Africa’s Richest Man

I wrote about Africa’s richest man, Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote, in this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s a very difficult man to catch.

Photo via Bloomberg Businessweek

Out in Africa

I have a story in the year-end issue of the The New Yorker, my first print piece for them, about Ugandan activist Frank Mugisha and the rise of the gay-rights movement there. It’s subscription only, but do read! I also wrote a short accompanying article for the web about the perpetually-in-limbo “Kill the Gays” bill.

Photo via The New Yorker

Uganda’s First Gay Pride

A little late on this, but I wrote about Uganda’s first Gay Pride back in August. It was an incredible event.

Photo by Anne Ackermann

A South African Diary

I visited South Africa’s most hated gallery for The New Yorker, and, before that, wrote about a controversy involving President Jacob Zuma and an infamous painting that rocked the country for over a month.

Photo via The New Yorker

Amputees and Bionic Limbs

I have a story in The New York Times about amputees who choose to remove more of their limbs after their original procedures in order to get bionic, high-tech prosthetics. The videos and photos accompanying the story are amazingly done and moving.

Photo via The New York Times

Recent Work

A couple of recent posts at The New Yorker:

on positive stories from Africa,

the U.S. Republican presidential candidates’ stances on Africa,

George Clooney’s activism in Sudan and the conflict there,

and the coup in Mali.

And an article on a Mexican restaurant in the Bronx for The New York Times from the beginning of the year.

Photo via The New Yorker

Dispatches from Dakar

A few weeks ago, I was in Senegal. I was invited to participate in a reproductive health reporting project with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, in which three other American journalists, four accomplished reporters from Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, and I attended a family planning conference and talked about, among lots of things, men, women, and all the complicated side effects of sex in Africa.

Here are two dispatches from my time there: about a controversial H.I.V. and contraception study and about the roots of the resistance to abortion. Dakar is stunning, by the way. There is a stretch of highway in the city that is bordered by palm trees, the beach, and the ocean, and that literally looks like LA.

Photo by Jake Naughton

Recent Stories

I wrote about an early black colony and a cool antiques shop in Brooklyn for The New York Times. The neighborhood of Bed-Stuy is a fascinating place.

Photo via The New York Times

A Ghanian Fashion Photographer

James Barnor, who grew up in Accra and now lives in London, got his start photographing sports celebrities like Muhammad Ali, leaders of Ghana’s independence movement, and Africans living in England (his first camera was a plastic point-and-shoot). Though he temporarily returned to Ghana to establish the first color-processing photo lab there, he made his name doing glamorous fashion photography. Drum was the name of one of Africa’s most popular magazines in the 60′s, and Barnor regularly shot its covers, photos of black models in quintessential English scenes: in front of a red telephone box, exiting a tube station, or surrounded by pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

More than that, his photos are a fuzzily poignant time capsule: a polaroid of England as its different ethnic groups ebbed and flowed, mixed and crossed. The first comprehensive exhibition of his street and studio work, called Ever Young, runs until November 27 at Autograph ABP in London.

More of Barnor’s photos are here. Barnor’s own words on his work are here.

Crown Heights Revisited

After leaving Bushwick at the end of last August, I moved into the neighborhood of Crown Heights, a place I had heard stories about (the violent riots of the 90′s), but had never visited. My apartment there would be a haven for the next six months: a convenient point to local salons and shops and restaurants run by Arabs and Jews and blacks who always recognized your face; a part of a building full of welcoming Haitian and Latino neighbors; and an overheated shelter from the cold outside. I wrote about the 20th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots here.

Photo via The New Yorker