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WORK TITLE: Love, Africa
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.jeffreygettleman.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/25/beach-reads-jeffrey-gettlemans-love-africa/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016014935
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016014935
HEADING: Gettleman, Jeffrey, 1971-
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670 __ |a Fresh Air with Terry Gross, April 4, 2012: |b transcript (Jeffrey Gettleman, journalist)
670 __ |a Wikipedia, WWW, viewed January 26, 2016 |b (Jeffrey A. Gettleman (born 1971) is an American journalist. Since 2006, he has been the East Africa Bureau Chief for The New York Times.)
PERSONAL
Born July 22, 1971; son of Robert William Gettleman, judge of the United State District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and Joyce R. Gettleman, a psychotherapist with a private practice in Evanston, IL; married Courtenay Morris, a web producer for the Times, 2005.
EDUCATION:Cornell, B.A., 1994; Oxford University, M.A., 1996.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and journalist. South Asia bureau chief, New York Times. Worked formerly as a communications officer for Save the Children, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1994; as a reporter for St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times), 1997-1998; as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, 1999-2001; as a reporter for the New York Times, 2002-2006; as the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, 2006-2017. Has appeared as a news commentator on CNN, BBC, PBS, NPR, ABC and the Charlie Rose Show.
AWARDS:Pulitzer Prize, international reporting, 2012; the George Polk award, two Overseas Press Club awards.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including Los Angeles Times, New York Times, GQ, New York Review of Books, and National Geographic.
SIDELIGHTS
Jeffrey Gettleman is a writer, journalist, and the South Asia bureau chief for the New York Times. Before working as the South Asia bureau chief, Gettleman worked as the East Africa bureau chief for eleven years. Gettleman has also reported for the Los Angeles Times and St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). His writing has appeared in GQ, New York Review of Books, and National Geographic.
Gettleman grew up in a Chicago suburb. His father was a judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and his mother was a psychotherapist. He attended college at Cornell University, where he received a B.A. in Philosophy in 1994. In 1996 Gettleman attended Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship, where he received an M.A. in Philosophy.
Gettleman began reporting with the New York Times in 2002, covering domestic issues in Atlanta. In 2003 he began reporting from Iraq and in 2006 became a foreign correspondent for the East Africa bureau. He was appointed East Africa bureau chief in the same year. In 2012 Gettleman received a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his reports on famine and conflict in East Africa.
Gettleman was appointed as the South Asia bureau chief in 2017. He lives in New Delhi, India, with his wife, Courtenay Morris, a web producer for the Times.
Described by a contributor to Kirkus Reviews as a “stark, eye-opening, and sometimes-horrifying portrait,” Gettleman’s first book recounts his long relationship with Africa. Appointed as foreign correspondent for the East Africa bureau of the New York Times in 2006, Gettleman writes about the events and relationships that entered his life in the decade that he lived and worked in the region.
Gettleman opens the book by describing some of the difficulties he has encountered in writing about Africa. As a journalist focused on a region torn by famine and conflict, he must find a balance between representing the realities of Africa, while ensuring that the New York Times audience will still read the stories. Additionally, Gettleman writes about the complications in writing about the region without falling into stereotypes of Africa and the people who reside there.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote that Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, Love, and Survival “has the virtues and limitations of journalism; it’s colorful, evocative and immediate, but also distracted and somewhat shapeless.” Gettleman’s stories are extreme and unique, ranging from witnessing tribal massacres to meeting real pirates at a cafe. Kristine Huntley in Booklist wrote that the book has “thrilling immediacy and attention to detail” that “puts the reader right beside him.”
The book also describes Gettleman’s relationship with Courtenay Morris, the woman he ultimately ends up marrying. The relationship is at times fraught, and Gettleman does not hold back from sharing intimate details about the causes of fights between the two. This includes an illicit sexual relationship he shared with a photographer in Africa while he and Morris were geographically, but not romantically, separated. The career paths of Gettleman and Morris led to their geographic separation, as Gettleman sought out reporting work in East Africa and Morris attended law school. The two are eventually able to unite and marry, and Morris joins Gettleman in East Africa.
The themes of Gettleman’s love of Africa and love of his now-wife are repeated throughout the narrative. Writing on the website Africa’s Country, Keren Weitzberg observed that Gettleman’s “romantic escapades and trials feel trivial against the background of war and violence.” Weitzberg also noted that at other times in the book Gettleman “grapples more sincerely with the stakes of his profession.” The story concludes with Gettleman and Morris united, and Gettleman’s reflections on his complicated relationships with and love for both his wife and East Africa.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2017, Kristine Huntley, review of Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival, p. 51.
Economist, May 20, 2017, “Love and Adventure, A Memoir of Africa,” review of Love, Africa, p. 77.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2017, review of Love, Africa.
Publishers Weekly, April 24, 2017, review of Love, Africa, p. 86.
ONLINE
Africa’s Country, http://africasacountry.com/ (August 21, 2017), Keren Weitzberg, review of Love, Africa.
Economist Online, https://www.economist.com/ (May 18, 2017), review of Love, Africa.
Jeffrey Gettleman Website, https://www.jeffreygettleman.com/ (January 24, 2018).
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (August 25, 2017), Laura Seay, review of Love, Africa.*
How I Got Here
My interest in Africa was a bit of a fluke. I wasn’t one of those precocious kids toying with atlases or globes at a tender age. When Joseph Conrad was a little boy, the story goes, he pointed to a map of Africa and declared: "When I grow up, I’m going there." When I was a little boy, I pointed my finger into my nose and declared I was going to be a fireman.
I grew up in a Chicago suburb, progressing at an average speed from Star Wars figures to Estes rockets to Roman candles to struggling with how to unclasp a bra in the dark. My mom was a social worker, my dad a lawyer, my sister a good student who drove a red Grand Am – we were hardly the most worldly bunch. From birth to college, I lived in the same house, in the same room, and I could lie in bed and see all the stages of my life — the Walter Payton posters, the set of pocket knives, the drawers crammed with wrinkled notes, old letters and doomed valentines. I was vaguely aware of the tumultuous throb of the world without considering I had any real place in it.
