I spent August in Angola, working on a documentary, and have written this piece on the town of Kuito for Le Monde Diplo. Here’s a one-minute intro to the documentary, which I hope to complete in the new year.
Posts Tagged ‘UNITA’
On Angola in Le Monde Diplomatique
In Africa, Aid & development, International on November 7, 2009 at 5:59 amAlegre’s Story. A World Report from Kuito, Angola
In Africa, Aid & development, International, Travel on September 6, 2009 at 10:51 amI’ve just returned from Angola, where I was filming a documentary on recovery and reconstruction in the town of Kuito, since the end of the war. This is a short radio essay telling the story of one of the people I met there, Alegre. It was broadcast on World Report on RTE Radio One.
Review: Bay of Tigers
In Africa, Aid & development, International on July 7, 2003 at 10:00 amBarely a few pages into Bay of Tigers, Pedro Rosa Mendes’ chronicle of travels in Angola in 1997, we learn “there are more than one hundred million mines buried in seventy countries, close to a tenth of them in Angola”. It is a depressing start, but in ways that may not be immediately apparent. Mendes is wrong: the people removing the mines from the ground in Angola commonly cite estimates of between 300,000 and 1 million mines. And in any case, statistics are the bane of understanding, the foil of insight. 1 million? 10 million? Either way, we are immediately straightjacketed into the conventional responses to the conventional African news: shock, and pity. Read the rest of this entry »
