I was explaining to the woman at the cell phone company yesterday that I needed to close my account because I was moving back to the United States. "Why?" she asked. "Are you tired of Kenya?" The lady at the bank, the man at the ISP -- all...

After a hiatus, and in time for Friday, Obamarama is back, thanks to this image I fished out of my cell phone. I shot this in Mombasa back in April and forgot about it. Yes, that's Barack Obama Road, printed in stencil. Previous Obamarama...

You know you're in Africa when... ...after napping on a long road trip back from the bush, you reach your destination, look in the back of the truck and find your stuff has been joined by two huge sacks of charcoal and two live chickens.   This was...

You can't go to Asmara and not note the architecture. While most African capitals today are replete with drab, hulking towers from the 1960s and 1970s, the Eritrean capital, dating back to its days as an early-century Italian colonial pied-a-terre, is...

I'd been warned before going to Asmara that I might be spied upon. In the extremely small capital of an extremely secretive regime, diplomats told me they assumed they were being watched by their neighbors and probably even by some Eritreans who worked...