Refugee Road: The Flight from Mali

Refugee Road: The Flight from Mali Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting Ilagala Ag Amin, a 59-year-old Tuareg from northern Mali’s Kidal region in West Africa, is a wiry, compact man who, when I met him at the Mentao Red Cross camp in Burkina Faso, was wearing a blue...

Mali Chaos Continues/PRI’s The World

Mali Chaos Continues | PRI’s The World On Public Radio International’s “The World” with Marco Werman, May 25, 2012: American journalist Peter Chilson  has been in Mali, reporting on the crisis there. He crossed the border from Mali into Burkina...

An Enemy We Could Respect

The curator at the Sikasso Regional Museum here in the south of Mali tosses up his hands and falls on the floor of his office, flat on his back to demonstrate how the city of the same name, once the capital of the African kingdom of Kenedougou, fell to the French in...

Travel without Papers

I’ve just learned that Mohammed, the uninvited passenger sitting in the back seat of my rented car, doesn’t have travel papers. This is an issue because we’re waiting at the Ivory Coast border on our way south, out of Mali. Mohammed is the brother of Abdoulaye Diakité...

Man of the People?

Man of the People? Late the morning of Dec. 3, I’m in a Toyota Land Cruiser in a convoy, fourteen vehicles racing through thick red dust across back roads of the “new” Ivory Coast—the freshly reunited Ivory Coast, six months after the end of last spring’s brief civil...