Geoffrey Nyarota
Date: Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Time: 4:00pm-6:00pm
Location: White Hall 205
Public Lecture: From Bread-Basket to Basket Case: the Story of Zimbabwe
Born in Zimbabwe in 1951, Geoffrey Nyarota is an award-winning investigative journalist, newspaper editor, and media entrepreneur. He is Managing Editor of The Zimbabwe Times (thezimbabwetimes.com) a leading Zimbabwean online publication.
He graduated with a BA Hons from the then University of Rhodesia in 1974, became a high school teacher and then trained as a journalist. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University from 2003 to 2004. He became a fellow of the Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy, as well as a research fellow with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, both also at Harvard. He was Visiting Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College in Upstate New York in 2006 and a Guest Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo in Norway in 2005.
He launched The Zimbabwe Times in October 2006. He publishes from Massachusetts, where he lives. It has become very authoritative and influential within the short space of time it has been online. In 1999 he launched The Daily News, a newspaper that became Zimbabwe's most popular and only independent daily newspaper. He fled from the country after the Daily News was infiltrated by government and after he survived an assassination attempt and his printing press was destroyed in a bomb attack. The paper was subsequently banned by government.
Has has won nine international media awards for his work as a journalist and for his contribution to the development of the independent press in Zimbabwe. The awards include UNESCO's Guillermo Cano Press Freedom award and the Golden Pen of Freedom presented by the World Association of Newspapers. The Daily News received an international award for excellence in its fourth year in the market.
His first book, "Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman," was published in South Africa in July 2006. It is the story of the trials and tribulations of the independent press in a nation under dictatorship. It details the collapse of a country once the bread-basket of southern African, which has now become a basket case itself, with 80 percent unemployment and inflation then running at more than 100 000 percent.
The theme is intertwined with the personal story of a journalist who, as a young school teacher, was jailed by Rhodesia's last colonial Prime Minister, Ian Smith, for supporting Robert Mugabe's liberation army, only to be arrested by Mugabe on six occasions for supporting the new struggle for freedom and democracy in post-independence Zimbabwe.
Tuesday, February 17: Mamadou Diouf
