Her work included important information from Pulitzer on cocaine crisis in the 1980s, coverage of the effects of racism and its abolition in South Africa she went there to The Washington Post for the first time in 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years [1] and a life report in New York City.
Her 2003 book, Mandela, Mobutu and Me, is a critically acclaimed memoir chronicling her four-year term as chief of The Washington Post's African bureau and was nominated for the National Community of Black Writers' Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in 2004.
After her return to the U.S., Duke served as The Washington Post's New York City bureau chief for a year.
She later returned to Washington, D.C., and wrote long-form features for the Style section, eventually becoming editor and retiring from the paper in 2008.
[2] She immediately began work on a second book, for which she was awarded a fellowship from The Alicia Patterson Foundation.