Two days after the bloodshed the army has conquered the city. Tanks and armored vehicles surround the mosques and the public buildings, line up in the streets, roll down the Nile corniche. Mobile check points appear and vanish. Soldiers in combat gear watch from the rooftops while plaincloth policemen manning pistols and machine guns check documents and keep the press at bay. A curfew is enforced at 7 pm. The…
The rain is a blessing. It pours lavishly from the thundering clouds filling the ponds and the scorched fields. Now the Beroms in Dogo Nahawa can plant the corn and water their gardens outside the village: they’ll soon harvest new food for their children. I walk a short distance towards the rocky hills to the burial ground: a large stone platform and an iron cross mark the mass grave where…
Apartheid is a state of mind. I spent a week in a township on the Cape Flats and never spotted a white person around, not even a coloured. Self-segregation is firmly in place. Whites drive fast on the freeways cutting through the endless lines of tin/plastic shacks without stopping. After dark no outsider dares to roam the dirt and volatile narrow alleys of Crossroads, Guguletu or Mitchell’s Plain; althought it…
I was standing in front of my son’s high school in Brookline, Boston, where students were supposed to stand silent for a minute exactly one week after the Marathon bombings: few seemed to care. The CNN is desperate to keep the story alive with “exclusive details” (Anderson Cooper: pressure cookers used in attack were bought at Macy’s) and meaningless “breaking news” (my old friend Nic Robertson, hastily dispatched to Daghestan,…
Thousands of flickering lamps floating in the hills and down in the valley: at night the miners leave the digging holes and flock to the village, hungrily looking for women, chanvre and cheap liquor. Drunk soldiers roam the muddy streets, girls peep from the shacks, armed youngsters sit on beer boxes outside the dens, porters pull overloaded bikes and shout in the dark. I hear the kids coughing in the…
His dad left home long before he was born, so at the age of two James had no option but to spend two and a half years behind bars at Nairobi’s Langata prison with his mother, convicted for robbery. At ten he dreamed to be a pilot but was already the youngest member of the gang in the Korogocho slum. He was smart. He was the lookout. And was the…
I came to Fortaleza, Brazil, to research on sex slavery and women’s trafficking. My friend Ruchira Gupta of Apne Aap should come over from Kolkata and see! Twelve to sixteen years old kids from the slums flock to the back street bars near Praia de Iracema every night and look for tourists, both Europeans (mainly Italians) and Brazilians, while dozens of sordid motels cater for low scale prostitutes and truck…
Back to Haiti. Almost three years after the earthquake it’s still a desperate place. Hurricane Sandy has brought more misery and destruction, with dozens of victims swept away by the floods. I travelled north to Cap Haitien where another tropical storm hit the battered town last weekend: roads were cut, people were shaken, houses were flattened and corpses surfaced in the mud. Then I returned to Port au Prince on…
I went to the El-Fateh mosque in downtown Tunis for the Friday prayer. It’s a militant mosque. That’s where the hardline muslim leader Seif Allah Ben Hassine was holed up by police three days ago after he blamed the government for the killing of four demonstrators during the storming of the American embassy last week, in the riots sparked all over the muslim world by an obscene low cost film…
Lo provoco: gli dico che sulla scrivania dove lavoro troneggia – venerata reliquia – un frammento del tagliamare della nave “Otago”, primo comando del capitano Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, alias Joseph Conrad, acquistato a un’asta e donato a mio padre dall’editore Ugo Mursia. Accusa il colpo, ma controbatte con una modesta pieza pequeña della torre d’artiglieria pesante “Anton” della “Graf Spee”, la corazzata tedesca colata a picco nel 1939 a…