From The Publisher: Dec. 21, 1992

Getting a story out of Africa is never easy, but this week's cover package posed a special challenge for the veteran Africa hands in TIME's Nairobi bureau -- operations central for our correspondents in Somalia. Not only did the army of print and video journalists descending on Mogadishu fill every available hotel room and airplane seat, but they also emptied neighboring capitals of supplies. While our resourceful office manager, Grace Okeyo, scoured Nairobi for bottled water and U.S. currency (a commodity in increasingly short supply), Nairobi reporter Clive Mutiso pulled every string he knew to get TIME space on planes denied...