Essays & Reporting
My journalism has appeared in National Geographic, Emergence Magazine, Monocle, GQ, The Atlantic, New Yorker, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vox, Foreign Policy, and many other publications.
Today’s five-year-olds will likely live to 100
National Geographic, February 2023
Five-year-old Peggy Hawkins wants to be a penguin when she grows up. Even at her young age she concedes it’s unlikely, but being pragmatic she has backups, including dancer. Her playful visions of the future reflect the enthusiasm and unconstrained imagination of this cheerful British girl, and while she won’t become a penguin, something almost as confounding is a near certainty: Peggy Hawkins will live to 100.
The Maldives is being swallowed by the sea. Can it adapt?
National Geographic, January 2022
“My most peaceful moments are on the water,” Thoiba Saeedh, an anthropologist, said just before a motorboat took us skimming across the glassy Indian Ocean towards the tiny island of Felidhoo in the Maldives. The speedboat carved a wake between sand-fringed, palm-covered islands—some with resort villas lining wooden jetties—as a pod of dolphins butterflied through the gentle swell and flying fish launched themselves improbably into the air.
A locust plague hit East Africa. The pesticide solution may have dire consequences
National Geographic, March 2021
A swarm of locusts is awe inspiring and terrible. It begins as a dark smudge on the horizon, then a gathering darkness. A rustle becomes a clatter that crescendos as tens of millions of voracious, finger-sized, bright yellow insects descend on the land. Since late 2019, vast clouds of locusts have shrouded the Horn of Africa, devouring crops and pastureland—and triggering an operation of staggering proportions to track and kill them.
Illuminating Kirinyaga
Emergence, November 2020
Twice a week Joseph Mbaya trudges purposefully into the forest a few miles south of his home in the lee of Mount Kenya to forage for roots, bark, sap, and leaves. His neighbors find this behavior a little odd, his esoteric knowledge of the trees and plants eccentric; most of them would choose Tylenol over his herbal concoctions of infused teas. It is Friday morning and warm beneath the forest’s patchy canopy, despite being at an elevation well over nine thousand feet. Mbaya sweats in his layers of fleeces, his shirt and coat, patched Carhartt trousers, and brown leather boots. Occasionally he pauses in the forest’s silence to smoke raw tobacco rolled in old newspaper.
Meet Congo’s caretaker of the forest
Vox, December 2019
A pair of 70 horsepower outboard motors cut the river journey westward, from the city of Kisangani, to just two hours. By the more common motorized barges — floating cities in their own right, bursting with commerce and chaos — the journey is four times longer. The even more common canoes, poled and paddled by hand, stretch the trip into days. The alternative is a rutted dirt road so extravagantly potholed and seasonally impassable that it is mostly, and sensibly, avoided.
Congolese infrastructure is scant and parlous, a daily losing battle against neglect and nature. But even so, the Yangambi Research Station in the heart of the world’s second-largest rainforest is remote from everywhere.
The lessons, and the costs, of terrorism in Kenya
The Atlantic, January 2019
On a warm Tuesday afternoon here in Kenya’s capital, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the Secret Garden Café, a restaurant within an upscale hotel and office complex. The blast shredded the bodies of customers sitting at tables on the restaurant’s ground-floor veranda, threw debris across the grassy courtyard, and shattered windows six floors up.
African herders have been pushed into destitution and crime
The Economist, November 2017
At the start of every dry season fires creep southwards across the Central African Republic (CAR). Kasper Agger, a Dane who works for African Parks, a South Africa-based conservation group, can see them on his laptop thanks to a piece of NASA-made software that plots benign-looking flame symbols like boy scouts’ campfires onto a Google Earth map. Through December and January the fires edge close to Chinko, a vast nature reserve in the CAR. When the fires reach the park boundary, a light aircraft is dispatched to shower leaflets over the smoulder.
In Kisumu
London Review of Books, September 2017
When people in Kisumu, in western Kenya, began voting on a Tuesday morning in early August it was more like a party than an election. At the Kenyatta Sports Ground, a large triangle of dirt and trees in the city centre, whistles blew, vuvuzelas honked and drums banged; there was shouting, laughing, singing, cheering, even dancing. Cigarette smoke and the smell of booze drifted up from boisterous clumps of young men. Other voters smiled and chatted as they queued in their hundreds, some with babies swaddled in polyester blankets. It was 4.45 in the morning, still dark and more than an hour before the polling stations were due to open, yet new arrivals were latecomers already.
Who shot Kuki Gallmann?
The Observer, June 2017
There is thunder and the equatorial rain falls perfectly straight, drenching the lawn and a pair of towering candelabra trees that frame the driveway which leads to a two-storey, colonial-era house. Inside, logs burn in the grey stone fireplace, worn kilims are spread on the parquet floor and Kuki Gallmann – 74 years old and recovering from two bullet wounds in her abdomen – sits regally upon a chair of wrought iron and stained glass shaped like a resting bird.
Casualties of war in the world’s newest country
New Statesman, November 2015
There were no wounds on Nyachan’s body. She demonstrated how she was tied up – arms pulled back, elbows bent sharply towards her spine – but the rope marks had faded. Government soldiers had abducted Nyachan from her village in Unity State in South Sudan in mid-April and marched her to a military camp. For two months she was held captive: forced to work by day, bound and raped by night. Eventually Nyachan (not her real name) escaped on foot to a UN base outside the state capital, Bentiu, where she was reunited with her five children, and where we met a couple of months later.
Women held as sex slaves in South Sudan ‘rape camps’
AFP, September 2015
One woman was abducted by soldiers and taken to a military camp, tied up and raped repeatedly for two months. Another was kidnapped with her 15-year-old sister and raped every night for five nights. A third was taken to a forest with her 12-year old daughter where both were raped.
The best pizza in Mogadishu
AFP, May 2015
The first time I went to Mogadishu there were soldiers on the roof of the airport terminal and a crashed cargo plane on the apron with a rocket-sized hole in its fuselage. I wore body armour pretty much all the time, was woken by explosions at night and ducked rifle fire by day. That was five years ago. I was back again recently and went out for a pizza, at night.
In Kenya, the end is nigh for northern white rhinos
AFP, February 2015
This is what extinction looks like. No meteor from outer space, no unstoppable pandemic, no heroic, ultimately futile last stand. Instead poor sperm, weak knees and ovarian cysts mark the end of a lifeline cut short by human greed, ignorance and indifference. With just five northern white rhinos left on earth, the animal's end is inevitable.
The next Darfur?
The New Republic, June 2013
The squat, tin-roofed buildings of the Mother of Mercy Hospital lie surrounded by rocky hills in a natural amphitheater in Sudan’s rebel-held Nuba Mountains. The hospital was made for 80 patients, but last month there were four times that number. Beds lined the corridors and the outside verandas. Injured civilians and wounded soldiers lay alongside the sick, diseased, and malnourished.
In Abyei
London Review of Books, June 2011
Last month the Northern Sudanese army, helped by Misseriya tribesmen, attacked the disputed town of Abyei, which lies on the border between North and South Sudan. President Bashir said the invasion, which was preceded by artillery and aerial bombardments, was in retaliation for an attack on his own troops. Most of those who live in Abyei, which has a population of 40,000, are Southern Sudanese – and thousands more returned there from the North in the weeks before and after January’s independence referendum.
Sudan prepares to break apart
The Nation, January 2011
“The suffering of southerners was created in colonial times," says Peter Lam, a retired teacher in his 70s from Malakal, a trading town in Sudan where north meets south on the banks of the Nile River. As Sudan’s second independence approaches, we are discussing the first, and what has gone wrong.
Rewilding the UK one abandoned lot at a time
National Geographic, August 2022
“A big thorn bush and a load of brick rubble,” says Sarah Smith, recalling the pre-pandemic state of her printing company’s yard on the outskirts of this medieval east England city.
A couple of years on, it has been transformed into a miniature mosaic of wildflowers, grasses, lavender, and poppies. There are ponds, a rock garden, a vegetable patch, herbs, and a little compost heap decomposing merrily in the sun. Birdsong battles with the thrum of the refrigeration unit at the meat wholesaler next door, bees stock up on nectar as they pass by the warehouses, and field mice scurry through the chain link fence in search of shade, seeds, and insects. It is messy and bursting with life.
The Rift
Aeon, January 2023
We are restless even in death. Entombed in stone, our most distant ancestors still travel along Earth’s subterranean passageways. One of them, a man in his 20s, began his journey around 230,000 years ago after collapsing into marshland on the lush edge of a river delta feeding a vast lake in East Africa’s Rift Valley. He became the earth in which he lay as nutrients leached from his body and his bone mineralised into fossil. Buried in the sediment of the Rift, he moved as the earth moved: gradually, inexorably.
