Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship by Anjan Sundaram

Author:Anjan Sundaram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DDay Gen Adult
Published: 2016-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

RESISTANCE

We were beginning to penetrate the repression that was growing after the election; we were going into it.

The people had complied with the president’s order, electing him en masse. The press was destroyed. Dissent had been crushed. The people lived in fear and spoke only in praise of the leader. If there was any scent of criticism it came anonymously, as a rumor. If you were talking to someone and they gave you their name—or if you were foolish enough to request their name—you had lost that person, you knew immediately that they would only repeat government propaganda. The same if you took notes in their presence, or if you recorded their voice. It was too risky to disobey, to have any record of it. And the president, growing more arrogant in this power against his critics, had started to say more and more in interviews and on foreign television appearances—“Why do you criticize us from abroad? Why are you insulting our people by saying they are not free? Why don’t you come here and talk to our people, and listen to what they will tell you?”

He said that anyone who criticized the presidential election was insulting the five million citizens who had voted for him, and therefore taking away the dignity of Africans.

It was more than anything a demonstration of his force, a force that he was acutely aware of.

The president said he had looked into the eyes of Rwandans and asked if they were happy. He proclaimed, “They feel we are making good progress together.”

He had declared the government’s position, and these were the words the people knew they must repeat.

And moving within this silent country, oppressed, of words without sense—dissent banished, praise had become meaningless—I felt as if I were moving within a kind of blackness, that everything around us had not been seen, was somehow trapped where it was, that information could not escape.

It made a strange sensation: a feeling that everything I was seeing could be new. The hawk, the tree, the grass on the earth, it could all astonish. I scanned the landscape for signs of change, knowing well that the people could not speak. The idea that if something massive was happening I would have heard about it was lost. I had heard nothing; the country was isolated. Everything was suddenly possible in this place.

I felt I was traveling in a sort of medieval land, many centuries ago—it was perhaps how travelers had felt, that what they set their eyes on had not been seen by any of their people, and was independent of the world.

The farther I traveled from the capital the greater the possibilities seemed. I was waiting for something large to appear.

These were the feelings as I moved deeper within the oppression that had enveloped the country after the election.

• • •

We traveled first by bus to a main city, and from there took a pair of motorcycle taxis to the villages. But already on the way Roger pointed at the hills that we sped past, and shouted out—“Have you noticed? There are no huts.

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