A report from the Central African Republic, where "acts of extraordinary cruelty have become commonplace."

On Nigeria’s citizen vigilantes who’ve banded together to fight Islamist terrorists.

The Nigerian schoolgirls who escaped Boko Haram.

How celebrity-led humanitarian aid exacerbated a crisis.

In 1981, Mauritania became the last country on Earth to abolish slavery. The law had little effect; at least 140,000 people are still enslaved today. Their best hope for freedom is an abolitoinist named Biram Dah Abeid.

The Wall Street firm that bailed out Robert Mugabe.

On PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and the experience of covering AIDS in Africa.

Following Muammar Qaddafi’s death in 2011, Libya had hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the story of how it was erased.

Barack Obama on Africa, Putin and the gap between what CEOs tell him over lunch and what they tell their lobbyists.

Hunting people who hunt elephants.

A profile of a doctor fighting Ebola in Uganda.

Siblings tend to lions at a Tanzanian animal clinic.

"Eleven years her senior, Derek left America when she was fourteen to study and work in New Zealand, Greenland, and Chad, combing lakes for pale bacterial blooms. Over a decade Diana had collected his letters, filled with descriptions of the origins of rivers, dead fish in the Niantic, elephant calves strung up in abattoirs. And when she finished her sophomore year, he founded the Keren Reserve, a lion research conservatory that commanded a half-million acres at the edge of the Sahel. He had filmed four documentaries for television. Now, he researched emerging atavistic traits in the prides: infighting, cubs abandoned by their mothers."

How divisions between Nigeria’s Muslim North and Christian South resulted in the birth of terror’s most ruthless movement.

Adriaan Vlok, a former apartheid leader, seeks redemption.

How America is trying to fight terrorism in Africa without doing any of the actual fighting.

“What kind of a person looks upon the world’s largest land animal—a beast that mourns its dead and lives to retirement age and can distinguish the voice of its enemies—and instead of saying ‘Wow!’ says something like ‘Where’s my gun?’”

In northern Nigeria, radical Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram is facing a vigilante backlash from armed teenagers with nothing to lose.

A dispatch from the Central African Republic.

An investigation into allegations that Rwandan President Paul Kagame is assassinating exiled dissidents.

Investigating the burning of ancient books by rebels in Timbuktu.

On children accused of sorcery in Congo.

A mother defends her family lineage against disruption from envious cousins in this 2008 story by National Book Critics Circle award-winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

"His cousins, during the funeral, took his ivory tusk, claiming that the trappings of titles went to brothers and not to sons. It was when they emptied his barn of yams and led away the adult goats in his pen that she confronted them, shouting, and when they brushed her aside she waited until evening, then walked around the clan singing about their wickedness, the abominations they were heaping on the land by cheating a widow, until the elders asked them to leave her alone. She complained to the Women’s Council, and twenty women went at night to Okafo’s and Okoye’s homes, brandishing pestles, warning them to leave Nwamgba alone. But Nwamgba knew that those grasping cousins would never really stop. She dreamed of killing them. "

Inside the lucrative — and illegal — business of elephant tusk trafficking.

A mother tries to get herself abducted, first for money, and then for appreciation.

"After all, Tim could not replace me with just any woman he plucked off the streets. He’d have to date first, and then there’d be nannies and maids to pay, restaurant bills, and eHarmony fees. Not to mention the time he’d lose on the endeavor, which, multiplied by his hourly rate, would cost a considerable amount. Viewed in this light, my value was significant. I used to work in marketing and view matters at all levels of illumination."

Decades later, U.S.-backed dictator Hissène Habré faces justice.