Helen Epstein

In the Despot Archives

“Government officials routinely distort the truth, incite ethnic hatred, treat the legislature and the media with contempt, and appoint partisan judges, while security forces carry out arbitrary arrests, torture and kill people, and run amok in other countries.”

Uganda’s Two Tyrants

Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni both confronted, in different brutal ways, the challenges of governing a postcolonial nation.

The Iron Grip of the CFA Franc

The colonial-era currency limits the economic freedom of the African countries that use it and subjects them to continued French authority.

The Roots of Rwanda’s Genocide

Why have so many Western historians, journalists, and human rights investigators failed to grasp why Hutu Rwandans suddenly started killing their Tutsi neighbors in April 1994?

Steeltown in the Rearview

The images Stephen Shore took in 1977 of scenes from the Rust Belt captured the start of a slow-rolling social catastrophe.

The Truth About Museveni’s Crimes

Despite Western claims that he brought peace to Uganda after years of violence under his predecessors, his regime has been bloody from the start.

In Uganda, Another Museveni Crackdown

As an election approaches, opposition to the strongman’s long, brutal rule is gathering—but it has to reckon with his security state and its international enablers.

Left Behind

While poverty in America is all too real, it’s not the only reason for the epidemic of deaths of despair.

Violence & the Inuit

The Highest Suicide Rate in the World

When I visited Nunavut’s capital in July, virtually every Inuit I met had lost at least one relative to suicide.

Rwanda: A Deathly Hush

How Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front obscured Washington’s role in a particularly bloody period of central African history

The Mass Murder We Don’t Talk About

Judi Rever’s ‘In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front’

Justice Not Done

Congo for the Congolese

A century and a half of malign interference by imperial powers and marauding neighbors is enough. The only way out of this mess is to deliver Congo back to the Congolese.

Who's Cheating Kenyan Voters?

America may not be as neutral in Kenya’s electoral contest as it claims to be.

Kenya: Election & Cover-Up

Another rigged election in Africa is not news. But that US election observers were so quick to endorse it is shocking.

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Uganda's Fake Democracy

If violence breaks out in Uganda in the aftermath of February’s presidential election, it will demonstrate the failure not of democracy, but of the sham version of it under which Ugandans—and so many others in so much of the world—are forced to live.

Uganda: When Democracy Doesn’t Count

Uganda, one of the US’s most important African military allies, will hold presidential and parliamentary elections on February 18. Despite strong opposition, the election may be decided outside the voting booth.

When Mothers Neglect Children