But as Love, Africa explains, my life took a major left turn after my freshman year at Cornell. I went to Africa for the first time and came back a changed man. I worked summers "throwing paint" on houses (the Da Vinci Brothers’ era, which I get into in Chapter Three) and raised a little dough to go back to Africa.
First I thought I wanted to be a portrait photographer. Then I thought I wanted to be an aid worker. I had the Where (East Africa) but no idea about the What. It was only after a crushingly lonely summer in Ethiopia that I seized on journalism.
I’ve had the privilege of working at some excellent publications, from the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) to the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. I’ve covered everything from small town carnage to a New Year’s Eve possum drop in Brasstown, North Carolina, to wars, elephant slaughters and famines. My stories have appeared in GQ, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Lapham’s Quarterly and National Geographic. I’ve been lucky in many ways, including winning several awards: the George Polk award, two Overseas Press Club awards and the Pulitzer Prize.
I live in Nairobi with my family in a house with mango trees that are often raided by the same fat monkey. For more than a decade, I’ve been the East Africa bureau chief for The New York Times. But there may be some big changes on the horizon soon. Please reach out to me if you’ve read Love, Africa or have any questions.
My stories have appeared in GQ, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Lapham’s Quarterly and National Geographic.
Jeffrey Gettleman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jeffrey Gettleman
Born July 22, 1971 (age 46)
Occupation Journalist
Notable credit(s) The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, St. Petersburg Times, Cherwell
Spouse(s) Courtenay Morris (m. 2005)
Jeffrey A. Gettleman (born 1971) is an American journalist. From 2006-July 2017, he was the East Africa Bureau Chief for The New York Times.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Background
1.1 Personal life
1.2 Education
2 Career
3 Awards
4 References
5 External links
Background[edit]
Personal life[edit]
Jeffrey was born in 1971, the son of Robert William Gettleman (b. 1943),[2] a judge of the United State District Court for the Northern District of Illinois,[3] and Joyce R. Gettleman, a psychotherapist with a private practice in Evanston.[4] Gettleman's sister Lynn Gettleman Chehab is a physician.
Gettleman is married to Courtenay Morris,[5] a former assistant public defender who is now a web producer for the Times. The couple first met while both were attending Cornell University. The wedding was held on October 29, 2005 at their home in Hoboken, New Jersey, with Gettleman's father officiating at the ceremony.[6]
Education[edit]
Gettleman graduated from Evanston Township High School in 1989, and Cornell University in 1994 with a B.A. in Philosophy.[7] Initially, he did not know what he wanted to do after graduation, so took a leave of absence to back pack around the world which he says help set his life trajectory. However, when a professor suggested journalism as a profession, he scoffed at the idea, saying "That was the dumbest idea I had heard... who wants to work for a boring newspaper?”.[8] Beginning in 1994, he was a communications officer for the Save the Children organization in Addis Ababa.
After his graduation from Cornell, Gettleman received a Marshall Scholarship to attend Oxford University, where he received a master's degree in Philosophy in June 1996. While at Oxford, he was the first American editor of Cherwell, the university's student newspaper.[5][9]
Career[edit]
Gettleman began his journalism career as a city hall and police reporter for the St. Petersburg Times from 1997–1998. In 1999, he transferred to the Los Angeles Times as a general assignment reporter. He became bureau chief in Atlanta two years later, and was also a war correspondent for the broadsheet in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
In 2002, Gettleman joined The New York Times as a domestic correspondent in Atlanta, where he later became the bureau chief. He reported from Iraq beginning in 2003, where he did a total of five tours. After a stint as a reporter for the paper's Metro desk in 2004, he became a foreign correspondent in July 2006 for the Nairobi-based East Africa bureau of The New York Times. Only a month later, he would be named chief.[5]
Currently, Gettleman covers over ten countries, often under difficult circumstances. He has focused the majority of his work on events in Congo, Kenya and Tanzania in East-Central Africa, where he has reported on atrocities involving rape, mutilation as well as ritualized murders of albinos, among other issues. His often straightforward, non-cynical approach toward such difficult stories has been colloquially dubbed the "Gettleman method" by Jack Shafer.[8][10][11]
Gettleman has also covered conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Egypt and Yemen. In the 2004 spring, he along with photographer Lynsey Addario were abducted for several hours by militants in Fallujah. According to Gettleman, the pair were eventually released because he had successfully posed as Greek and concealed his passport in Addario's trousers, where he had guessed his captors would not search.[10]
In addition, Gettleman has served as a commentator on CNN, BBC, PBS, NPR and ABC.[12]
Awards[edit]
First place for general reporting by Florida Press Club (1997)
First place for spot news by Tampa Bay Society of Professional Journalists (1997 and 1998)
Los Angeles Times Editorial Award for Breaking News (2001)
Overseas Press Club Award (2003)
Overseas Press Club Award (2008)
Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting (2012)[13]
Jeffrey Gettleman
Jeffrey Gettleman, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for international reporting, is The Times’s South Asia bureau chief, based in New Delhi. His work has appeared in National Geographic, GQ, Foreign Policy and The New York Review of Books. He studied philosophy at Cornell University before winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford. He was previously the East Africa bureau chief, based in Kenya, from 2006 to 2017. He is the author of “Love, Africa,” a memoir about his experiences in Africa and a whole bunch of other things.
Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times
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For his vivid reports, often at personal peril, on famine and conflict in East Africa, a neglected but increasingly strategic part of the world.
Gregory Moore (left), co-chair of The Pulitzer Prize Board, presents the 2012 International Reporting Prize to Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times.
WINNING WORK
September 25, 2011
Taken by pirates
July 16, 2011
Misery follows as Somalis try to flee hunger
December 28, 2011
For Somali women, pain of being a Spoil of War
November 2, 2011
Somalia's agony tests limits of aid
September 10, 2011
As an enemy retreats, clans carve up Somalia
August 2, 2011
Somalis waste away as insurgents block escape from famine
November 25, 2011
African Union force makes strides inside Somalia
July 1, 2011
Another area girds for revolt as Sudan approaches a split
July 4, 2011
Sudanese struggle to survive endless bombings aimed to quell rebels
December 15, 2011
Somalia’s insurgents embrace Twitter as a weapon
BIOGRAPHY
photo of Jeffrey Gettleman
Jeffrey Gettleman is the East Africa bureau chief for The New York Times.
