, as three presidents smiled for cameras in Washington, a young mother named Aline Sambuka was running for her life in South Kivu. She clutched...
- Advertisement -
