I had been thinking about the trip ahead for eight years, and had spent €5,000 to get here. And now, just as I was about to start, I felt like quittin I was standing at a dusty border crossing in the very south of Angola, in southern Africa. Trucks heading north trundled past, accelerating away… read more +

Originally published in the Irish Times. Posted here again now due to Valentino Achak’s Deng’s visit to Dublin. One night in the summer of 2001, I stood in a field, in thick mud, holding a clipboard and a torch. The torch showed up a row of primitive huts, and I moved from hut to hut,… read more +

Aid, Trade and the Angolan Kleptocracy From the Dublin Review of Books, Summer 2008 In early 2001, in a small meeting room in a rehabilitated building in the town of Kuito, in Bié province in Angola, the local security officer for the United Nations told us of a new government policy that was likely to… read more +