Ruth Maclean is the West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, based in Senegal. She joined The Times in 2019 after three and a half years covering West Africa for The Guardian, reporting on the chocolate industry’s devastation of the rainforests in Ivory Coast, the government’s cover-up of a rape crisis in the Democ
ratic Republic of Congo and tensions between herders and farmers in the highlands of Nigeria. She grew up in southern and East Africa and, as a reporter, was based in Mexico City, London and Johannesburg before moving to Dakar.