4 ideas
The book describes a sense of time in which time exists only when people act on it. A bus leaves when it is full and a meeting starts when enough people arrive, so waiting is the normal state rather than wasted time. On this view, time is a relation produced by a gathering or an event, not a fixed schedule that exists apart from people.
In April 1980 Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, a barely literate soldier, killed Liberian President William Tolbert and had members of Tolbert's government publicly shot on a Monrovia beach. He then ruled through his own ethnic group for a decade.
In Rwanda, Hutu and Tutsi were once fluid social and economic categories: cultivators versus cattle owners, and people could move between them. That turned a flexible social rank into a permanent inherited ethnicity, and later mass killings were organized around that ethnicity.
In famine zones and refugee camps, food aid becomes the most valuable resource. Whoever holds the guns controls who gets it, so warlords and armed youths take the deliveries and use them to feed fighters and buy loyalty. Humanitarian supply can therefore sustain the violence that caused the hunger.