He covers 12 countries and has focused much of his work on internal conflicts in Kenya, Congo, Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia. Before this posting, Jeffrey worked for The New York Times in New Jersey, Baghdad and Atlanta. He has also been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the St. Petersburg Times.
He studied philosophy at Cornell and earned a master's of philosophy degree from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has appeared as a news commentator on CNN, BBC, PBS, NPR, ABC and the Charlie Rose show. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic and GQ.
Jeffrey is 40 years old and married to Courtenay Morris. They live in Nairobi, Kenya, and have two young sons.
MEDIA / NEWS
7 Questions For ...New York Times Pulitzer Winner Jeffrey Gettleman
POSTED BY KEVIN J. KELLEY ON FRI, OCT 19, 2012 AT 1:14 PM
click to enlarge jeffrey_gettleman_photo.jpg
Jeffrey Gettleman, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting, says that as a reporter for a highly influential newspaper he gets "a lot of crap" regardless of what he's writing about. But no critic can justly accuse this 41-year-old New York Times East Africa bureau chief of embodying the stereotype of the journalist as a lazy cynic.
Gettleman, who's speaking at St. Michael's College on Monday evening (7 p.m. in McCarthy recital hall), regularly risks his life reporting from lethal and largely ignored corners of Africa because "I want to try to help people who are experiencing famine or really horrific abuses."
As the Pulitzer panel noted in its award citation, Gettleman writes "vivid reports, often at personal peril." He has covered the Islamist insurgency in Somalia — generally considered the most dangerous place in the world for journalists — atrocities carried out by the maniacal Lord's Resistance Army in central Africa, and albinos murdered in Tanzania because their body parts are believed to confer magical powers. He composes these dispatches in uncommonly graceful prose that can remain lodged in readers' memories long after the day's newspaper has been tossed in the recycling bin.
A sampling of his stories is available on the Pulitzer website: http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2012-International-Reporting.
Seven Days caught up with by phone with Gettleman, who was in Los Angeles on Thursday.
SEVEN DAYS: You've been heading the Times bureau in Nairobi, Kenya, for a while now. Are you going to be rotated out of there soon? Do you want to leave?
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN: I've been in Nairobi since 2006. The Times does have an unspoken practice of having a correspondent spend four or five years at a post and then moving on. But that won't necessarily happen with Nairobi. We really like it there. My wife has a good job [with the State Department] and both our kids were born there. The older one, who's 3, is starting to learn Swahili. There's nowhere else I want to go at this stage of my career.
SD: What about security concerns? Al-Shabaab [the Islamist insurgency in Somalia] has been setting off bombs in Nairobi. And there's also the day-to-day crime problems in a city a lot of expats refer to as Nairobbery.
JG: Of course I worry about something horrible happening to us, but we don't let that impact our lives too much. Nairobi is actually a beautiful city in a very interesting part of the world.
SD: Some of your best reporting has been from Somalia. You were going there a couple of years ago when there were no other Western journalists on the scene because the country was so totally anarchic. Can you say why you did that?
JG: I feel very committed to the Somali people. I keep going back there a lot because Somalia has been so neglected for so many years. There's a great deal of suffering there, most of it totally preventable. So I try to shine a light on a place that's not getting the attention it should be getting.
Somalia produces more news than any country of its size in the world. Somalia also exports its problems: Shabaab, pirates, famine. It's an important place in an increasingly important region.
I also feel strongly about Somalia because of what happened there to Dan Eldon, who was a good friend of mine. [Eldon, an English photojournalist, and three colleagues were beaten and stoned to death in 1993 by a mob in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, enraged by a raid carried out as part of a U.S.-led military intervention.]
He was the reason I went to East Africa at age 18 from suburban Chicago, which is where I grew up. We spent months traveling all over East Africa, and I fell in love with it. I knew I wanted to work there.
SD: So that's how your journalism career began?
JG: No. First I went to Cornell where I did study Swahili. After that, I wanted to work for an aid agency. I had no interest in working for a newspaper because I didn't feel passionate about journalism. But the aid work wasn't all I had thought, so I did finally get a journalism job at age 25, which was sort of late.
[Gettleman started out as a police reporter for the St. Petersburg Times. In 1999, he became a general-assignment reporter for the Los Angeles Times and later a war correspondent in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Gettleman joined the New York Times in 2002. He and photojournalist Lynsey Addario were abducted by militants in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004 and released unharmed after several hours.]
SD: What's it like to work in Africa for the New York Times?
JG: It's great; it's a dream job. There's a lot of pressure, and the expectations are very high. You take a lot of crap from people because your work is so visible. You're going to be criticized no matter what you do, so you have to develop a really thick skin.
The Times offers a great platform because it does believe in its mission of presenting the world to its readers. The Times still has three offices in Africa, for example. There aren't many news organizations making that kind of commitment.
SD: Say something about your approach to reporting.
JG: I want to focus on and tell stories no one else is telling. An example is the Ogaden region of Ethiopia where I reported from in 2007 — a time when nobody was visiting there. Ethiopia was brutalizing its own people in the Ogaden, and the Ethiopian government gets hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from the U.S. It was a story that had to get out.
I do risk my life a lot in doing this job. It's not really about the glory, though that can be nice. It's more that I want to try to help people who are experiencing famine or really horrific abuses.
I try to write vividly and to move people. I don't want to write something generic, and at the same time I try not to be melodramatic. I try to give people the honor they deserve.
SD: Do you have any connection to Vermont?
JG: I've been on vacation there a couple of times but I don't know much about it. The woman who invited me to talk there [Laurie Gagne, head of the peace and justice program at St. Michael's] is very passionate about the Congo. That was really the driver.
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Jeffrey Gettleman
May 15, 2017
How a New York Times Bureau Chief Wrote His Memoir
Eat your meals standing up. Don’t sneak onto Mt. Kilimanjaro.
