Radio Okapi Kindu: The Station the Helped Bring Peace to the Congo; A Memoir

(Paperback)

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When Jennifer Bakody stepped off the plane in Kinshasa in 2004, she walked right into the most arduous and inspiring job an idealistic young journalist from Nova Scotia could ever imagine. After seven years of brutal warfare involving eight neighboring countries and several million deaths, the Democratic Republic of the Congo had just agreed a tentative ceasefire. A week later Bakody finds herself 1,500 miles up the Congo River in the heart of the country's jungle, managing a small UN-backed radio station.
Welcome to Radio Okapi Kindu. Welcome too to its team of hard-working local reporters determined to cover the complex events in the country's rapid march towards elections. One day rebel soldiers are walking out of their jungle enclaves and handing in their weapons; the next, it's time for some music, or some public service announcements. Then one of the journalists is accused of lying, and Bakody finds herself confronting a general of the Congolese army in his own living room, while armed guards look on.
When a public lynching in Kindu is followed by an outbreak of violence in a nearby city, Bakody begins to realize how little she understands the complexities of the country's politicsand how little she has at stake compared to her colleagues. Maintaining the rigor of Radio Okapi's editorial line suddenly seems like a matter of life or death. As the pressure builds and the team redoubles its efforts to bring its listeners accurate and impartial news, they realize they are targets too. How long can one small station of the "Frequency for Peace" stand the strain
Radio Okapi Kindu is a touching memoir of a young journalist's coming of age and a love song to a poor but astonishingly beautiful country recovering from a decade of war.

Reviews

It is my hope that the humanity portrayed by Radio Okapi Kindu will help to rally the world around the many forces for positive change in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dr. Denis Mukwege, 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, world-renowned gynecological surgeon & founder & medical director of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo I have visited the Congo as a journalist, observing in action the largest United Nations mission on earth. But I always wondered: what would it be like to be one of those UN workers, in the country not for weeks, but years This book answers that question in a way that is nitty-gritty, vivid, funny, up close and personal and has compassion for what the Congolese have suffered for so many years. Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopolds Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, and Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empires Slaves "One dramatic highlight is the brilliantly understated account that one of Bakodys colleagues gives of how he was brutally beaten by soldiers in retaliation for a story he wrote about the armys poor performance in battle. Thanks to Bakodys talent for snappy dialogue, eye for detail, and humorous prose, the book never flags, even when its pace slows down to capture the everyday slog of running a radio station." Nicolas van de Walle,Foreign Affairs Bakody manages right from the start to frame her story around the team of Congolese journalists, thereby avoiding the stereotypical pitfalls of a young Western woman going to find herself in a remote place in the deepest and darkest and most dangerous part of Africa that all too often provides the backdrop for these books. Radio Okapi Kindu is definitely among my favorite aid worker memoirs now. Tobias Denskus, Aidnography She [Bakody] spent nine months in this remote outpost, her sense of purposes fuelled by a determination to create a public record that would deliver accurate and even-handed information to a population exhausted by six years of civil war. This is her engaging account of that experience. Sarah Murdoch,Toronto Star She captures a sense of Kindu and of her likable, hard-working and often fearless staff as they adjust to a changing postwar world nonetheless fraught with danger. Chris Smith, Winnipeg Free Press Here, at last, is a book about the Congo that evokes not anger and pity, but admiration and hope. Radio Okapi Kindu is a heartfelt memoir of an Africa that few correspondents or visitors ever get to see. Michael Meyer, author of In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China; and The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed

Author Bio

Jennifer Bakody is a journalist and aid worker whos spent the last twenty years working for BBC, CBC, CNN, France 24, Radio France Internationale and the UN in Canada, the Congo, France, Haiti, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. She grew up in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and studied journalism at the University of Kings College in Halifax. She currently lives in Singapore, with her husband and daughter.