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Travels through Zimbabwe

Ben Sheppard Friday 15 March 2019

"Recently, I was back in Zimbabwe to take a 1,000-km road trip...to report on the country's troubled post-Mugabe 'reboot' and to seek stories away from the news headlines and outside the political scene of Harare," writes Ben Sheppard, a reporter based in Johannesburg.

The stories he found "all offered glimmers of hope for Zimbabwe's future, but they also exposed how much resilience is required on a daily basis... and .... the excitement of being on the road in Zimbabwe was tempered by the sense of its decades of wasted potential during the Mugabe years -- and a gloomy feeling that the country's struggles are far from over."

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AFP / Paul Faith

Brexit borderlands

Joe Stenson Monday 11 March 2019

"Peace came to Northern Ireland when I was just seven years old -- I have no memory of the bitter violence that defined three decades of life in the British province," writes Joe Stenson, a reporter based in Dublin from where he covers the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland for AFP.

"Twenty years on, I spent a week travelling its 500-kilometre border with the Republic of Ireland to speak to locals about the fear that Brexit could bring back the bad old days."

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Mesmerized by orcas in the north

Olivier Morin, François Xavier Marit Wednesday 6 March 2019

When two of AFP’s most experienced photographers went to photograph orcas high above the Arctic Circle, they didn’t expect to fall in love. The setting wasn’t exactly welcoming -- air temperatures of minus 10-15 degrees Celsius, water temperatures barely above zero. On top of that, Mother Nature was not at all cooperative in Tromso, northern Norway. Not only did they have barely two hours of daylight in which to work every day, the skies were overcast and the normally clear waters of the fjords were murky because of all the sediment a storm had kicked up the week before.

But no matter -- after a week of diving with the graceful giants, Olivier Morin and Francois-Xavier Marit fell completely under their spell.

“'It was magical.'”

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AFP / John Macdougall

My love story with Karl

Gersende Rambourg Sunday 24 February 2019

"I had to be sneaky to get in. When you’re a journalist, you sometimes have to be", writes Gersende Rambourg.

"After the Fendi show in Milan, I snuck off to the backstage entrance and told the doorman Karl Lagerfeld was expecting me. The truth is I hadn’t even asked for an interview. But I had nothing to lose!"

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