With great live music and the FESPACO film festival, Ougadougou is one of the coolest capital cities, though it reaches 45 degrees Celsius during the dry season. During my two years there, I trained journalists and produced a radio drama series with community radio station Radio Salankoloto.
Top tip – if your plane from Abuja to Kano leaves early without you, don’t take a cab instead. I tried to and, three cars and seven hours later, I felt incredibly lucky to have survived both the roads and the bandits.
Producing this BBC World Serviceradio series gave me an unrivalled opportunity to spend many hours watching Nollywood movies. Often gory, never under-acted, they offer an interesting window into this enormous, chaotic and vibrant country.
Carrying out research with focus groups in Somaliland and Djibouti to evaluate a communications project was really interesting. But getting there involved taking my most terrifying flight ever on a local carrier from Somaliland where the most modern technical items on the plane were people’s mobile phones and the plane’s 1950s wooden light fittings.more…
I visited during an intense period of conflict in Sierra Leone when battle lines shifted between West African peacekeepers and the Liberian-back Revolutionary United Front. I met an inspirational woman, whose life was shattered by rape and violence, who was rebuilding slowly, with great dignity and forbearance.
Graeme Green may have visited Liberia on a tramp steamer – I took the far-less romantic, modern equivalent – an unregistered airline with Ukrainian pilots flying ancient soviet-era aircraft. Monrovia was facing another siege and still bore the scars of the previous two. I learned something of how people survive endless conflict visiting communities in Sinoe County.
I truly owe my survival in Lagos to my taxi driver, who swerved off a congested bridge leading to Victoria Island not a second too soon – there were robbers with guns on the road ahead.
I interviewed women and girls in the Eastern Congo who had experienced sexual violence. The research was used for reports and campaign materials for Save the Children. The sweet voices of these children from this camp set up to demobilise child soldiers only served to underline the harsh impact this conflict has had on the innocent.
The year 2000 saw a resurgence of conflict in Burundi, with the government forcing farmers into the narrow hill top village centres around the capital Bujumbura to starve the rebels of their alleged civilian support. I covered the work of a radio station seeking to promote peace and build consensus during these uncertain times.
As a Canadian, canoeing should practically be in my DNA, but we don’t normally have to navigate between hippos and crocodiles on a morning’s paddle. I found them distracting as I photographed these elephants bathing in the Zambezi river in Zimbabwe’s Mana Pools National Park, which were later published in Geographical magazine.