A whale in the desert
Emergence, December 2021
At the foot of a ridge of successive hills, sparsely wooded with thorny acacias, lies a plain of shrubs, sand, and gravel. The sun overhead is relentless, the sky cloudless, as it has been for months now. It is June, the depths of the dry season, the land arid as an abandoned well, the hot wind an empty promise. Cast in relief against the austere beauty of the land is a dark, volcanic outcropping to the distant north that is visible for many miles in every direction, while to the east shimmers the haze of Lake Turkana, a body of water that sprawls across northern Kenya like a sluggish crocodile. In this part of the country, there are no paved roads, no piped water, no electricity poles, no brick buildings, no school, no shops, and no crops. The landscape is coursed with dry riverbeds, prone to long droughts and occasional floods; there is hot sand underfoot, and thorns on every branch and stem.
Strong foundation
Monocle, March 2021
An embassy is commonly a fortress or museum but in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, the French mission is a total manifestation of diplomacy: soft power in the hard form of timber, stone and concrete. It was designed with the environment in mind but also with aesthetics and, of course, security as priorities. The quiet compound sits on a hilltop between two valleys sloping towards the narrow, murky Getathuru river and, beyond that, Nairobi’s Karura Forest. The embassy’s lawns and stands of mature bombax, cedar, cypress, fig and jacaranda can make it feel more like an extension of the woodland sanctuary than a seat of international diplomacy.
Could universal basic income change aid forever?
Prospect, June 2020
The seventh of every month is a joyful date for the people of Magawa, a diffuse village lost in the lushness of rural western Kenya, which lacks electricity, paved roads and mains water. The villagers’ phones ping in unison telling them that another instalment of £17 has been transferred to their accounts. It’s been this way for four years and will continue for another eight because the villagers are participants in the world’s largest-scale, longest-term study of universal basic income (UBI).
Murder by translation
Tortoise, November 2019
In the video of their deaths, Zaida Catalán and Michael J. Sharp are shepherded, shoeless, through scrubby forest. The two United Nations investigators, whose job it was to recommend human rights abusers and arms embargo busters for sanctions, were killed on a Sunday afternoon in March 2017 in Kasai, a southern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo that is larger than the United Kingdom but with barely a stretch of unpotholed paved road.
The bloody toll of Congo’s elephant wars
GQ, April 2018
Fifteen shots felled the elephant. It was a few weeks into Congo's springtime rainy season, and the animal, an adult male, collapsed among dense green stalks of yard-high grass. A few miles away, Dieudonné Kanisa, a compact and muscular Congolese ranger, heard the shots as he patrolled the northern bank of the meandering Garamba River, looking for poachers. With his four fellow rangers beside him, Kanisa moved toward the gunfire.
After years of progress, a deadly setback in Somalia
New Yorker, October 2017
The district of Hodan, in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, exemplifies the city’s transformation in recent years. Visitors can find open-air pizza restaurants, ice-cream parlors and shisha bars, hotels and restaurants, barrow boys hawking bananas and mangoes, and taxis and cars honking their way through the throng. Pretty much every day is busy, but Saturdays are especially so. This past Saturday, a massive truck bomb detonated in Hodan, killing more than three hundred people, an unprecedented death toll in Somalia which may rise as bodies are hauled from the wreckage.
‘They’re like the mafia’: the super-gangs behind Africa’s poaching crisis
The Guardian, August 2017
Late on 6 June 2014 Kenyan police, acting on a tip-off, raided a used car lot in Mombasa’s industrial area. Inside Fuji Motors East Africa Ltd, in one of the lock-ups, they found two tonnes of ivory. Days earlier a white Mitsubishi truck, its paperwork claiming “household equipment” but in fact carrying more than 300 elephant tusks secreted beneath a tarpaulin, had pulled into the yard on Mombasa Island’s dirty northern fringe, far from the tourist hotels and beaches for which the city is famous.
Do dope-smugglers also peddle ivory?
The Economist, February 2017
When a middle-aged Kenyan called Feisal Mohamed Ali was found guilty in July 2016 of possessing more than two tonnes of ivory and sentenced to 20 years in jail, conservationists welcomed the verdict as a victory for elephant protection. An “ivory kingpin” had received his comeuppance, dealing a powerful blow to those behind a scourge that threatens the survival of Africa’s elephants.
That elusive peace
The Economist, October 2015
Holding court beneath a neem tree in a walled compound next to a mud hut with a satellite dish, Stephen Taker Riak Dong, the acting governor of Unity State, cheerfully dismisses talk of economic collapse. Bentiu, his state’s administrative capital, is a wreck after 21 months of war. It looks as if a cyclone has scattered its shack-like dwellings. Abandoned vehicles rust in the grass. Herds of looted cattle are guarded by men with AK-47s. Unity once accounted for much of the country’s oil but now produces none.
