Bad News - Last Journalists in a Dictatorship

Zusatztext 45752510 Informationen zum Autor Anjan Sundaram Klappentext In 2009, Anjan Sundaram began a journalist's training program in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Often held up as a beacon of progress and modernity in Central Africa, the regime of President Paul Kagame-which took over after the 1994 genocide ravaged Rwanda's population-has been given billions of dollars in Western aid. And yet, during Sundaram's time there, almost every reporter he instructed was arrested or forced to leave the country, caught in a tightening web of strict media control. With Bad News, Sundaram offers an incredible firsthand look at the rise of dictatorship and the fall of free speech, one that's important to understand not just for its implications in Rwanda, but for any country threatened by demands to adopt a single way of thinking. Grenades I felt swallowed by the wide road, the odd car hurtling uphill, the people hissing on the sidewalk bathed in sodium-vapor orange—a tick-tock had gone off in my mind since the bomb. And were I not so consumed by these emotions I would have savored the immense surrounding pleasantness—the long baguette-like hills on the horizon, the silhouettes of clouds that hung low over our heads, the calm city that offered so much space—that tonight made me feel disoriented, smothered. I searched for charred metal, the smell of burning rubber, any remains of the violence. A blue-uniformed policeman stood near the traffic circle, tall and rigid. I raised a hand to signal him, and spoke almost in a whisper: “Mwiriwe! Good evening! Was it here, the explosion?” “The what?” “The blast. I heard it from down the hill.” “No, no, you are imagining things.” He spoke slowly, shaking his head. “What is that man sweeping, though?” “We always clean the roads.” But I saw fragments shimmer, and I made to take out my camera. His hand moved in front of my face. “No photos! No photos!” “What’s the problem, if there was no explosion?” “Listen carefully. Nothing happened here.” I instinctively stepped back. Everybody in the neighborhood had heard it. I was told the ambulances had come—their sirens silent. But the road was now practically clean. Traffic was circulating, as it always did in Kigali, in orderly fashion. And the center of town, in this, the most densely populated country in mainland Africa, was nearly empty, as usual. The discussion in my classroom two days later only heightened the sense of insecurity. Ten journalists arrived, and one by one took chairs. The mood was somber. The curtains fluttered at the back of the room. A stout young man said the blast had been caused by a grenade, thrown to destabilize the government. The journalist had succeeded in taking photographs, but the police had recognized him and searched his bag. They had found the camera and taken the film—many journalists in my class still used old, outdated equipment—and warned him to wait for the official version of events, not to promote the enemy. There was a murmur of discontent. The faces in the room were all marked—some by hunger, by fatigue, others with deep gashes. I heard a wooden knock pass the classroom door—it was the figure of Moses, hunched over his cane, stumbling over a leg that had been smashed in a torture chamber. Moses, a senior journalist, had been responsible for summoning the students to our training program. He was so respected that not a single person had refused his invitation. The students were newspapermen and -women, both owners of publications and employees. Most were in their thirties, though some were much older than I was. They had been specially chosen for our training program for their independence and ability—the idea was to bring together and professionalize Rwanda’s last free journalists, so they functioned as a skilled unit. I had come to...

Product details

• Authors: Anjan Sundaram
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 30.11.2016
• EAN: 9781101872154
• ISBN: 978-1-101-87215-4
• No. of pages: 210
• Dimensions: 137 mm x 203 mm x 15 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies