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First COM Conversations lecture
Persecuted Zimbabwean journalist to urge freedom and integrity in reporting
By David J. Craig
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Geoffrey Nyarota |
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In the dusty streets of Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, rumors spread faster than the wildfires that sweep across the countryside in the summer dry season. Every day, ordinary citizens in marketplaces and restaurants whisper about mysterious arrests and kidnappings, government corruption and land confiscation. They have no expectation that Zimbabwe's state-operated newspapers, The Herald and The Chronicle, will cover such events.
From 1999 to 2003, the Daily News was an indispensable source of information in Zimbabwe. Despite founding editor Geoffrey Nyarota's six arrests on trumped-up charges, the firebombing of his office and printing press, his reporters being beaten by government thugs, regular attacks against the paper's distributors and vendors, and numerous death threats, the independent newspaper never missed an issue. It became the most widely read paper in Zimbabwe, with a circulation of more than 100,000, before Nyarota was forced to flee the country last January. The tyrannical government of Robert Mugabe shut down the paper altogether in September.
Nyarota will present a free public lecture entitled Press Freedom in a World of Censorship, on Tuesday, March 2, at 5 p.m., at the School of Management. The lecture is the first in a new College of Communication series called Conversations, which will feature prominent speakers from film, television, public relations, and advertising, as well as print and broadcast journalism. The lectures will take place at least once a semester “The sad truth is that in too many places in the world today, journalists work at their own peril,” says COM Dean John Schulz. “Nyarota is a person with true integrity, who has been willing to stand up and be counted for what he knows to be right, even in the face of overwhelming odds.”
Now a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Nyarota got his start as a reporter in Zimbabwe in 1978. He says he never seriously considered pursuing a career in the West. “My meaningful role was at home,” he says, “working as an investigative journalist and contributing to the development of a free, independent press.”
After working as a editor at the Chronicle for many years, Nyarota was fired in 1989 for exposing large-scale government corruption. He then traveled, wrote, and taught throughout southern Africa before launching the Daily News, the country's first national independent daily. Among the accomplishments he is most proud of is a series of articles in 2000 about construction contracts for an airport in Harare that went to an unqualified company partially owned by a nephew of Mugabe. The series eventually pressured the dictator to fire a high-ranking government minister notorious for corruption.
While being relentlessly persecuted, Nyarota says, he and his colleagues found courage in the faith placed in them by their fellow citizens. “The public in Zimbabwe regarded the Daily News almost as a salvation, as a savior,” he says. “They would bring information to us with the expectation that allegations would be investigated and exposed. There was no room for fear, because we had an unwritten contract with the public to do our job.”
In his COM lecture, he will implore aspiring journalists to remember that even in liberal societies, pressures exist to compromise the integrity of reporting. “Living in the United States has been quite an eye-opener for me,” says Nyarota, who plans to return to Zimbabwe when friends there deem it safe. He has won numerous awards, including the 2002 Golden Pen for Freedom from the World Association of Newspapers. “I always assumed that journalists in the United States were absolutely free to report as they wish, and maybe they are, but I found that news stories on television and in the papers about the U.S. invasion of Iraq didn't ask many basic, critical questions. It seemed that reporters were preoccupied with the act of the invasion, and that they reported a regurgitation of what the government fed them. The important questions about the war only now are starting to get asked — like whether there was any evidence of weapons of mass destruction.”
Because of Mugabe's draconian media laws, in Zimbabwe journalists remain ever “alert to the importance of preserving our freedom, since it is always under threat,” Nyarota says. “Western journalists must make sure not to take their freedoms for granted. If those freedoms are withdrawn in any way, they must be careful to recognize that it is happening.”
27
February 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations