From the Globe and Mail subhead: "As award-winning Globe and Mail Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen bids farewell to a place she's come to love, she reflects on how it has changed, and how it changed her."
Hunched behind a low stone wall outside the Taj Mahal Palace and Hotel in Mumbai last week, I took my eyes off the burning building for a minute to do a quick head count: There were at least 300 other journalists in the plaza with me; CNN was live at one end of the plaza, the BBC at the other, and a dozen photographers I know from war zones around the world were crouched in between.
My days of being alone on the big story appeared to be over.
In five years as this newspaper's Africa correspondent, I found myself in such a crush of reporters just three times — at the 10th anniversary of Rwanda's genocide, the controversial 2005 elections in Zimbabwe and the ousting of South African president Thabo Mbeki as head of the African National Congress a year ago. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, I was alone. Even on really big stories — like the start of the latest war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which 350,000 people have fled their homes — there was exactly one other foreign correspondent with me at the front line.
Last week's attacks provided lots of justification for The Globe and Mail's decision to open a new bureau in India, and my own desire to report there. But for me, it was also a powerful reminder of the amazing scope and scale of the stories I was leaving behind in Africa, and what it was like to cover them, knowing I was struggling against a limited Western attention span, with its defensive and weary expectation of yet more bad news — and trying not to succumb to that sensation myself. ...
Nolen then unleashes a litany of horror stories -- sectarian violence in Kenya, xenophobic violence in South Africa, rape in Congo, AIDS is Swaziland and the neverending despair of Zimbabwe.
I realized that in my bleaker moments, I was doing what I often chided others for — seeing Africa as an unchanging disaster and not realizing that between this coup or that rebel insurgency, change was happening — sometimes almost imperceptibly slowly, but definitely, defiantly happening.
I started this job well aware of the preponderance of negative coverage of Africa in the Western media. When I arrived in Jo'burg, I had to face the suspicion of African journalists who were sure I was there to serve up more bad news based on a limited understanding of the place. So I was determined to tell the good news, as often as I could, even if famines and mass rape did demand my frequent attention.
Nolen moves on to become the Globe's correspondent in New Delhi.
Her story didn't really leave much advice for who her successor -- or even hint if there will be a successor. Perhaps the Out of Africa headline means the Globe and Mail itself.*
* On Aug. 7, the Globe announced that Geoffrey York, the paper's current Beijing correspondent, will be the new Africa correspondent. I missed that. My apologies.
She did mention this exchange with one of her stylish Jo'burg friends:
I told him about leafing through the stacks of articles as I was packing boxes — about the relief over some things, especially the lessening despair about AIDS, while in other places, I had told stories of such darkness.
He nodded. "It's important to remember that both these things exist at once," he said. "We have to remember that they are both there, together."