Journalists in Zimbabwe

NPR has a feature on how Zimbabwe represents inhospitable terrain for journalists. One journalist explores why:

In Zimbabwe, practicing journalism is forbidden. Reporters caught working without government permission face beatings, long prison sentences, or worse. The job becomes especially perilous when the story about the local police force, focusing on police brutality

So why do reporters like myself take the risk? Some do it for the thrill, others for the fame. Others do it because they knew Zimbabwe before it became the police state dictatorship it is today and they feel morally obligated. I do it because I know a lot of Zimbabweans. They are wonderful people, who don't have a voice to tell their stories. I also do it because I can.

I certainly wonder what will happen the next time I am in Zimbabwe. Of course there is an element of self-aggrandizement in the speculation — the odds, after all, are that nothing will happen. At the same time, it would not take more than a few seconds of snooping and all of my identities would strip away — professor, American, etc. — and I’d be marked down into one category, however much I denied it: Journalist, and a hostile one at that.

Hostile, of course, meaning to Robert Mugabe and his regime, and not to Zimbabwe and its people.  But in any authoritarian state, opposing the leader is tantamount to opposing the state. Oppressive states always silence journalists and other potential critics, especially outsiders, if it is at all possible to do so. Information is dangerous for people like Mugabe, who accuse his critics of trafficking in untruths. The stronger the accusation the more likely it is that the targets of his ire have identified real truths, which are the most damning.