Every weekend, Longform highlights its favorite international articles of the week. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform's new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.
Aris Roussinos • Vice
A war travelogue through Mali alongside French troops as the "place just like Afghanistan" descends into chaos.
Not long before our grim tour, I had traveled to Mali to witness the aftermath of France's intervention. I was to ride with a French military convoy from the capital of Bamako to Gao-a five-day journey across the desert. We would be the first such convoy to reach the city, where for the previous six months, al Qaeda and their local allies had taken over and created an Islamic theocracy, indoctrinating youths in jihad and enforcing Sharia law on the locals with whips and butcher's knives. French troops had subsequently retaken the city with jets and attack helicopters, and we were bringing them food, bottled water, and generators: the full, ungainly logistics trail of a modern army digging its heels in. As we slogged through the Sahara, villagers periodically appeared from their huts to greet us as liberators, waving tricolours and shouting, "Vive la France!" and "Merci, merci!" But as one gets closer to Gao, the Islamist influence grows, and soon I would find out that not all the locals viewed their French saviors with the same fuzzy glow.
ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP/GettyImages
Ariel Sabar • Washingtonian
The King of Rwanda is 76 years old, 7 feet 2 inches tall, and lives on public assistance in a small apartment in Virginia.
Kigeli V (as in the fifth) might himself have been easily forgotten, an accidental, throwaway ruler of one of the smallest and poorest countries in Africa, the last twitch of a monarchy abolished in 1961 as Rwanda moved from colonial feudalism to independence. Kigeli drifted in exile for decades, trundling from one African sanctuary to the next. A man with a kingdom had become a man with a street corner, like the one in Nairobi where curiosity seekers in the 1980s paid a few shillings to meet someone who'd once worn a crown.
But the genocide and its political aftermath opened a door, if ever so slightly, for Kigeli's return-possibly even his restoration. Arriving penniless in the United States in the early 1990s, Kigeli robed himself in the mythology of the Rwandan monarchy: He was the eye through which God looked upon Rwanda, a father figure above clan, politics, and tribe, singularly qualified to pacify his fractious children.
EPA/GARY I ROTHSTEIN
SUBJECTS:
