Tom Masland

Outside the presidential mansion in Liberia's crumbling capital city, Monrovia, a billboard urges citizens to think big. The author and resident, Charles Taylor, certainly does. "He is very bold--nothing scares him," says an American businessman who knew Taylor back in the 1970s, when he was a cash-strapped student activist in Washington, D.C., leading protests against the Liberian government.

Like teenagers everywhere, the girls of Khayelitsha Site B understand that breaking up with a boyfriend can be painful. But in this dirt-poor squatter camp on the outskirts of Cape Town, teen love gone sour carries special risks.

The people who stormed into rebel leader Foday Sankoh's Freetown villa on May 8 weren't conducting your usual search-and-seizure operation. Enraged by the renewal of a nine-year-old rebellion in the West African country of Sierra Leone, the crowd wanted blood.

The people who stormed into rebel leader Foday Sankoh's Freetown villa on May 8 weren't conducting your usual search-and-seizure operation. Enraged by the renewal of a nine-year-old rebellion in the West African country of Sierra Leone, the crowd wanted blood.

Something, nobody knows what, drew Foday Sankoh back to his wrecked villa. At 5:30 in the morning last Wednesday, a local Muslim cleric, Imam Kabbah Sesay, saw the rebel leader and a bodyguard walking toward him on Dirty Road in suburban Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone.

Two Sierra Leone detectives were poking around Foday Sankoh's looted villa, high on a ridge overlooking Freetown. A huge crowd had gathered last Friday in the stadium below for a state funeral for those who died when a protest against Sankoh turned bloody.

It was the first phone call David Rasnick ever received from a head of state. When the San Francisco biochemist's telephone rang last Jan. 21, South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, was on the line.

The militants often arrive in Zimbabwean government-owned vehicles. They march onto white-owned farms, push down the gates and take possession of land they say was stolen from their ancestors a century ago by British colonists.

It began as a street protest. the 5,000 demonstrators gathered at churches, then marched on the provincial governor's office. As they moved, they beat on gongs, scrawled graffiti on the walls and waved placards protesting a plan to extend the use of Sharia law in Kaduna, a largely Muslim province in northern Nigeria.

Even on the mean streets of Homa Bay, a fishing center of 750,000 on Lake Victoria, the children stand out: Kenya has 350,000 AIDS orphans, and 35,000 of them live here.

The man who called himself Nassor had an honest face. Hired on that basis a year ago as the assistant chef at Burger World, outside Cape Town, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, 26, turned into a dream employee. "Nothing was too much for him," the restaurant owner, Albin Dalvie, told NEWSWEEK. "We started loving the chap--all of us." Dalvie soon invited Nassor, who said he had fled to South Africa to escape political persecution in Tanzania, to stay in his home without charge.

How does a leader wreck a country's economy and still die an international hero? Julius Nyerere's imposition of Ujamma, or "familyhood," on newly independent Tanzania in 1961 was a signal failure.

First, the five captured guerrillas were handcuffed to trees. Then a physician rubbed a specially prepared gel on their bodies--and stepped back to study the effect.

His keynote address to the United Nations Sept. 20 was a big speech for Thabo Mbeki. In it, the president of South Africa quoted a trendy new book: the world needs a "mobilizing vision," he said, to guide the knowledge-based economy being driven by advances in information technology.

It is the wailing wall of the African Diaspora. The boxer Muhammad Ali came to the Slave House on Senegal's Goreee Island and wept. Singer James Brown made a show of trying to fight the first white person he saw after he left the old stone building.

People in the music business aren't given to superlatives. It's not cool to be impressed by the latest whiz kid to hit town. But even the hippest of the hip give it up when the subject turns to Richard Bona, a slight, shy virtuoso of the electric bass guitar from a mud-hut village deep in Cameroon. "My jaw was on the floor," says New York producer and recording engineer Paul Wickliffe, who first heard Bona during a recent session led by veteran jazz guitarist Larry Coryell. "He was all over the...

To cry out, even to utter a sound during the ritual cutting of their genitalia would deeply embarrass the initiates' families. So when the time comes, very few of the Sabiny women of eastern Uganda balk.

Ever since blacks came to power in South Africa five years ago, people have wondered when the only African country with both a functioning democracy and a world-class economy would step up to its natural role as the region's dominant power.

His parents were teachers steeped in Marxist ideology, and his father helped to found the armed wing of the African National Congress. The son, Thabo Mbeki, became an antiapartheid activist and began to work with Nelson Mandela in 1961.

When Gerald Botha was 13 years old, his best friend died from a shotgun pellet in the head. The two had been with a group of singing, dancing protesters in their tin-shack township, Duncan Village, when South African police pulled up in a yellow van and began firing.

As an NBA star Bill Bradley played his own game. He's doing the same as a presidential candidate, practicing retail politics while other contenders hit the TV talk-show circuit. "[Bradley's] not going on, but he has been invited," says one producer. "He doesn't even return our guy's calls anymore." A Bradley aide confirmed the "talk-show avoidance" strategy. "When we think the voters are paying attention, we'll start talking to them," she says.

IT WAS FINALLY OVER. MOBUTU Sese Seko fled from his capital, and that was the signal for his generals and ministers to line up, with their frightened families, on ""the beach,'' a strip of waterfront from which speedboats would ferry them to sanctu ary on the other side of the Congo River.

A U.S. AIR FORCE AWACS SURVEILLANCE plane circled high over the Straits of Florida. Two navy cruisers, a frigate and 11 coast guard cutters cut through the heavy swells.

THIS WAS PROGRESS. AT LEAST, it looked a lot like progress when Secretary of State Warren Christopher flew to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, last week to witness the first agreement hammered out during 10 days of talks among leaders of the former Yugoslavia.

A rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world." That was the vision Nelson Mandela evoked a year ago this week, as a huge global audience watched him assume the presidency of South Africa.

Move over, Wynton. the hottest jazz trumpet player in the world, at least this year, is no longer Marsalis, who gave the music a fresh new image in the 1980s; it's 25-year-old Roy Hargrove.

Only last year, Gaza seemed to be on the way up. The handshake between Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn promised a new start for the wretched enclave, one of the most crowded places on earth.

The so-called foreign aid program . . . has spent an estimated two trillion dollars of the American taxpayers' money, much of it going down foreign ratholes to countries that constantly oppose us in the United Nations, and many which rejected concepts of freedom.'' With that postelection blast, Sen.

HERE IS SHOOTING, PEOPLE ARE BEING terrorized, people are inside their homes lying on the floor," Rwanda's acting prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, said over a rare phone link to a Paris radio network. "We are suffering the consequences of the death of the head of state." Later, the soldiers came for her.

IT BEGAN AS A PROTEST RALLY. ABOUT 40,000 CHANTING Zulus converged on Johannesburg's financial district last week brandishing spears, clubs and cowhide shields-the same weapons with which their ancestors tried to fight off British rule in the 19th century.