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HOW TO | SHOP TALK
So, you want to write a memoir? I’ve just done it. It took me nearly five years to write my memoir, Love, Africa. And my wife nearly divorced me about ten times. During the heavy-lifting months, when I was staring at a blank screen, trying to create, I became a recluse. I lost weight. I was extremely irritable. Anti-social is an understatement. I couldn’t stand crowds, hated parties and found myself constantly scribbling things down, wherever I went, any time of day, especially at night, when I should have been resting up for the next big writing day. For months, I slept horribly.
It was a good thing that the New York Times had given me a sabbatical from my day job—traveling around Africa, interviewing everyone from pirates to rebel fighters, and writing news stories from three hundred to three thousand words. If you insist on doing this, and will feel like a coward forever after if you don’t, here are a few things I wish I had known when I started:
1. Conceptualize. I bashed out my first draft in about five months, and that draft was pure kaka. I had felt compelled to prove to myself I could write 100,000 words, and it was scattered, themeless, episodic and boring. So I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to think thematically and conceptually before writing down a single word.
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I had written about all the major events in my recent life but I hadn’t thought through what actually connected them. One major theme was my struggles to balance the different loves of my life, my love for East Africa and my love for a woman I met at an early age. I was constantly torn between the two, and after a lot of thinking I realized: Wait! That’s my theme!
My advice: Take some long walks and think about what you’re trying to say. What means the most to you? What do you want people to feel at the end of your book?
I worked through a lot of difficult passages in my head while running several miles a day through farmland on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, where I live. As I ran, I would number the thoughts in my head. So let’s say, while running, I thought: Okay, I want to rewrite the part where I meet the rebel commander named Peacock and then I want to fix the part where I cross the border into Congo and I need to change a few words about the physical description of the jungle, I’d say to myself there are three things I need to remember. Then I would come back, stand over my desk dripping with sweat and scribble down notes on a legal pad before I forgot.
2. Focus on scenes. It’s very difficult to nail the structure. I spent months creating, editing and polishing chapters that we ended up cutting. For example, I had a long chapter about feeling lost and depressed while in graduate school at Oxford. I felt like an imposter there, the stupidest, least-focused student on that 700-year-old campus. But the book read much better if I jumped over that period and condensed those lost Oxford days to a couple paragraphs.
But there were certain scenes in the book that I always knew I wanted to share. Now I know, books live and die off their scenes. One of the most fun scenes for me to write was from when I was about twenty years old, and a buddy and I sneakily attempted to climb Africa’s highest mountain, Mt. Kilimanjaro. It was a total disaster. Imagine us clinging to a sheet of ice nineteen thousand feet above sea level, with white athletic socks on our hands (we had no gloves) and dried puke on my face. I nearly died up there. Many people die on Kili every year. I was damn lucky not to be one.
I took my time with that section, to convey all the drama, fear and ridiculousness of what we did. My advice: Think of the best scenes you can tell, and even if the structure remains elusive, concentrate on really animating those scenes. And don’t sneak onto Mt. Kilimanjaro.
3. Work backwards. This was probably the hardest lesson I learned. I’m a newspaper writer. I’ve been trained to stack all the good stuff—the news—at the top of a story. So suspense is not my strong suit. The way in which I eventually improved at creating suspense and developing plot was to think about the whole process backwards.
I once read that John Irving always wrote his last line first. That has clearly worked for him. Know where you want to go and work backwards from there. Do this for the larger story, Irving-style, but also for each chapter and each scene. Plant little time bombs along the way, set to go off later. I did this with the sad story of my friend Benny, a goofy, joyful soul, who died early in my life and left a huge hole in my heart. I write about Benny from the beginning, when he and I used to “throw paint’’ as we called it (painting houses in the Chicago suburbs). I dropped hints of what was going to happen to him. When it unfortunately did, the reader had a deeper sense of my loss.
4. Get offline. Stay on Microsoft Word all day. As much as your job or other circumstances allow, resist checking your email or the news. When I was tired at night, and couldn’t create any more, I would do research. I would go through old newspaper stories, gleaning details. The next morning, when I was reasonably fresh, I’d start using those details and facts to draw more scenes. Save the day’s most productive hours for creating.
5. Eat your meals standing up. I would start writing around 8 a.m.; work for an hour; have a quick breakfast of Grape-Nuts on my feet; work some more until about noon; go for a run or a walk; then have lunch of a sandwich (standing up) and then sit down again for three or four more hours until it was dusk and time to go home and play with my kids.
If you’re working eight hours a day at your desk, take your meals standing up. Stretch a little between breaks. Going for a run in the middle of the day or getting some exercise can help clear your mind.
6. Feedback. Make your own board of directors. Find ten to twenty people whose judgment you trust and turn to them for feedback. I turned to several dozen people who read different versions of the manuscript. Some pointed out that a few of my early chapters were too slow; others spotted clumsy language that I then excised. Make sure to stagger the sharing of drafts so that you reserve fresh advisers for later stages of your work.
And most important!
7. Stay in that chair. A novelist friend once told me: “It’s not about talent, divine inspiration, intelligence or even luck. It’s all about how long you can sit in that chair.” There’s no substitute for perseverance. You need to stay in that chair and keep revising and rewriting. Many times, I got frustrated. Some days I went backward.
But I’m used to working hard on news stories in my day job. Almost always, time solves everything. So when I felt stuck, I returned to the beginning of the problematic section and tried different sentences or scenes until I felt I was close. Then I’d move on and come back to that same part later and polish some more. That’s the only way the book will ever be anything you’re proud of.
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Love and adventure; A memoir of
Africa
The Economist.
423.9041 (May 20, 2017): p77(US).
COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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Hot and hungry--Africa in stereotype
"JUST remember, let's not get too 'ooga-booga' out there." So warned one of Jeffrey Gettleman's
bosses in 2006, shortly before he flew off to take over as east Africa bureau chief of the New
York Times. When Mr Gettleman looked confused, the man patiently explained: "You know, the
stereotypes, the platitudes, Africa as primitive and violent." Soon after he got to Nairobi, a
seasoned Africa hand sat Mr Gettleman down and over a long lunch offered his own advice.
"Whatever you do, Jeff…don't forget the 'ooga-booga'. It's what makes Africa Africa."
