Stories floating around that are worth your time:
Timothy Kustusch has a feature for GlobalPost on the usually-overlooked conflict in Western Sahara. He thinks it might get worse before it gets any better.
New York Times East Africa correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman has a travel feature on Uganda. Travel pieces on Africa tend toward fetishization — you’ll read a lot of nonsense about “the real Africa,” as differentiated, I suppose, from fake Africa,” such as Cape Town. Because God knows we cannot associate Africa with modernism. Gettleman avoids most of the worst of this sort of thing because he does know the region and because his hook is a whitewater rafting trip.
The High Court of Rwanda has rejected a challenge on the part of Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda’s wife to have Nkunda released from custody. To add insult to injury (neither unwaranted), she was forced to pay court costs.
I am not saying it is justified. I am not even going to weigh in on whether or not I believe the charges to be true. But it is simply a fact that the Democratic Alliance (DA) is perceived to be a white party and as a result, whatever its modest sucesses in the most recent elections, in the long run, the mantel of opposition to the ANC is almost certain to be passed along to a party more broadly representative of the country’s population. If it can survive the fallout from a disappointing campaign, the Congress of the People (COPE) still strikes me as best equipped in the long run to provide a viable challenge to the ruling party.