Bad News
Last Journalists in a Dictatorship
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Author of the acclaimed Stringer, praised by Jon Stewart as "a remarkable book about the lives of people in the Congo," Anjan Sundaram returns to Africa for a piercing look at Rwanda, a country still caught in political and social unrest years after the genocide that shocked the world.
Bad News is the story of Anjan Sundaram's time teaching a class of journalists in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. The current Rwandan regime, which seized power after the genocide in 1994, is often held up as a beacon of progress and is the recipient of billions of dollars each year in aid from Western governments. Underpinning this shining vision of a modern orderly state, however, is a powerful climate of fear springing from the government's brutal treatment of any voice of dissent. "You cannot look and write," a policeman tells Sundaram as he takes notes at a political rally. As Sundaram's students are exiled, imprisoned, recruited as well-paid propagandists, and even shot, he tries frantically to preserve a last bastion of debate in a country where the testimony of the individual is crushed by the ways of thinking prescribed by Paul Kagame's dictatorial regime.
A vivid portrait of a country at an extraordinary and dangerous place in its history, Bad News is a brilliant and urgent parable on the necessity of freedom of expression and what happens when that freedom is seized.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Sundaram (Stringer) takes an affecting, if draining, look at conditions in Rwanda from April 2009 to December 2013. Focusing on his experiences with a program that trained Rwandans as journalists, he describes his relationships with his students and his struggle, as President Kagame's government grew more repressive, to find new ones. The book opens with Sundaram investigating the sound of an explosion, only to be informed by a police officer that he imagined it. This moment of state-mandated disconnection between reality and perception is just the first of many the book explores, at times powerfully. The cumulative effect, however, is exhausting. Students come and go from Sundaram's class, but there are a few that he clearly admires and considers friends. Gibson, a student of particular talent, struggles after being placed under government surveillance. Moses, another such student, is a survivor of the genocide, and one of the most poignant moments occurs when Sundaram accompanies Moses to a genocide memorial. These relationships add a measure of warmth to a book that comes to feel endlessly bleak. Despite the wearying grimness, this is an important book for students of political science, modern history, and journalism.