The term "ooga-booga" sounds a little outlandish to anyone seriously covering Africa. But the
dilemma facing Mr Gettleman--how to pique the interest of Western readers in a part of the
world where history has invariably been portrayed as dark, without simply reinforcing their
prejudices--is one that is all too familiar to most who write about the continent.
With this uneasy tug-of-war in mind, Mr Gettleman embarked on a decade of reporting on a
region, large parts of it torn by conflict, that was to earn him a Pulitzer prize in 2012. His
reporting took him to areas where people were being killed, raped or starved. "I felt irresponsible
sinking time into a lighter story when I knew that one short plane trip away, people were being
slaughtered," he muses in his book. "A story in our pages really does have the power to put
pressure on governments to adjust their policies or the United Nations to send in more
peacekeepers."
Sadly, however, there is little sense of that higher purpose in this book, which places the author
at the centre of all the dramatic events occurring around him, interweaving them with a love
story. His posting to Baghdad early on in the American occupation offers few insights into a
conflict that still reverberates through the Middle East. Instead Mr Gettleman talks about the
electrifying sex he had with a photographer while cheating on the woman he was later to marry.
His recounting of a trip deep into the Ogaden region of Ethiopia with a rebel army reveals hardly
anything about the conflict. Instead you learn about the spat Mr Gettleman was having with his
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wife. His visits to the Democratic Republic of Congo say little more about the place than that
many women were raped there. Mr Gettleman seems less concerned about what he has seen than
about the decision by one of his editors in New York to cut from his copy the lurid descriptions
of a group of women being forced to eat a fetus freshly killed by members of a rebel group.
Despite his intention not to get too "ooga-booga" when writing about Africa, that is exactly
where he ends up.
Yet for all that one may not learn much about Africa from this book, Mr Gettleman's writing
certainly zips along. His tales, whether of madcap antics such as nearly getting arrested for
illegally climbing Mt Kilimanjaro as a student to being arrested years later for sneaking into the
Ogaden, convey a vivid sense of a place where anything seems possible.
Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival.
By Jeffrey Gettleman.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Love and adventure; A memoir of Africa." The Economist, 20 May 2017, p. 77(US). General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491932001/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b8767586. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491932001
12/25/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1514234403573 3/5
Gettleman , Jeffrey: LOVE, AFRICA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gettleman , Jeffrey LOVE, AFRICA Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 5, 16
ISBN: 978-0-06-228409-9
A passionate debut memoir bears witness to political turmoil.For Pulitzer Prize winner
Gettleman, East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, his response to Africa was nothing
less than love at first sight. Yearning to return after a summer trip, in 1992, he left Cornell
University, where he was an undergraduate, for "a whole glorious year" of exploring. Naive,
enthusiastic, fearless, and woefully unprepared, he counted among his adventures nearly falling
off Mount Kilimanjaro, being arrested for climbing without a permit, getting mugged, and twice
losing his passport. Nevertheless, he felt sure that East Africa would become part of his life
forever. The path to realizing that dream involved an internship in Ethiopia, just emerging from
30 years of civil war. The country was broken: dead animals rotted in the streets, and beggars
roamed everywhere. Later, as a journalist, the author documented the atrocities of other wars: in
Iraq, where the American invasion had unleashed "horrific and random and multivectored"
violence; in Somalia, where America's support of Ethiopia's invasion, overthrowing "a popular,
grassroots, and surprisingly effective Islamist administration," led to chaos, "high-seas piracy,"
terrorism, and ultimately devastating famine. Reporting from a region of 3.3 million square
miles, 400 million people, and a dozen "fragile and poorly governed" countries--including the
hot spots of Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Kenya, and Burundi--Gettleman focused on human rights
abuses and terror resulting from conflicts among warlords, religious and ethnic factions,
Western-backed rebels, and opportunistic militias "very good at murder on a shoestring." Caught
in those conflicts, he was kidnapped, imprisoned, and beaten. Gettleman is forthright about
condemning American policies and U.N. failures, and he underscores his struggles to find
language to convey the reality he witnessed. He haggled with his editors, for example, "over
hacked versus killed, tribe versus ethnic group," each of which "expressed value judgments or
paternalism." Besides his career, the author chronicles his long, sometimes-fraught relationship
with the woman he finally married and with whom he settled in Kenya. A stark, eye-opening,
and sometimes-horrifying portrait by a reporter enthralled by the "power and magic" of Africa.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Gettleman , Jeffrey: LOVE, AFRICA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668611/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cee7e7eb. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668611
12/25/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1514234403573 4/5
Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance,
War, and Survival
Kristine Huntley
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p51.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival. By Jeffrey Gettleman. May
2017.352p. Harper, $27.99 (9780062284099). 810.
Gettleman recounts his two decades in journalism in this exciting, harrowing memoir that aptly
displays why he's a Pulitzer Prize winner and a New York Times bureau chief. In college at
Cornell in the 1990s, Gettleman discovered his two true loves: East Africa and a beautiful, bright
fellow student named Courtenay. These two passions end up being at war with each other: the
more Gettleman seeks out a career that takes him to the region he feels at home in (first in a brief
stint as an aid worker, and then as a correspondent), it puts both geographical and emotional
distance between him and Courtenay, who is pursuing her own dream of being a public defender.
But even as Gettleman's job takes him to war-torn countries like Afghanistan and Iraq (and into
other women's beds), he can't quite let go of the hope of a future with Courtenay. Whether he's
recounting a terrifying encounter with a child killer or running afoul of the Ethiopian
government, there's a thrilling immediacy and attention to detail in Gettleman's writing that puts
the reader right beside him. Combining that with his gimlet-eyed observations on East Africa
and his love for the region, especially Kenya, Gettleman's memoir is an absolute must-read.--
Kristine Huntley
YA: Teens with an interest in life in other countries or journalistic aspirations might find this an
absorbing read. KH.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival." Booklist, 1 May
2017, p. 51. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495035028/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=63f71320. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495035028
12/25/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1514234403573 5/5
Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance,
War, and Survival
Publishers Weekly.