Maximum sun protection
Monocle, July 2015
To get to Japan’s only foreign military base you pass a whitewashed mosque, cross a disused colonial-era railway line and turn onto an unfinished dirt road where a fine fog of choking dust is thrown up by rumbling trucks. The 12-hectare base in Djibouti is next to an airport a few kilometres from the sea, occupying a scorched chunk of desert and rock on Africa’s northeast coast that is among the most sought-after military property on Earth.
Hearts and mines
Delayed Gratification, April 2015
On a cool Tuesday morning in August 2009 Campbell Bridges awoke to shafts of dawn light falling across his plank-walled bedroom high in the boughs of a white flowering mwarange tree. At seventy-one years old Bridges was still a fit, strong, bear of a man. He shuffled out onto the rickety balcony to stand in the brisk morning air.
The Smack Track
The Economist, January 2015
Experts are calling it the African “Smack Track”: a circuitous route to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan to Europe, passing through east Africa. Two drug busts in November, netting 712kg of the stuff, closed a record year for heroin seizures off the coast of Kenya. The haul is less a sign of improved policing and more evidence of the growing importance of the route.
How Timbuktu saved its books
Harper’s, February 2013
I first met Abdel Kader Haidara in happier times. It was five years ago, and I had come to see his family collection of ancient manuscripts, which were stored in a grand house midway down one of Timbuktu’s sand-blown roads. Inside, researchers and archivists were working to organize, digitize, and display some of the 45,000 manuscripts Haidara and his family had collected and safeguarded for generations.
The machine gun preacher
The Times Magazine, April 2011
The Rev Sam Childers leans back in a plastic chair, crosses his tattooed, bear-like arms over a broad expanse of chest and regards me from behind wraparound sunglasses. Finally, after an unnerving minute, a smile gradually spreads out beneath his ragged and greying walrus moustache and he chuckles. “I never said I killed anybody, did I?” says the man who calls himself the Machine Gun Preacher. “I never shot anybody that didn’t need shot. If a gun’s pulled on you, you shoot.”
Thorn of Africa
New Statesman, February 2010
After dark, the dull thud of mortars and the staccato popping of machine guns come more frequently. Sometimes the explosions make it hard to sleep, so I lie awake counting, learning to read the Mogadishu soundscape: one . . . two-three . . . four. Pauses follow sequences of explosions like Morse code, each bullet and mortar landing somewhere, ending or ruining a life.
Conservation that lasts
National Geographic, July 2021
Outside the health clinic in Biliqo, a hot wind whips up the dirt. It tugs at the shreds of material caught in the thornbushes, whirls discarded plastic bottles across the ground, and chases the tail of Madina Kalo’s indigo hijab as she stands in the clinic’s rough wooden doorway. It’s midyear—northern Kenya’s main dry season—and the land is parched by the sun, the color palette bright and blown out, like an overexposed photograph.
Into the future
Monocle, March 2021
Hidden within a mid-rise block in a leafy Nairobi suburb are the offices of a company with a lofty goal: revolutionising retail business in Africa. Founded in 2014, Twiga Foods has a simple premise. Acting as a logistics connector, it pulls together small retailers and links them to farmers. “In Africa the retail structure is informal and fragmented: 80 to 90 per cent are the retailers you see on the streets – the dukas, the kiosks – and that creates an inefficient supply chain,” says Peter Njonjo, Twiga’s 44-year-old co-founder and CEO.
Balance of power
Monocle, March 2020
Occupying a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic Ocean to form continental Africa’s westernmost point, the congested, fast-growing city of Dakar has always drawn visitors to its beaches and jazz joints. But today, Senegal’s capital is pulling in investment, attracting new residents and experiencing an infrastructure boom that is reshaping its future.
The McMillan Memorial Library
The Fabulist, May 2019
On a recent February morning, the street in front of the McMillan Memorial Library in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, took on a Victorian air. Shoeshine booths with high chairs and footstools—piled with polish, brushes, and buffers—bookended the library’s fifty-yard spiked iron fence, and young men hauled handcarts back and forth, loading and unloading goods for a few shillings a day. I half expected Mr. Pickwick to make an appearance.
A deadly election season in Kenya
The Atlantic, January 2018
Two days after her husband was shot in the head on a soggy October afternoon, Dorothy Achieng sat on a wood-framed sofa cradling their one-year-old daughter Maya. Around her sat a dozen friends and relatives, quietly commiserating. In front of her, two photographs of her handsome husband lay on a knee-high wooden table; in each picture, he’s posing and smiling directly at the camera.
