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Saving the Rosenwald Schools:
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Millennial Men: The Product of Mass Marketing,
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Refugee foster care in Mississippi
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Coming Out Party: Haitian-American Women Step Out
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In the Name of the FatherPhilippe WambaIn For My Sons and Daughters, the South African poet Dennis Brutus conveyed a prophetic message to his children: "Memory of me will be a process of conscious and unconscious exorcism." As noted by chroniclers and scholars of the human experience from Euripides to Freud, coming of age necessitates coming to terms with your parents legacy. In Africa, where a new generation stands poised to inherit control of a continent from elders who are slowly relinquishing their grip on power seized in the 1960s, the future will largely be shaped by the ways in which young Africans selectively embrace or reject their parents example. | |
A Son Confronts Oil Poverty in the Niger DeltaPhilippe Wamba"As much money as they take out of here, this place should look like New York," Ken Wiwa says, gesturing at the passing landscape as his car, chauffeured by his fathers driver, Sonny, speeds southeast from Port Harcourt towards Ogoniland along the areas only major road. The buildings of the city quickly give way to fields of banana and palm trees. Two gas flares, one at a local petrochemical plant, the other burning above the areas lone oil refinery, are visible through the foliage, like palm trees with undulating orange flames in place of green fronds. Dozens of oil trucks are parked at the roadside, awaiting the opportunity to fill up with shipments of gasoline bound for all over Nigeria when the refinery opens on Monday morning. The scenery is lush and green, but except for the road, the nearby industrial plants and the occasional shack, its devoid of construction. Hardly a New York skyline. | |
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Of Birds and BombsMary Anne WeaverI never thought I would ever want to return to Dalbandin, a little desert town of some five thousand people in the Pakistani province of Balochistan. It is one of the least memorable places I have ever been, situated uncomfortably in the middle of nowhere. It has mud-baked streets and a teeming bazaar, and clusters of tiny mud houses that are dwarfed by the soaring minarets of a white marble mosque, which had been built a number of years ago by the Saudi Arabian Defense Minister, Prince Sultan. The town's economy is based on grazing and smuggling, and every man seems to be armed. Dalbandinians are outnumbered by Afghan refugees two to one. |
How Long Will It Last?Mary Anne WeaverThe timing hardly seemed fortuitous. On May 1st, only 24 hours after a controversial referendum in Pakistan, which allowed General Pervez Musharraf to extend his Presidency for an additional five years and, in the process, stripped away the country's last façade of constitutional rule Pakistani officials acknowledged that U.S. ground forces would be permitted to operate inside Pakistan. Their objective: to pursue or ferret out members of al-Qaeda and perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself who were believed to be regrouping here, in the craggy mountains and rolling hills on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier. One Pakistani intelligence official told me that some three thousand or more al-Qaeda fighters and members of the Taliban had slipped across the Afghan border into Pakistan most of them through the tribal areas of the North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan. Even bin Laden himself had been spotted twice in recent weeks, an Afghan intelligence official told the press, just across the border in Pakistan's tribal area of North Waziristan. But diplomatic and strategic constraints had kept the al-Qaeda vanguard beyond the reach of U.S. troops, something that had led to growing frustration, and irritation, in Washington. Musharraf would permit the Americans access, but on his terms. | |