There’s a tradition around Africa that when people get their pictures taken, they stare stone-faced into the camera.

To an American eye it looks so severe and dour. My hunch is that it’s because there aren't all that many personal cameras on the continent. Most photos here are taken for formal portraits, passport pictures, ID badges, etc. That's in contrast to the US, where most photos are informal snapshots taken with the millions of cameras that Americans own.

But it hasn’t always been that way. Think of the black-and-white portraits from the 19th century of people like Abraham Lincoln. They're all stone-faced and serious. Back then, picture-taking was a new and rare technology. Having your portrait done was a serious event. No smiles, please.

Well, it’s the same today in Africa. I may be chatting amiably with some person who’s laughing and smiling, but the minute I take out my camera, they get all serious.

So I’ve taken to telling people here about the American habit of saying "cheese" before a picture is taken. They, understandably, think this is quite strange – and begin smiling and laughing at this odd American custom. And that’s exactly what I want. They’re back to their smiling selves. And I get the picture that, to American eyes, looks natural.

Some people assume there's not much business activity in Africa – given the number of wars, famines, and other crises. But I've met loads of spirited entrepreneurs across the continent. There was the former prostitute in the slums of Uganda's capital who was trying to start a hair salon to replace the income she lost when she pledged to give up turning tricks.

There's the former bank messenger who has created a thriving company that gives tours of Soweto, the black urban areas of Johannesburg, South Africa.

There are even the middle-schoolers who love learning about the basics of business.

My wife is getting her MBA here in South Africa, and one of her professors recently offered a business-oriented tour of the township. I asked if I could tag along. Clambering into one of the ubiquitous Toyota vans that serve as taxis, mostly for black commuters, we set off.

Here are a couple of the places we visited:

* A day-care center that uses income from its customers to fund, on a shoestring, an orphanage for babies with AIDS. The director is worried the electricity company is going to turn off their power. My wife's classmates pledged to try to help.

* A BMW repair shop where the owner takes smashed-up BMWs, repairs them, and sells them to aspiring township residents for half the dealer price.

It may be harder to start a business in Africa – given all the obstacles – but for many people it's the only way they can make a living. So they're working hard to create and sustain businesses. Maybe even Donald Trump would be impressed.

Nicole Itano - Correspondent

For any reporter based in South Africa, meeting Nelson Mandela is an increasingly rare treat, and one I’ve had only a handful of times in more than four years here. The legendary anti-apartheid leader doesn’t give many one-on-one interviews these days, although he does hold the occasional press conference or appear at the rare public event. 

In the most recent controversy over his art (see story), Mr. Mandela has spoken only through close associates, like his lawyer, George Bizos. That has led to some speculation, mostly discounted, that they have acted alone and that the fight is actually part of a larger battle for control over his legacy.

The image of the feeble king, surrounded by scheming courtiers, hardly seems to fit Mandela. There is no doubt he is growing old, but there is steel beneath his grandfatherly exterior and his disapproval could still silence most people with a glance.

At his most recent public appearance, late last year in the garden of his house in a suburb of Johannesburg, he looked frail and had to be helped to his chair. Surrounded by his family, he calmly announced that his son had died of AIDS.

His voice slow and measured, he said that there was nothing to be ashamed of. He said he had chosen to tell the world his son had AIDS in hopes that it would help break down the stigma.
Yet even then, in the midst of a personal tragedy, he bantered with reporters and asked after the families of those he knew. A few local journalists who had known him for years called him tata, or grandfather.

When someone adjusted a large, fuzzy television microphone that looked like a dead animal, Mandela laughingly recalled how, as he emerged from prison, someone stuck a similar piece of equipment in front of his face. After almost three-decades of being cut off from the world, he had absolutely no idea what it was. For all he knew it was some space-aged security device. But with the eyes of the world on his every move, he had no time for shock or wonderment. And, he laughed, he soon got used to the cameras.

Now that Mandela is in official retirement, such face time is rare and hard fought over. A colleague from a major European news organization once described to me how, when Mandela agreed to record some AIDS-prevention statements for a radio campaign, experienced correspondents – some famous in their own right – argued over who would hold the microphone. Half the office trouped to Mandela’s house for the recording session, although one person could have done the job.

I’ve seen even the most cynical of foreign correspondents go soft in his presence. Perhaps our admiration is unprofessional, but I like to think that even journalists are allowed to have heroes.
Mandela has never asked for special treatment from journalists, never attacked them for disagreeing with him. I’ve never had more than a handshake, the pleasure of being part of a small crowd privileged to hear a few private exchanges. But it’s true, Mandela in person doesn’t disappoint. He is refreshingly human, full of warmth and a little bit of boyish naughtiness.

