Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship

ISBN-13: 9781408866474 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 208 str.

Anjan Sundaram

Opis

Hearing a blast, journalist Anjan Sundaram headed uphill towards the sound. Grenade explosions are not entirely unusual in the city of Kigali; dissidents throw them in public areas to try and destabilise the government and, since moving to Rwanda, he had observed an increasing number of them. What was unusual about this one, however, was that when Sundaram arrived, it was as though nothing had happened. Traffic circulated as normal, there was no debris on the streets and the policeman on duty denied any event whatsoever. This was evidence of a clean-up, a cloaking of the discontent in Rwanda and a desire to silence the media in a country most of whose citizens were without internet. This was the first of many ominous events. Bad News is the extraordinary account of the battle for free speech in modern-day Rwanda. Following not only those journalists who stayed, despite fearing torture or even death from a ruthless government, but also those reporting from exile, it is the story of papers being shut down, of lies told to please foreign delegates, of the unshakeable loyalty that can be bred by terror, of history being retold, of constant surveillance, of corrupted elections and of great courage. It tells the true narrative of Rwandan society today and, in the face of powerful forces, of the fight to make explosions heard.

Recenzje

Required reading . A superb exposé of a dictatorship as he observes how the tentacles of totalitarianism squeeze the life from a society. Bad News is an important book that should shatter any lingering faith people might hold in Kagame's hideous regime . This is a desolate work, taut prose describing the stifling atmosphere of a nation trapped in fear Guardian

O autorze

Anjan Sundaram is an award-winning journalist who has reported from Africa for the New York Times and theAssociated Press. His writing on various countries in the continent has also appeared in Granta, the Observer, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fortune and the Washington Post. He graduated from Yale and received a Reuters journalism award in 2006 for his reporting on Pygmy tribes in Congo's rain forest. His first book, Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo, was published to great critical acclaim in 2014. In 2015 he won a Frontline Club Award for print journalism for his piece, 'A Place on Earth: Scenes from a War'. @anjansun