Bad News Paperback by Anjan Sundaram

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2016-11-15)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 208 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780345814838
• Item Weight: 226.8 grams
• Dimensions: 20.32 x 13.72 x 1.52 cm

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.

About the Author

ANJAN SUNDARAM is the author of Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo. He is an award-winning journalist who has reported from Africa for a decade for The New York Times, the Associated Press and other publications. His writing on Africa has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Granta, Observer, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fortune, and the Washington Post. He has been interviewed on African affairs by the CBC, the BBC, and Radio France Internationale. He received a Reuters journalism award in 2006 for his reporting from Congo. Anjan graduated from Yale University. The author lives in New Brunswick.