He flirts with pretty women and, even now, takes time to meet the local beauty queens. He tells stories, cracks self-deprecating jokes. Sometimes he says things that are slightly sexist, but he’s Mandela and he’s 86, so no one minds.

We’re all far too aware that he won't be around forever.

One of the challenges of covering the recent Pan-African Film and Television Festival (FESPACO) in Burkina Faso has been getting there (and back). There are currently no direct flights between Accra, Ghana, where I live, and Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Buses ply the 600-mile journey every day but I'm frightened by the speed and recklessness of their drivers, so I chose to drive my own car.

Taking a vehicle across borders in Africa involves a certain amount of paperwork. I had to obtain a "green card," which is an international registration certificate that looks just like a passport, a "brown card," insurance cover valid for West Africa, both of which I had before leaving Accra.

At the Burkina Faso border, I had to get a "laissez-passer," a temporary registration card for that country. Yet obtaining these documents and crossing the border took nowhere near the time that I spent on the side of the road dealing with car trouble.

Thank goodness for Africa's roadside mechanics. In every small town along every main road I've traveled in East and West Africa, I've seen veritable strip malls offering tires, welders, body shops, and mechanics of varying skill levels. While a breakdown on the road is never fun, one is rarely far from help. And the help that is almost always both inexpensive and honest.

Before leaving Accra for Ouagadougou, my 1994 Nissan sedan has had its share of problems, but I did all the pre-departure checks I could think of and the car seemed to be running smoothly. I loaded up the car with a journalist friend from Nairobi at 6 a.m. on departure day, turned the key, and nothing happened.

My battery had mysteriously died overnight. I called my mechanic, who left behind his breakfast, dashed to my house within a few minutes, diagnosed the problem and gave me the battery from his truck. He didn't charge me anything.

We travelled about 400 miles that day, arriving at dusk in Tamale, a small city in the semi-arid north of Ghana. The next morning, the car started fine, but made an awful muscle-car rumbling noise. I took a look underneath and could see the exhaust pipe had come away from the manifold. A guy named Ahmed who was sitting beside the road helped me find a welder who fixed the problem within an hour and billed me $2. I gave him $3 for not trying to take advantage of a foreigner in a bind.

About 40 miles down the road, the rumbling began anew. The exhaust pipe was again dangling, the $2 weld hadn't held. The next settlement of any size was called Walewale, where I learned I needed an electric welder instead of a gas welder. At the Hope Hands Fitting and Welding Shop, the electric welder did the job for $4. It has held since.

In the photo above, mechanics at the Hope Hands Fitting and Welding Shop work on my car.

On Sunday, the morning after the film festival's award ceremony (in which the South African film Drum took top honors) I left Ouagadougou carrying a different passenger, a radio reporter from Berlin.

About 80 miles south of the city, as I touched the brakes to avoid a flock of guinea fowl crossing the road, my front right tire blew. And I mean blew. It was ripped to shreds, the steel belts sticking out from the rubber like a mad scientist's hair.

A bunch of children and young men from the nearby collection of huts - a village called Pihgyiri - came to help. I jacked up the car and got the tire off, but when I tried putting on the spare, I discovered that it didn't fit. The used-car salesman in Accra had obviously just given me whatever tire he had lying around, and I'd never checked.

So I flagged down a "bush taxi," in this case a putt-putting Peugeot station wagon with a ripped-out interior, cracked windshield and lack of functioning door handles. It cost $1 to get me and my tire to the next town, Po, six miles further along the highway. There I bought a used tire for $15. The seller took me to a different guy, Sulieman, to fit the tire on the wheel (charge: $1). To do so, he started slapping some substance that resembled a kind of porridge eaten in West Africa. I asked, and he told me that it was precisely that porridge, "gari," made from the pounded flour of the cassava plant mixed with water.

I've never liked cassava, finding it rather gluey. This practice sealed my opinion. It also sealed the tubeless tire quite well to the rim ... it held for the rest of the trip.

But my visits with the roadside mechanics weren't over. North of the central Ghanaian town of Kintampo, something very strange was happening with my electrical system. Turning on the four-way flashers caused my engine to turn off. When I turned off the ignition, the oil light and battery lights lit up. I explained this to the roadside mechanic who came to my aid, and he promptly started attacking the carburetor.

I kept protesting, but only after he siphoned fuel up to the carburetor with his own lips and the car still wouldn't start did he agree to summon an electrician. The electrician then listened to the bizarre symptoms, poked around the fuse boxes and eventually found a loose connection. He didn't state a price, so I gave him $1 and he smiled.

My Nissan and I are now safely back in Accra. But the 1,200 miles of road had some rather nasty potholes, and I think I need new shocks.

