Makini Brice won this year’s OPC Foundation’s Flora Lewis fellowship, which has been extended in the Reuters bureau in Dakar. She has also received a Reuters-National Association of Black Journalists fellowship which will continue her stay for up to an additional nine months.
It was around 4:00 p.m. on an otherwise uneventful day when the bureau chief strolled from his desk to inform the Reuters newsroom about a rumor circulating that the army was holding the president and government ministers hostage in Burkina Faso.
As we’d come to find out, it wasn’t just a rumor. For about a week, the citizens of Burkina Faso took to the streets to protest a coup d’état orchestrated by members of an elite army unit with close ties to the former president, Blaise Compaore, which the transitional government had planned to dismantle. Fears of a civil war were happily averted when coup leader Gilbert Diendere returned power to the interim president and – to my surprise – apologized for the putsch.
I’ve been at Reuters’ Dakar bureau since the beginning of June and I’ve learned a lot so far: the depth of the conflict in northern Mali; the number of coups in Guinea-Bissau; and the meaning of the word “putsch.” The bureau here covers 23 countries in western and central Africa, stretching from Mauritania to the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s not uncommon to start a day in Conakry and end it 2,200 miles away in Brazzaville, especially during the recent unrest surrounding elections.
Before coming to the region, I had studied Journalism and French Studies, with an interest in Francophone Africa. Of course, all my knowledge of the region before stepping foot in Dakar was mainly comprised of research papers written by historians and sociologists and whatever information about sub-Saharan Africa that filtered through to New York. Despite my best preparations before my departure, I certainly could not tell you much about countries like São Tomé and Príncipe and Togo. And although I had freelanced throughout school and used the Reuters wire at the newsroom where I worked before graduate school, I certainly wasn’t a master of Reuters style.
On my first day, my head swirled with the new information, and I didn’t end up finishing work until late in the evening, when I completed a draft of a story about an attack on the Red Cross in an area of Guinea still struggling with Ebola, prompting fears of the disease’s spread across the border to Guinea-Bissau.
Perhaps the greatest lesson that Dakar has taught me though has been one about patience. As someone who had never lived in a majority-Muslim nation before, when I first arrived, I was slightly thrown by the frequent inshallahs (“God willing”) that peppered people’s conversations: “I will see you tomorrow, inshallah”. At the time, I resented the implication that I had so little control over my own destiny. By November, after having waited for hours for the beginnings of press conferences and interviews (once for a full day), begged taxi drivers to drive to the suburbs for accompanying photos and waded through urban floods, I have come to accept that sometimes fate does not reside in my hands.
Tomorrow I’ll have something new to learn, I’m sure. Inshallah.