For a country with an unelected hereditary leader, there is a blunt irony in calling itself the Democratic Republic of Congo. This vast swath of Central Africa is many things — a failed state, a humanitarian crisis, a natural resource bounty — but a representative democracy it is not. That may be about to change with Sunday’s vote — the first multi-party elections in 40 years.
At one end of the stock exchange a man writes numbers on a whiteboard with a blue marker, at the other brokers tap sums into large calculators. Shares are bought and sold in crisp, verbal transactions; the deals are noted on ledgers filled with carbon paper.
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/ 27 January 2006
A new local film depicting Jesus as a black man was launched with trepidation at the Sundance film festival last weekend. Rory Carroll reports.
The artists’ community in Nieu Bethesda is divided over the arrival of black families from the township, writes Rory Carroll. Is this idyllic Karoo dorpie a microcosm of South Africa?
With a population of just 70, the Karoo village of Nieu Bethesda seemed to embody the imagination and creativity of a South Africa reborn after apartheid. But now another South Africa, one of poverty and inequality, has crashed into it, exposing segregation, racial tension and government neglect.
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/ 14 October 2005
Two and a half years of bloodshed have convinced the outside world that Baghdad is not so much a city as an event, a maelstrom of violence. The ferocity and frequency of bombings and shootings have turned Iraq’s capital into a maze of military checkpoints, concrete blast walls and razor wire. In the past fortnight, violence has claimed almost 400 people.
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/ 1 September 2005
For once, there were no cars rigged with explosives, no men with assault rifles or bomb-filled vests — no proof of malice. The culprit was a combination of panic and the weight of Shia pilgrims crushing against each other.
Last Sunday, just hours before Iraq’s Parliament extended the deadline for the new constitution, women’s rights advocates mounted an 11th-hour push to dilute the role of Islam and safeguard their freedoms. They mobilised in Baghdad to steel liberal and secular members of the drafting committee for a showdown against religious conservatives.
For decades farmers in Salman Pak, a lush townland by the Tigris river, used canopies of date palms to shelter orange groves from a broiling sun. When insurgents took over the area earlier this year they used the foliage to hide stolen cars, weapons caches and supply routes from American drones buzzing overhead. Rory Caroll reports.
Deep in the Malawi bush where lions and hyenas roam, it is easy to imagine what the ruins would look like: the clocktower toppled, the Romanesque arches crumbled, the wrought-iron gates bent and rusted, the artificial lake a malarial swamp, the entire 1 380-acre site a deserted, soundless rubble. Fitting tribute to a megalomaniac’s folly. […]