Bad News

In 2009, Anjan Sundaram began a journalist's training program in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Often held up as a beacon of progress and modernity in Central Africa, the regime of President Paul Kagame—which took over after the 1994 genocide ravaged Rwanda’s population—has been given billions of dollars in Western aid. And yet, during Sundaram’s time there, almost every reporter he instructed was arrested or forced to leave the country, caught in a tightening web of strict media control.

With Bad News, Sundaram offers an incredible firsthand look at the rise of dictatorship and the fall of free speech, one that’s important to understand not just for its implications in Rwanda, but for any country threatened by demands to adopt a single way of thinking.  

ANJAN SUNDARAM is the author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship and Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo. An award-winning journalist, he has reported from central Africa for the New York Times and the Associated Press. His writing has also appeared in Granta, The Guardian, Observer, Foreign Policy, Politico, Telegraph and The Washington Post. His war correspondence from the Central African Republic won a Frontline Club Award in 2015, and his reporting on Pygmy tribes in Congo's rainforests won a Reuters prize in 2006. His work has also been shortlisted for the Prix Bayeux and the Kurt Schork award. Stringer was a Royal African Society Book of the Year in 2014. Anjan graduated from Yale University.