New York- My field research on North Korean monuments across post-colonial Africa was cited by the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea in their report titled Illicit: North Korea’s Evolving Operations to Earn Hard Currency by Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Non-Resident Scholar, at the Carnegie Endowment.
The ruling Kim dynasty, burdened by decades of sanctions, has had to look far beyond the West to export labor alongside soft power initiatives like monument building across the African continent. I worked on a sort of happenstance story on the phenomenon of various African regimes importing hulking socialist-realist monuments created for them by the Mansudae Overseas Projects in Pyongyang.
I first became aware of North Korean activities in Africa while I was in Addis Ababa working on a story about China constructing the then new African Union headquarters, One afternoon I went to check out a massive Marxist obelisk replete with statues commemorating the valor of Cuban soldiers that Fidel Castro had sent to help Ethiopian forces turn the tide against invading Somali troops attempting capture the ethnic-Somali Ogaden region.
I went to Ethiopia some 15 years ago primarily to visit the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela in the northern Amhara Region. This of course meant spending some time in Addis Ababa, the country’s bustling capital and transport hub. Growing up in the United States in the era of Band Aid/Live Aid and We Are the World, the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s lingered over my boyhood. The roots of the famine we little undrstood by Western publics broadly speaking.