Guyana, the pint-sized South American republic wedged between Venezuela and Suriname, has spent most of its 57 independent years as the answer to a trivia question nobody asked. Lately, however, the world’s energy giants have started treating it like the last unopened bottle at closing time. ExxonMobil, Chevron, and a chorus of smaller desperados have…
**Botswana: The Last Honest Man’s Oasis in a World of Banana Republics** The Southern African nation that gave the world the world’s largest diamond and, more importantly, the world’s largest elephant herd, has spent 2024 reminding everyone that functioning democracies still exist—somewhere between the Kalahari and the collective Western nervous breakdown. While the rest of…
Kinshasa and Dakar are not, to the casual eye, obvious rivals. One is a humid sprawl of eight million souls perched on the Congo River, where traffic lights are decorative suggestions and power cuts arrive with Swiss punctuality. The other is a breezy Atlantic capital where the ocean smells of fish, hip-hop, and the faint…