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p86.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival
Jeffrey Gettleman. HarperCollins, $27.99
(352p) ISBN 978-0-06-228409-9
A journalist juggles a relationship and overseas adventure in this hectic memoir. Pulitzer Prize--
winning New York Times correspondent Gettleman recounts his dangerous reporting from
global hot spots: interviewing Taliban POWs in Afghanistan; surveying firefights and suicidebomb
carnage in Iraq; and exploring famines, insurgencies, tribal massacres, and a pirate cafe in
East Africa, where he is the Times bureau chief. Sharing many of his exploits is his wife and
some time colleague Courtenay; their star-crossed relationship, including bouts of infidelity,
complicates his wanderlust. Gettleman's narrative has the virtues and limitations of journalism;
it's colorful, evocative and immediate, but also distracted and somewhat shapeless. Many
episodes are riveting: Gettleman was abducted by Iraqi insurgents (he escaped by pretending to
be Greek instead of American), and he and Courtenay accompanied Ogaden rebels on a
gruelling desert trek only to be thrown in prison by Ethiopian soldiers. Unfortunately, the stormtossed-romance
theme feels inflated; it bogs down in bickering between Gettleman and
Courtenay, and sometimes entices the author into purplish prose (one illicit tryst in Baghdad "
[left] a wet spot on the sheets as blood settled into pools out on the streets"). Africa definitely
feels like the more compelling of Gettleman's passions, rendered here in engrossing reportage.
(May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p.
86. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250881/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=96276f5f. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250881
Monkey Cage Analysis
Beach Reads: Jeffrey Gettleman’s ‘Love, Africa’
By Laura Seay August 25
Beach reading (Laura Seay)
It’s hot, school is about to start if it hasn’t already, and at this point in our summer reading series, you may be getting a little tired of reading academic books. Luckily, there are plenty of nonacademic books about African politics out there. I read two recent tomes by journalists with longtime experience in the region in hopes that if, unlike most of The Monkey Cage’s editorial team, you are not spending the Labor Day holiday weekend stuck in a hotel with several thousand other political scientists and instead are at the beach or the lake or in the mountains or enjoying a comfortable staycation at home, you’ll enjoy a lighter look at some of the topics we’ve been examining this summer. While we were originally scheduled to review two books this week, I’ve divided this post into two. My review of Jeffrey Gettleman’s “Love, Africa” runs today, while we’ll look at Andrew Harding’s “The Mayor of Mogadishu” next week.
Full disclosure: I am not a fan of longtime New York Times East Africa Bureau Chief Jeffrey Gettleman’s reporting. His coverage of eastern and central Africa has irked me for the last 11 years, and I was pleased to learn that he had finally moved on from his position in Nairobi in July. Gettleman’s writing was often the worst of parachute journalism, in which a journalist charged with covering a dozen or more countries flies into a country for a few days, gets only the narrowest grasp on a story and jets off to the next crisis. As I have written elsewhere, no individual could possibly cover such broad range of subjects well, but Gettleman often compounded the problem of mile-wide, inch-deep reporting by relying on lazy and reductionist assessments of armed group members’ motivations for fighting in complex contexts and failing to seek out local academics and other neutral observers who could provide context for his stories.
In other words, I was likely to hate Gettleman’s new book, “Love, Africa” before I even started it. And I did. I expected the book to be much like his reporting: reductionist and exoticizing. Mostly, though, it was just boring. An Africa largely devoid of Africans is not a particularly interesting story about a man’s journey to finding himself, finding love and finding what really matters to him. While it’s not the worst book I’ve ever read on Africa (that dubious distinction belongs to Kuki Gallman’s white savior-laden “I Dreamed of Africa“), it’s not a book I would recommend to students or friends wanting to learn about the continent, its politics or its people.
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This is because Gettleman’s book is not a book about Africa. It is a book about Jeffrey Gettleman. Africa is merely the backdrop to Gettleman’s process of finding himself, deciding whom he loves and committing to a career in journalism. Africa also serves as a kind of totem, a stand-in for the vague aspirations of his early 20s and his zealous search for increasingly dangerous and sometimes illegal adventures to offset the emptiness of his comfortable, suburban upbringing and dragged-out struggle to fully commit to the woman he loves.
We are nearly 200 pages into the book before Gettleman begins describing his time in Nairobi, save for some summer and gap-year adventures in his early 20s, in which the author catches the Africa “bug” and vows to find a way to return professionally. Most of the book comprises descriptions of Gettleman’s efforts to build a career as a journalist in St. Petersburg, Fla., Los Angeles, Atlanta, Afghanistan, Iraq and Newark. At the same time, his on-again, off-again romance with his college sweetheart also occupies Gettleman’s heart and mind as he travels around the world chasing stories and developing what sounds like a case of undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder from seeing so many tragic deaths in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. He responds to the stress of a long-distance romance and seeing so much trauma by sleeping with a number of women who are not his then-girlfriend, which results in the reader being subjected to several incredibly awkward and questionably necessary descriptions of Gettleman’s bedroom escapades and quite understandably upsets his girlfriend, who finds out about his infidelity only after they have married and moved to Nairobi to cover the region together for the Times.
Although it comprises only about a third of the text, Gettleman’s description of his time as Africa correspondent is by far the most interesting part of the narrative. However, there’s a peculiarity about it, too, foreshadowed in the book’s early stories about Gettleman’s summers on the continent: the near-total absence of meaningful African characters. Almost all of the Africans mentioned in the book are either subjects of his stories who are most often one-dimensional objects of pity, Gettleman’s employees, or simply part of the background scenery. With one semi-exception, a rebel in Ethiopia nicknamed “Peacock,” we don’t meet any multidimensional, complicated African people. This is made even more bizarre by the fact that Gettleman dedicates so much time to describing the fancy, expat-centered hotels in conflict zones he stays at around the world. Sometimes it’s as though Bukavu’s Orchid and Mogadishu’s Sahafi hotels are as central to the narrative as anyone who actually lives in the cities they occupy.
