Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship

By Anjan Sundaram

The author of the acclaimed Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo now moves on to Rwanda for a gripping look at a country caught still in political and social unrest, years after the genocide that shocked the world.
 
Bad News is the story of Anjan Sundaram's time running a journalist's training program out of Kigali, the capital city of one of Africa's most densely populated countries, Rwanda. President Kagame’s regime, which seized power after the genocide that ravaged its population in 1994, is often held up as a beacon for progress and modernity in Central Africa and is the recipient of billions of dollars each year in aid from Western governments and international organizations. Lurking underneath this shining vision of a modern, orderly state, however, is the powerful climate of fear springing from the government's brutal treatment of any voice of dissent. "You can't look and write," a policeman ominously tells Sundaram, as he takes notes at a political rally. In Rwanda, the testimony of the individual—the evidence of one's own experience—is crushed by the pensée unique: the single way of thinking and speaking, proscribed by those in power.
 
A vivid portrait of a country at an extraordinary and dangerous place in its history, Bad News is a brilliant and urgent parable on freedom of expression, and what happens when that power is seized.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780385539579

Anjan Sundaram

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

Reviews for Bad News

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A whole slew of words can be used to describe how I felt on the completion of this book: appalled, angry, misled, misinformed and uninformed and just generally devastated. Hired to run a class in Rwanda for journalists, the author whom had reported on the situation in the Congo, finds journalists who are afraid for their lives. Seems things are not a democratically rosy in the Kagome regime as have been reported. After the genocide rocked the country, Kagame seized power and has ruled by intimidation, threats, fear and murder. Journalists must use word games timescale the attention of this regime because criticism carries grave consequences not only for the journalist but for his family. And many countries, including my own, give this government millions of dollars in aid and hold his country up as the epitome of reform. Seriously? How screwed up is that? What is the matter with this world?Reading this book one learns not only the problems of the journalists but of regular people swept away by what is going on and just trying to survive. The memorials of those victims of the genocide are run by the coup try are used more as a fear factor than a dedication. The United Nations is an ineffective body that generally looks the other way or chooses to not see so they do not have to confront the truth. A small book in pages but large in content, written clearly and concisely. Eventually the author's program is shut down because there are no more journalists to train. The right of reporting and the need for intensive reporting can not be overstated but is often the first thing to be threatened and taken away in these dictatorships. The appendix lists the reporters whom have been killed, threatened or who have left, naming them and what happened to them. An important book, I think but a devastating one.