The judges who defied the president: why Kenya’s election is being rerun
New Statesman, October 2017
It’s a rare thing for a judge to become a folk hero, and rarer still for one to defy a president and overturn an election result – but that is what happened in Kenya last month. On 1 September, Chief Justice David Maraga – ascetic, God-fearing, 66 years old and with a perpetual look of mild amusement – declared President Uhuru Kenyatta’s 54 per cent victory in the August election to be “invalid, null and void”. The election commission was blamed for mishandling the presidential poll so badly (it was “neither transparent nor verifiable”) that it is scheduled to be run again on 26 October.
Kenya’s most famous critic of politicians runs for political office
New Yorker, July 2017
On a March afternoon, as gray clouds gathered overhead, Boniface Mwangi procrastinated outside the walled Kariokor Market, in Nairobi, scrolling through text messages on his iPhone. Mwangi is thirty-four years old and a well-known political activist whose tactics frequently put him at the center of attention. On that day, however, he was entering the narrow, crowded alleys of the market not to protest government corruption—his signature issue—but to campaign for a seat in parliament, and he was nervous.
A struggle for land and survival in Kenya’s restive highlands
AFP, February 2017
The broad plains of Mugie, a huge estate on a high plateau northwest of Mount Kenya, are crisscrossed with cattle trails and the wildlife is mostly gone. The knee-high grass remains, but not for long, reckons manager Josh Perrett. Tensions between semi-nomadic pastoralists and settled landowners are nothing new, nor is competition between livestock and wildlife, but in Kenya's central Laikipia highlands they are taking a destructive, sometimes violent turn.
‘Close your eyes and pretend to be dead’
Foreign Policy, September 2015
Simon Belcher lay on his front beneath a black Range Rover, breathing deeply, wanting to unsee the pile of mangled bodies a few yards in front of him. He turned his head toward his wife, Amanda, who was hiding beneath a white 4×4 to his right. “I love you,” he mouthed silently before resting his head on the pavement.
The end for elephants?
Earth Island Journal, June 2015
Koyaso Lekoloi shot his first elephant in anger. The hundred or so that followed he killed for money. During nearly two decades as a poacher, bandit, thief, and alleged murderer Lekoloi killed more elephants than any other individual in northern Kenya until, tired of life on the run, he decided to give up poaching.
Firing squads, blast walls and dangerous diplomacy in Somalia
AFP, February 2015
A navy flak jacket over his sky-blue shirt, Neil Wigan peered through the bulletproof glass window at six uneven wooden poles in front of a sand dune. “There are more of them now,” the British ambassador to Somalia said, driving past the execution posts that convicts are tied to before being shot by firing squad. “It isn’t a particularly reassuring sign of progress.”
Take off
Monocle, October 2013
At Aden Abdulle International Airport the chaos starts at 06.30. The outermost steel security boom is raised and the stream of passengers makes its way through five separate security checkpoints and flows on past the blast walls and barbed wire into the concrete terminal. Midway through the morning rush, airport worker Abdul Kani takes stock of the familiar scene.
Hell’s kitchen
Delayed Gratification, July 2012
For a quarter of a century, as his home city of Mogadishu was engulfed by civil war, Ahmed Jama lived abroad. He had been lucky enough to escape, first to Kenya, then Uganda, then the UK, where he studied catering in Solihull and opened his first restaurant in London, on the Fulham Palace Road.
One man’s Rwanda
Columbia Journalism Review, January 2011
There had been ethnic massacres in Rwanda before, but nothing on the scale of the genocide that began in April 1994. The killing had been over for nearly a year when a young American reporter, Philip Gourevitch, set foot in Rwanda for the first time the following May. The bodies of the dead were reverting to bone but memories were still raw. Gourevitch wrote of accidentally crushing a skull beneath his foot, so thick were the dead at a massacre site, and of the eerie emptiness of a country where so many had died so violently and so recently.
The invisible country
Virginia Quarterly Review, January 2010
As we sped through the dusty heat of rural Somaliland on one of the region’s few paved roads, an armed escort behind us and the hills of Ethiopia ahead, Dr. Adan Abokor told me his story. Abokor is sixty-two years old with thinning, gray hair, and his steady, measured voice can mask his emotions, but his energy is undiminished, and his memories of 1982 are still raw. “I was a member of the Hargeisa Group,” he began.