Moreover, even in their 11 years in Nairobi, Gettleman and his wife don’t appear to socialize much outside of expatriate circles, depriving both them and the reader of any close friendships with Kenyans or other Africans to share. Early in the book, Gettleman laments his summer interning at a nongovernmental organization in Ethiopia, describing the profound loneliness he felt as a recent college graduate with no friends and nowhere to go at night. Why he didn’t attempt to make friends with ordinary residents of Addis Ababa is a question that is never asked nor answered. The pattern repeats itself throughout the memoir; the author describes an elaborate New Year’s Eve party at the nearly all-white Muthaiga Club in 2007. Africans only enter the story that night as Gettleman is pulled away to cover Kenya’s unfolding, horrific post-election violence that stretched well into 2008.
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“Love, Africa” is at its best in its discussion of the 2007-2008 Kenyan electoral crisis, a story Gettleman could report deeply from his home base in Nairobi. It’s here that he struggles most openly with the way he covers Africa, debating how to describe horrific human rights abuses and murders, fighting with editors over whether to use the term “tribe” or not, and wondering whether describing very real things that happened at the time takes his coverage too far toward the “Ooga-Booga” approach to covering Africa that exoticizes its subjects.
Unfortunately, Gettleman’s thoughtful discussion of Kenya is the exception, not the rule in “Love, Africa.” The book bounces from topic to topic in roughly chronological order, but at times the bizarre interactions between Gettleman’s personal and professional life are jarring. More contraceptive methods are discussed than are African journalists, even as Gettleman relies on many of their services as fixers. And there are a few outright falsehoods and misleading claims, such Gettleman’s weird description of the Islamic Courts Union, which brought peace to Mogadishu until U.S.-backed Ethiopian forces ousted them in 2006, as al-Shabab, conflating the two movements when al-Shabab actually did not split away from the Islamic Courts Union until after Gettleman’s visit with the movement’s future leader.
I can imagine someone with little familiarity with Africa or Gettleman’s reporting to be enthralled by “Love, Africa.” Gettleman comes off as a fearless, risk-taking journalist who gets kidnapped and detained just often enough to have great stories while not losing his life. And it is obvious from the way he writes about her that he is deeply in love with his wife and has been since they met. But the overall effect of the book for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the continent is to wonder why media outlets like the New York Times insist on continuing with the tired old tradition of having foreign correspondents cover the world rather than hiring the many competent local journalists who have far deeper contextual knowledge and are just as adept at translating complicated situations for Western audiences as are their American counterparts. I am excited about Gettleman’s replacement as bureau chief, Jina Moore, a talented and experienced journalist who will bring a badly needed, fresh perspective on eastern and central Africa to the Times. But at the same time, I can’t help but wonder why the Times didn’t seize this opportunity to bring an African journalist on board to such a prestigious position. The talent is there, but the will is not, and until that fact changes, we’re more likely to be stuck with coverage from figures like Gettleman than not.
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Laura Seay is an Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College. She studies African politics, conflict, and development, with a focus on central Africa. She has also written for Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Guernica, and Al Jazeera English. Follow @texasinafrica
Love and adventure
A memoir of Africa
How the east Africa bureau chief of the New York Times was shaped by the continent he covers
Print edition | Books and arts
May 18th 2017
Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival. By Jeffrey Gettleman. Harper; 336 pages; $27.99. To be published in Britain in June; £18.99.
“JUST remember, let’s not get too ‘ooga-booga’ out there.” So warned one of Jeffrey Gettleman’s bosses in 2006, shortly before he flew off to take over as east Africa bureau chief of the New York Times. When Mr Gettleman looked confused, the man patiently explained: “You know, the stereotypes, the platitudes, Africa as primitive and violent.” Soon after he got to Nairobi, a seasoned Africa hand sat Mr Gettleman down and over a long lunch offered his own advice. “Whatever you do, Jeff…don’t forget the ‘ooga-booga’. It’s what makes Africa Africa.”
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The term “ooga-booga” sounds a little outlandish to anyone seriously covering Africa. But the dilemma facing Mr Gettleman—how to pique the interest of Western readers in a part of the world where history has invariably been portrayed as dark, without simply reinforcing their prejudices—is one that is all too familiar to most who write about the continent.
With this uneasy tug-of-war in mind, Mr Gettleman embarked on a decade of reporting on a region, large parts of it torn by conflict, that was to earn him a Pulitzer prize in 2012. His reporting took him to areas where people were being killed, raped or starved. “I felt irresponsible sinking time into a lighter story when I knew that one short plane trip away, people were being slaughtered,” he muses in his book. “A story in our pages really does have the power to put pressure on governments to adjust their policies or the United Nations to send in more peacekeepers.”
Sadly, however, there is little sense of that higher purpose in this book, which places the author at the centre of all the dramatic events occurring around him, interweaving them with a love story. His posting to Baghdad early on in the American occupation offers few insights into a conflict that still reverberates through the Middle East. Instead Mr Gettleman talks about the electrifying sex he had with a photographer while cheating on the woman he was later to marry. His recounting of a trip deep into the Ogaden region of Ethiopia with a rebel army reveals hardly anything about the conflict. Instead you learn about the spat Mr Gettleman was having with his wife. His visits to the Democratic Republic of Congo say little more about the place than that many women were raped there. Mr Gettleman seems less concerned about what he has seen than about the decision by one of his editors in New York to cut from his copy the lurid descriptions of a group of women being forced to eat a fetus freshly killed by members of a rebel group. Despite his intention not to get too “ooga-booga” when writing about Africa, that is exactly where he ends up.
Yet for all that one may not learn much about Africa from this book, Mr Gettleman’s writing certainly zips along. His tales, whether of madcap antics such as nearly getting arrested for illegally climbing Mt Kilimanjaro as a student to being arrested years later for sneaking into the Ogaden, convey a vivid sense of a place where anything seems possible.
This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "Love and adventure"
CULTURE
Jeffrey Gettleman’s tired tome
AUGUST 21, 2017 by KEREN WEITZBERG
0
Africa has often served as a laboratory of self-discovery for privileged outsiders. Since the era of colonial adventurers, as Nadifa Mohamed notes, the continent has been a site “for dreams and nightmares,” a foil and mirror for many a Western traveler.
This is the tradition/trap into which Jeffrey Gettleman falls. Gettleman, a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist known for his lurid coverage of war, was until recently the East Africa correspondent for The New York Times. His journey from middle-class suburbia to the halls of one of the country’s most prestigious papers is detailed in his newly published memoir: Love, Africa.
