In 2009, journalist Anjan Sundaram began running a training program for young reporters in Kigali. Bad News follows this small group as they attempt to create independent publications under increasingly impossible conditions.

At the time, Rwanda was being sold internationally as a post-genocide miracle: orderly, prosperous, technologically ambitious and led by a government credited with rebuilding a shattered country. Sundaram’s students encountered another Rwanda beneath this immaculate public image—one in which criticism could cost a journalist their livelihood, freedom or life, and where censorship worked as much through anticipation and fear as through explicit prohibition.   

Registration rules become instruments of obstruction; colleagues disappear, flee or abandon journalism; private speech contracts under the possibility that almost anyone may be listening. Sundaram is especially attentive to the quieter mechanics of authoritarianism: the bureaucratic demand that appears reasonable in isolation, the offer that purchases compliance, the friendship slowly deformed by suspicion. The result is less a conventional political exposé than an intimate study of how a dictatorship enters ordinary perception and teaches people to censor themselves. 

It is also a pointed challenge to the Western appetite for uncomplicated national success stories. Sundaram asks what becomes invisible when economic growth, cleanliness and stability are treated as sufficient evidence of political virtue—and who is required to vanish in order to preserve the picture.

Bloomsbury Circus, 2016. First UK edition, first printing. Paperback. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers and edges; small crease to lower front corner. Internally clean.