“Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive,” is a three-part exhibition of photographs from the Walther Collection, curated by the South African scholar Tamar Garb, with works that range from late-nineteenth-century photographs from southern Africa to pictures by present-day African and African-American artists. The final installment of the series, “Poetics and Politics,” is currently on view at the Walther Project Space, in Chelsea.

Click-through for a slide show of photographs from “Distance and Desire,” with captions abbreviated from the catalogue, followed by a Q. & A. with Garb: http://nyr.kr/10VCuoK

(Source: newyorker.com)

In Guillaume Bonn’s remarkable photographic essay “Silent Lives,” the relationships between members of Kenya’s white, Asian, and affluent black communities and their black servants are vividly and disquietingly examined.

As Bonn writes, “For a large number of Kenyans, employment as domestic servants underline the seismic disparities in a country where over fifty percent of the population live on less than a dollar a day while others reside in stately homes and colonial estates.” Bonn knows all about such awkward social dichotomies, for he is a product of them—he is a white African, whose great-grandfather took part in the French military conquest of Madagascar in 1884-86 and then settled there. Bonn’s grandfather was born in Africa, as was his father, and so was he. Bonn grew up mostly in Kenya. 

For a long time, Bonn said, he thought about doing a project on nannies. “I often wondered, all these years, what had happened to all the ones my parents had hired to take care of me when I was a kid. I realized that I knew nothing about them, and I barely remembered their names, where they came from and what their personal stories were.

…the employers and employees in this series [exist] in uneasily close proximity to one another, intimately bound but forever distant.

Click-through for a slideshow of Guillaume’s photos, and more from Jon Lee Anderson on this social dichotomy in Kenya: http://nyr.kr/ZdPlhH

(Source: newyorker.com)

Alexis Okeowo on the kidnapping of a family in Cameroon, terrorism in West Africa, and what all of this means for France and the U.S.: http://nyr.kr/13gkQ1A

(Source: newyorker.com)

James Verini on the first-ever Presidential debate in Kenya, held last week, and Kenyan tribal politics: http://nyr.kr/UIT35V

Photograph: AP.

Lila Azam Zanganeh on all that will be lost with the destruction of Timbuktu’s ancient libraries: 

Since the fifteenth century, Timbuktu had been an epicenter of commerce on the trans-Saharan caravan route, but also, thanks to its thriving mosque and university, an oasis of learning and literacy. Founded between the eleventh and twelfth centuries by Tuareg tribes, the city soon housed scholars and scribes within its walls. These scribes copied countless works on topics ranging from political science, history, and theology to astronomy, botany, and poetry. Arabic and, at times, Fulani, Songhai, or Bambara texts were recopied on camel shoulder blades, sheepskins, tree bark, and even papers from Italy. Some were illumined with gold leaf, with frail calligraphy presenting significant stylistic variations. The surviving manuscripts, including one in Turkish and one in Hebrew, span the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Thus a written history of Africa was constructed, including the wondrous “Tarikh Al-Sudan,” a storied chronicle of West Africa.

…The disappearance of even a section of the city’s ancient libraries conversely represents no less than the death by fire of old and ancient men and women who had so far pursued, with us and between themselves, a quiet but immemorial dialogue…

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/VmTAID

Photograph by Horst Friedrichs/Anzenberger/Redux.

(Source: newyorker.com)

This week, the photo collective Everyday Africa, a project focussing on images of daily life in Africa, will be posting to our Instagram feed. Nine photographers across the continent, from Mali to Kenya, are contributing. Follow us @ newyorkermag to see their photos:http://instagram.com/newyorkermag

In this photo: Children play in the ocean in Grand-Bassam, a popular beach community outside of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Photograph by the Everday Africa founder Peter DiCampo.

The Pentagon has yet to meet a military in a desperately poor or hopelessly corrupt country that it does not believe it can train and equip to a professional standard. Pentagon training has in fact strengthened and stabilized professional militaries in many developing countries. Yet some of the militaries that the United States has mentored in North and West Africa are best understood as criminal organizations that happen to wear pressed uniforms and epaulets. The better that some of these students learn to shoot while at Fort Benning, and the better the equipment they receive as favored clients, the more effective they become at their enduring vocations—drug smuggling, coup-making, and profitable collusion with pirates and terrorists.

Captain Amadou Sanogo, of Mali, was a longtime mentee of American trainers. He led a coup d’état against Mali’s weak democratic government early last year; after he seized power, reporters who interviewed him noticed that he proudly sported a United States Marine Corps pin on his uniform. As it turned out, Sanogo had been dispatched to the U.S. for training several times. Unfortunately, his skill as a mutineer ran “contrary to everything that is taught in U.S. military schools,” as a Pentagon spokeswoman later put it to the Agence France Presse.

…In the age of Barbary, as today, the most predictable aspect of war—and, for that matter, of American capacity-building—is that it will have unintended, unpredicted consequences.

Continue reading Steve Coll on on kidnapping in Algeria and terrorism in North Africa: http://nyr.kr/VuFaWu 

Photograph by Anis Belghoul/AP.

Alexis Okeowo on Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” which would imprison gays (and originally suggested the death penalty for certain homosexual behavior). Ugandan lawmakers left for vacation last Friday without holding a vote on the bill, and they will not return to work until February, leaving

 …the notorious “Kill the Gays” bill is back in limbo, along with the lives of those in Uganda’s L.G.B.T. community.

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/12yBjLr

Photograph, of Frank Mugisha, by Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty.

So impress this upon your leaders there, in the West there. What they have done to us! After slavery, there was colonization. After colonization there was neo-colonialism instead of independence. We never had independence here—not yet. And now again, you impose Kabila on us with this democracy of complacency. So it’s neo-slavery. We continue to suffer. Go inform your leaders there: if they continue to place at the head of this country these idiots, these imbeciles, these political homosexuals, we’re going to create Al Qaeda à l’Africaine here. That’s what we’ll become.

- Salvador Muhindo

Philip Gourevitch reports from Goma, where, as the violence continues to spread, some Congolese blame the larger international community: http://nyr.kr/TjSzy9

Photograph by Phil Moore/AFP/Getty.