Gettleman’s first forays into Africa are as a young undergraduate, when he visits the late photojournalist Dan Eldon, who becomes a friend and older-brother figure. Together, they drive from Nairobi to the Malawi/Mozambique border on a mission to aid refugees. One can forgive a sheltered young American for romanticizing a part of the world that has been so profoundly misrepresented in the U.S. (He describes East Africa as “visceral,” real, the people inexplicably happy despite their poverty.) Yet that same adolescent voice carries throughout the book. Gettleman may experience interpersonal growth as he ages (he stops cheating, settles down, starts a family). But his intellectual growth (and his understanding of the continent he claims to love) feel profoundly stunted.
The first half of the book is devoted to the path that brings Gettleman back to East Africa as a seasoned reporter. He begins his journalism career at a small paper, the St. Petersburg Times, in the working-class town of Brooksville in Central Florida. He views the locals much as he sees East Africans. He is friendly and sympathetic, but his perceptions are also tinged with a kind of liberal, middle-class condescension. After a big scoop that helps convict a child-murderer, Gettleman lands a job as a correspondent for the LA Times and later a coveted position at The New York Times. He does stints in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he loses track of how many bombings he has covered. A theme emerges: Gettleman becomes the journalistic equivalent of an ambulance chaser, following the stories with the most thrill and bloodshed and also the biggest pay-off.
His narrative is replete with drama and machismo: flings with local women in Florida; a brief romance with a colleague; a kidnapping in Iraq; fights and make-up sessions with his then-girlfriend/now-wife, Courtenay. (His fraught but intense relationship with Courtenay serves, throughout the memoir, as a highly gendered metaphor for his relationship with Africa). His romantic escapades and trials feel trivial against the background of war and violence.
Finally, he lands his dream job: Times correspondent for the East Africa desk. In the second half of the book, Gettleman relies on many of the same tired, recycled tropes that appear in his reporting for the NYT. Modernity vs. tradition. Ethnic conflict. Malthusian concerns with overgrazing and population growth. Death, especially of the exotic variety.
At times, one gets glimpses of the reporter Gettleman could have been. He is critical of American interventionism, citing examples of US blundering and criminal behavior in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. His views of al-Shabaab (when it was part of the Islamic Courts Union and enjoyed popular support) are surprisingly nuanced. And, given his track record for reporting in conflict zones, one can hardly accuse him of being an “armchair journalist.” Though in often hackneyed and self-affirming ways, Gettleman acknowledges the privilege he enjoys, the inter-personal and professional mistakes he has made, as well as the socio-economic disparities that enable his very career and lifestyle in Nairobi.
Yet reckoning with his guilt and reciting the critiques he perhaps anticipates does not seem to lead to more serious reflection on his journalistic practice. Africa remains a sounding board, a site for self-discovery. Passionate about the region, Gettleman is capable of a great deal of sympathy and admiration for the people he interacts with and interviews. But rarely do Africans appear in his memoir as equals.
Under different circumstances, Gettleman might have been a better, more responsible reporter. If only he had received the right editorial guidance from the NYT. If only he had freed himself from the pressures of an industry intent on chasing blood and mayhem, willing to apply different standards of ethics and quality to its coverage of Africa. If only he had seriously engaged with the many excellent reporters and analysts from East Africa, such as Abdullahi Boru, Charles Onyango-Obbo, and Murithi Mutiga, to name only a few. (African journalists are conspicuously absent from his memoir).
But it is likely that a more self-aware, self-critical version of Gettleman would not have come to occupy such a plum position within the hallowed halls of journalism. Gettleman is a great story teller. His prose is light and engaging. Handsome and photogenic, he is able to tell seductively simple stories about a continent that seems so overwhelming to most Americans. There will always be an audience for this type of work.
Which brings us to the question of professional ethics. To be clear, academia (my own field) is riddled with similar moral and political quandaries as journalism. How one should best negotiate power dynamics is not always obvious. With a platform like The New York Times, however, the stakes feel much higher. Unfortunately, Gettlemen reduces these dilemmas to a base choice. Before he leaves for his position in Nairobi, a Times editor cautions Gettleman to “not get too ooga-booga out there.” He is given contrary advice from another veteran reporter: “Don’t forget the ooga-booga. It’s what makes Africa Africa.” Surely there are better ways to understand the moral ambiguities of one’s profession than to view it (in his words) as an “ooga-booga tug-of-war.”
To be fair, Gettleman also grapples more sincerely with the stakes of his profession. He justifies his lurid choice of subject matter by arguing that “sinking time into a lighter story” would have been irresponsible for a Times reporter. “A story on our pages,” he writes, “really does have the power to put pressure on governments to adjust their policies or the United Nations to send in more peacekeepers…or a nonprofit to divert more of its resources to a specific area of need.” To some extent, this may be true. And there is certainly an argument to be made for “bearing witness” to atrocities and human rights abuses. Yet there are also obvious limits to such an approach. Especially when poorly contextualized and undertheorized, his style of reporting becomes parasitic, doing more to feed into public fantasies of Africa than to encourage any kind of meaningful intervention.
Gettleman, after all, is no mere observer. In reporting on conflicts, he also inserts himself into them. His boldness and naiveté sometimes work to his subjects’ benefit. In Afghanistan, he helps rescue a young Taliban solider being tortured by American allies (though, as he notes, the implications of publically fundraising to pay ransom are far from clear). At other times, by blundering into conflicts whose scope he does not fully comprehend, he leaves behind a more damaging trail. In Ethiopia, he is arrested by soldiers who confiscate his notebook. His sloppy note-taking, by his own admission, appears to lead them to the whereabouts of the Ogaden rebels he had earlier befriended.
What emerges is a tale of a very storied life and gilded career. But it is far from clear how Gettleman remains accountable to the people he is representing.
Since the publication of his memoir, Gettleman has stepped down from the East Africa desk. One can only hope that “the paper of record”—which has lagged behind a number of African newspapers in its coverage of the region—will take their responsibilities for reporting on East Africa more seriously.