Sitting in the fluorescent-lit waiting room of Soweto’s Jozi FM, doing a story on a popular South African radio show called “Cheaters,” I got to talking to two women who said they were there because they’re both being two-timed by a guy named Thabo. Their names are Florence and Portia. They were there that night to try to lure Thabo into the studio – and expose his cheating ways.

As we got deeper into the conversation, I asked them if they thought all men were cheaters. It’s a common belief in South Africa, where many people think having a mistress boosts a guy’s manliness. This phenomenon of multiple partners – among both men and women – is, sadly, one of the reasons HIV/AIDS has spread so fast in this country, where roughly 1 out of 9 people are thought to have the virus. So their answers are a window into whether the AIDS virus can ever be slowed or halted.

“The only way you can stop any man from cheating is to put the muti on them,” Portia said, referring to spells cast by traditional healers, or witch doctors. She added that she didn’t have much faith even in the healers’ abilities to stop men from cheating.

But Florence, clearly the more optimistic of the two, disagreed. “Not all men are bad. But this one is,” she said. “And that’s why I want to expose him.”

Exposing the rotten ones, she implied, would scare the others away from cheating – and perhaps help stop the spread of AIDS.

I’ve just spent several days touring refugee camps in eastern Chad – seeing and talking to some of the estimated 180,000 refugees who’ve fled fighting and ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s neighboring province of Darfur. Their stories are dramatic and often horrific.

But another thing struck me about being there: the grit and stamina of the international aid workers on the scene. Unlike the refugees, who’ve been forced into these dire conditions, the aid workers have chosen to live in one of the more remote and desolate places on the planet, often for months at a time. We spent two nights with a particularly hardy group in the northern town of Bahai, which sits on the rim of the Sahara Desert, a few miles west of the Sudan border and south of Libya.

Bahai is an outpost populated by several thousand people. It’s got only mud-brick buildings and no restaurants. At the local brothel, aid workers tell me, a bottle of beer costs more than a night with a prostitute. It’s a rather stark measure of the value of things in Bahai. Transportation costs make any commodity hugely expensive. And women aren’t valued much in this traditional society.

Aid workers toil seven days a week. It’s not as if there’s much to do on weekends. Their home and office is a four-room adobe building that leaks wildly in the frequent rainstorms.

My first introduction to one of these hardy souls was when we got off the 9-seat airplane at “Bahai International Airport” – a sandy airstrip marked by white stones (see photo below).

After dialing up our hosts on a satellite phone, they told us the two 4x4s sent to fetch us had gotten stuck in the mud.

About half an hour later, emerging out of the sand like a mirage, came Geoff Wordley, a senior emergency manager for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees or UNHCR. “Welcome to Bahai,” he said in a jaunty British accent, turning away our offers of water. This former British submarine officer quickly lept up on one of the nearby 55 gallon drums, pulled out his two-way radio, and began directing traffic among the vehicles sent to rescue the stuck trucks. With the crisis under control, he jumped off the drum, climbed up into the airplane, and flew away, off to another nearby camp, undoubtedly to put out whatever fires had arisen.

Another impressive guy is a French former professional hockey player named Axel (never did catch his last name). He’s been posted to Bahai for 2-1/2 months. That means he hasn’t had a single fruit or vegetable in 10 weeks. The only food available here is meat and rice. “I’m never going to eat rice again in my life,” he groused during one dinner.

During our stay, Axel was the acting chief of the UNHCR Bahai mission. He works 14 hour days, mostly trying to move several thousand refugees in truck convoys from the wadis (muddy riverbeds) they settled in when they first arrived, out to the nearby formal refugee camp called Oure Cassoni.

He was also in charge, for instance, of providing enough water for the handful of international staff to cook and bathe in. That meant coordinating a water truck every couple of days to make a run to the city of Tine. Usually that trip takes 1-1/2 hours. But with the rains flooding the wadis it’s begun to take 8 or 9 hours. It’s no wonder, then, that Axel looked a bit askance at me when I took a bottle of water out of one of the boxes in the office.

Ask these workers why they do what they do, and it’s often a combination of altruism, adventure, and, frankly, pretty good pay.

The most animated I ever saw Axel was just before a goat cookout being put on by the International Rescue Committee, a group of several international aid workers that also live in Bahai. Axel was delightedly shaving off his beard of 2 months, dipping his razor in a bowl of precious water and holding a small mirror to get every last whisker. “Finally a chance to not talk only about transferring refugees out of the wadi,” he said. But during the cookout, Axel sat mostly by himself. Maybe two-and-a-half months of all-refugees-all-the-time has left him unable to partake in small talk about much else.

And besides, a rainstorm came up during the cookout – and we all had to rush back to the UNHCR office and put away computers and clothes, so they wouldn’t get dripped on. So much for a social life in Bahai.