Three generations of women endure the trials of a turbulent Nigeria.

"Almost a year into their courting, the war comes. Her people are Biafra loyalists, his people think Ojukwu is a fool. On the night of their engagement party only her people attend. And when she goes by his house the next day she discovers he has left the country."

The journey from a Sudanese refugee camp to an Atlanta police academy.

How sectarian violence has made life in northern Nigeria “incomprehensibly frightful.”

An inside account of the Nairobi mall attack.

“Turns out your laptop—or camera or gaming system or gold necklace—may have a smidgen of Congo’s pain somewhere in it.”

“The only thing I’m able to conclude after my trip here is that it’s incredibly difficult for a poor country to go about getting un-poor.”

Two white security contractors set off into the remote interior. Within a week, a seemingly innocent man who crossed their path lay dead on the side of the road. The manhunt began.

Departing Marrakech by car with a plan to record music for the Library of Congress.

How a secretive Israel billionaire seized control of an untapped iron ore deposit beneath one of Africa’s poorest countries.

Struggling to pay for her mother's medical care, a young woman is drawn into the sex industry.

"The man arrived in a BMW, a Be My Wife, Njideka teased. He was tall and dark, his simple linen buba and sokoto crisply ironed, and his shoes shone even in the dim evening light. He reached out his hand and took mine. He drew my hand upwards, and tipped his head just a bit as he placed a kiss on the back of my hand. He wore gold rings on three of his five fingers. They were not massive rings, but small diamonds circled each of them and sparkled so that the rings appeared much larger than they actually were."

An eldery Nigerian woman tends to her deteriorating body and a family crisis.

"Her last child was thirty-seven years old. He had lived with her until nine years ago, when he traveled to China—via Libya, then Qatar, then Malaysia—in search of a better life. He was married now, to a Filipino woman he had met in a textile plant in Zhengzhou, and they had two children, a four-year-old girl whom they had named Corazón after his wife’s mother, and a one-year-old boy who was called Ramón after his wife’s father. He had sent his mother their photographs with the last parcel of canned pork and imitation-leather handbags that arrived from him with climatic regularity. The letter that accompanied the parcel informed her he was doing well, that he no longer worked in factories but now tutored Chinese professionals in the English language, and that he might come to visit next year with his family. In her reply she had urged him to come quickly because the eye trouble had recurred, and she wanted to see her grandchildren before she went blind."

A portrait of the Somali capital.

A potential assassin observes a wave of Zimbabwean refugees.

"They plunge into the Limpopo, sometimes drowning, and, if they survive, rise like mists from the water to cut holes in the border fence into his country. Then they plough through the jungle, and then eventually onto this very road that runs in front of his house. Headed to Jo’burg. What puzzles him, what he would really like to find out, is how they leave no footprints on the earth, make no mark, and drop nothing. And how it is that when they walk, like whispering, they do not cast shadows on the earth."

On the lives of street kids.

Why the integration of a South African university didn’t last.

A portrait of a new nation.

A trip to the French island of Réunion to report on a bloody battle between surfers and sharks.

A war travelogue through Mali alongside French troops as a “place just like Afghanistan” descends into chaos.

The King of Rwanda is 76 years old, 7 feet 2 inches tall, and lives on public assistance in a small apartment in Virginia.

An interview with the late writer.

Tracking down a Congolese war criminal.

The fight for South Africa’s future.

A history of how Tuareg separatists, jihadists seeking a “desert caliphate,” cigarette smugglers, and narcotraffickers have turned Northern Mali into “the globe’s most significant terrorist threat.”

A Liberian road trip with the creator of MTV, Ralph Reed and a reformed cannibal named General Butt Naked.

The diarist and photographer Peter Beard, known both for his series documenting a mass elephant starvation and for discovering the supermodel Iman on a Nairobi street, reflects on his life of “drugs, debt, and beautiful women” while recovering from being trampled by an elephant.