Context Africa: Rob Crilly

This is the third installation of Context Africa, a new series that will highlight projects that go above and beyond daily news to tell a story of a place in its context and create an ongoing dialogue about what it means to tell contextual stories in Africa. See also, Jina Moore's Q and A about forgivness in Rwanda from last week, and Nicholai Lidow on Sliding Liberia.

Rob Crilly is working on a new book project on the always contentious topic of Darfur. Rob's a stellar journalist whose live tweets during Bashir's indictment justify the service's existence. He strives to understand the place, its context, history and future in more than soundbites, more than 600 words, more than angry internet comment forums.

When not riding donkeys across vast stretches of Jebel Mara, he can be found at Java's in Nairobi filing for the Times, Christian Science Monitor, and other sundry outlets.

His book, tentatively titled "Saving Darfur," will be published this November.

Interviewing an SLA commander, Ibrahim Abdullah al "Hello", in En Siro, north Darfur

When and why did you start going to Darfur?

My first trip was in late 2005 after a year trying to get a visa. I’d started the application in November 2004, which was a few months after the world had woken up to what was happening. Sudan had reacted by closing down and most of the reporting was coming from the camps in Chad. None of the Nairobi press pack was getting visas.

How has it changed between then and now?

Everything has changed and nothing. Then the war could broadly be characterized as rebels against government. A poorly equipped African Union force was struggling to protect itself, much less civilians. And I met thousands of new arrivals in the sprawling aid camps.

Since then the dynamic of the conflict has shifted several times over. The worst of the fighting this year has been within and between tribes. The monthly death toll is much, much lower. The peacekeepers are wearing the blue hats of the UN. But in some ways nothing has changed. Thousands of people are still on the move and millions are living in miserable aid camps. The peacekeepers may have changed their hats but there is still insufficient security for people to go home.
How can you as a journalist add complexity, nuance, and context to this over simplified conflcit without losing readers? Or maybe you're okay with losing readers?

As a journalist it is very difficult to convey the sort of complexity I’ve seen in a 600-word story. There is just not the space. Putting it down in a book is my way of trying to open a discussion about what the conflict - or rather conflicts - are all about.

As far as I am concerned, there would be no point in writing a complicated book about Darfur’s complexities. I don’t want just Africa watchers or Sudan scholars, who already understand its problems, to read it. OK, I’m not going to kid myself that it will top the bestseller charts, but if I can just get a few of the people who listen to George Clooney or who have read Nick Kristof to pick it up, then I’ll be pleased.

The idea is to recount some of my journeys through the region, and keep it as a fast-paced journalist’s eyewitness account. The nuances will come through people I meet and things I have seen - the Arabs living in aid camps or fighting alongside the rebels, the peacekeepers sent on a doomed mission, Chadian rebels in Sudanese towns. Through them I can go beyond the simple black and white analysis of popular perception.

There will be more academic and exhaustive accounts of whether this is genocide, the role of the International Criminal Court, humanitarian interventions and so on. But I hope mine will explore the impact of all these things on the people that matter - the people of Darfur.


United Nations human rights investigators collect account of recent government bombing in the rebel held town of Madu, north Darfur

Can you tell me about your publisher, Reportage Press?

Reportage Press is a newish publisher that specializes in books by journalists. Now is not a good time to be trying to get a deal to write a non-fiction book but Reportage has a real commitment to publishing books that might not get a look-in elsewhere. Yet another book on Darfur, and one that sets out to explore some of its complexity, might struggle to find a home but it’s great that publishers like Reportage are putting this stuff out there. It’s also run by a former journalist and has tight turnaround times, which makes it the right sort of atmosphere for me.


One incredibly contentious issue is how to report the death toll in Darfur and which numbers should journalists trust. Any thoughts on that?

Journalists are in a tough position when it comes to conflict death tolls. We are expected to offer certainty in a situation where there is usually little agreement. For most of us the fallback position is to quote a respected authority, in this case the UN which uses 300,000 as the death toll. This is probably at the upper end of accepted estimates.

Similarly in trying to write about Darfur, it is difficult to get accurate and informed information - especially when writing stories from outside. Aid agencies and the UN cannot say much publicly (for fear of being expelled - although that strategy has clearly failed) and the Save Darfur Coalition has sometimes been caught out exaggerating death tolls and incidents of government violence.

Often though our job is to simplify the incomprehensible into themes that readers can understand: to go from the specific to the general. In the case of Darfur, this has often meant that we have picked up the Save Darfur analysis - Blacks or Africans against Arabs - as our narrative.

So I don’t agree with everything Mamdani says but on the other hand I agree that the broad Save Darfur movement has had a huge impact on the way journalists cover the story. Their advocates are often the only one who can be reached for a comment, for example. And who’s going to turn down an interview with George Clooney? We should have been a little more skeptical of the analysis we were being fed.

Given that a lot of the book will be about your travels, can you give us a preview or a juice anecdote or two about traveling and working in Darfur?

The most dramatic occasion was sitting in a government office in El Fasher as Janjaweed gunmen attacked the town’s market all around us. The man I was meeting raced to the door to escape, stopping only to remove his tie and leaving me sitting at his desk. It took me a moment to realize that not many Sudanese men wore ties. It would have marked him out as a government official, making him a target. A second later it dawned on me that his office was probably not the healthiest place for me to be either.

Al Siir and his taxi. Together we have been in dozens of scrapes, two accidents and one hole.

If what's happening isn't bringing us any closer to a solution, is there something that would?

A lot of the pressure for change is coming from outside, from a Save Darfur movement that has polarized the debate. The first step has to be taking some of the heat out of that debate to make it easier to engage with Sudan and also the Arab world, which has largely kept quiet so far. Then the next step is looking for solutions from inside Sudan, in building bridges between the tribes which have become caught up in the conflict. Some of this work is already happening but gets overshadowed in the rush to vilify Khartoum. Then the top tier is to improve relations between Chad and Sudan, another key driver of conflict.

There are no silver bullets. And many of the right processes are in place. The problem is that pressure is too often focused in the wrong places - getting peacekeepers in, the ICC - so that the international community expends all its energy, and political capital at the Security Council, on things that won’t end the conflict.