Across the divide

Our beach village of La Marsa (Arabic for ‘port’) sits along the northwest flank of the Gulf of Tunis, with Carthage and its famous ruins a ...

In fighting slavery in Mali, some favour dialogue, others confrontation. Caste systems in parts of Mali define what people can and cannot ...

--> The aim of this research was to study the capacity of state and independent media to investigate and report on the '...

"I’d chosen a source-to-sea expedition format with few open crossings and no real wilderness. A true beginner’s path. By hand-r...

My beloved Washington Canoe Club , a DC historic landmark, recently interviewed me for a member profile. Thanks to Liz Pennisi for the wri...

New article about two recent books on the ethics of disaster relief work in Humanity at UPenn Press. Thrust of my argument is that howe...

  New article out in Ocean Paddler #59 , Britain's best glossy mag devoted to sea kayaking. "Rising early for our put-in ...

In mid-December 2016, in rural Diffa region on Niger’s southern border with Nigeria, fourteen men gave themselves up to authoritie...

“With Boko Haram, we joined your club,” mused Mdjiyawa Bakari, the governor of Cameroon’s Far North Region ( Extrême-Nord ), when we met...

The roving celestial beasts of Lascaux’s Paleolithic hunting scenes and the scurvy-ridden, snow-blinding odyssey of Shacklet...

(c) P Casaer Last year's media coverage of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa riveted me on two fronts: seeing how western societ...

Happy to see my profile of kayak explorer Jon Turk finally out, quite a while in the making. Thanks to Adventure Kayak for appreciating ...

Like alcohol anywhere, palm wine is a formidable social lubricant but its undercurrent of magical thinking sets it apart. Amos Tutuola, N...

Memorable for their fleeting dignity and searing panic of private moments in battle, serendipitous snaps of civilians and combatants wit...

While writing a commemorative piece on Tim Hetherington recently, Liberia was fresh again in my mind. I pulled up a short rumination on pos...

There's a lot of Cold War wreckage scattered around Greenland. This 'parallel life' of the eighth continent is rarely associa...

This site seems quiet but I've been busy with a couple of articles that will appear shortly. I'll post the links here. One is a p...

In the 1960s, post-colonial Africa was the most hopeful place on the planet. Post-partum exuberance in Europe’s former colonies was infe...

Introduced to modern science in 2012 by John and Terese Hart (and reported  here ), the Lesula is the second of two major African primat...

International development is social engineering, yes, but with a social justice lens. Its success hangs on its ability to translate in...