I gave the President my book. He raised an eyebrow. "Who wrote this for ya, Geldof?" he said without looking up from the cover. Very dry. "Who will you get to read it for you, Mr. President?" I replied. No response. The Most Powerful Man in the World studied the front cover. Geldof in Africa — " 'The international best seller.' You write that bit yourself?" "That's right. It's called marketing. Something you obviously have no clue about or ...

The region of Ethiopia called the Middle Awash, some 140 miles northeast of the capital of Addis Ababa, is a hot, harsh and inhospitable place--a rocky desert punctuated by tree-lined rivers, the occasional lake and patches of lava that are slowly being buried by sediments flushed out of the hills by the torrential rains that come along twice a year. But between 5 million and 6 million years ago, the landscape here was very different. The same tectonic forces ...

In 1960 chocolate-skinned Robert Sobukwe, 38, head of the black nationalist Pan-African Congress, was sentenced to three years in jail for "incitement to riot." As his release date drew near last week, Sobukwe, a slim onetime university lecturer, was hustled from the maximum-security prison in Pretoria to a bleak detention camp on Robben Island in Table Bay, six miles from Cape Town. There he learned, just the day before he was to receive freedom, that South Africa's Parliament had rammed through a ...

In a much discussed speech at West Point two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that the U.S. should get out of the business of fighting the kinds of open-ended ground wars that it has waged for the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Any future Defense Secretary who advocated sending "a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,'" Gates said, quoting Douglas MacArthur. That ...

"Where Do Coloureds Come From?" asks Drum, Africa's leading magazine. Then it answers its own question: "coloureds" come from some of South Africa's oldest, most respected white families. "It is fairly safe to say,'' added Drum , "that where any family has been in this country for more than 200 years, the chance of having no infusion of colour is remote." To Johannesburg's Boer burghers, propping the apartheid barriers raised against South Africa's 9,000,000 blacks and coloreds, the suggestion ...

On Oct. 3, 1993, a mob dragged the bodies of two U.S. soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. The soldiers had been killed in an intense street battle that was later immortalized in the book Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden. But soon after the firefight, U.S. troops were withdrawn from Somalia, and other places--Afghanistan, Iraq--became known as locations where young American soldiers risked their lives. They're dragging bodies through the streets of Mogadishu once again. ...

SOUTH AFRICA Black headlines last week told South Africans of the troubles elsewhere. RACES IN U.S. ON COLLISION COURSE, announced the Natal Mercury, while the Johannesburg Star gave prominence tO THE TRIBAL WAR IN NIGERIA. In the bright and busy nation at Africa's southern tip, however, such difficulties seemed far away. Topless nighties were the talk of Cape Town. In Johannesburg, where last month's antique-car rally had drawn 69 entrants—from a 1907 Diatto-Clement to a 1938 Bugatti—the ...

Rattling racial skeletons There is a well-worn jest in South Africa that the country's "colored problem" actually began about nine months after the first Dutch settlers landed at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. However, in the strictly segregated society that has developed since, it is no laughing matter to suggest that the Afrikaners, who make up the majority of the 4.5 million ruling whites, are anything but racially pure. Thus when a South African academic raised the possibility ...

Correction appended April 28, 2010 This time last year, Somali pirates dominated headlines in the U.S. The hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, a tanker captained by an American, led to a made-for-Hollywood intervention by sharp-shooting Navy SEALS and triggered a media frenzy about the rise of piracy off the Horn of Africa. In the months that followed, a U.S.- and E.U.-led naval task force stepped up patrols around Somalia's coastline and lessened the threat posed by pirates there. ...

Fed up with the delays, cattle seating, security lines and inferior food associated with air travel? Then join the growing number of holidaymakers getting around by rail. Luxury trains offer golden-age-of-travel perks for prices that don't rise with every lurch in the price of oil. They've been jazzed up with wi-fi and DVD players and offer a more intimate connection with a destination. "Trains go right through the center of communities rather than being 30,000 feet in ...