Bad News

Zusatztext 53226998 Informationen zum Autor ANJAN SUNDARAM is the author of  Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship and  Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo . An award-winning journalist! he has reported from central Africa for the  New York Times  and the Associated Press. His writing has also appeared in  Granta !  The Guardian! Observer! Foreign Policy !  Politico! Telegraph  and  The Washington Post . His war correspondence from the Central African Republic won a Frontline Club Award in 2015! and his reporting on Pygmy tribes in Congo's rainforests won a Reuters prize in 2006. His work has also been shortlisted for the Prix Bayeux and the Kurt Schork award.  Stringer was a Royal African Society Book of the Year in 2014. Anjan graduated from Yale University. 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 Rwanda to teach jou...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Anjan Sundaram
• Editore: Doubleday Usa
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Pubblicazione: 12.01.2016
• EAN: 9780385539562
• ISBN: 978-0-385-53956-2
• Categorie: Saggistica > Filosofia, religione > Biografie, autobiografie; Autobiographien (div.)