Regrets Only: An Africa Journal: The Imposter

Monday, April 30, 2007

The Imposter

Every year, the Voice of America gets thousands of letters and phone calls from listeners around the world and many travel to Washington DC to visit VOA headquarters. VOAcorrespondents around the world also hear regularly from fans and most have unusual stories to tell about amusing letters they have received or first-hand conversations they have had with listeners about VOA programs. But an incident I experienced must surely rank among the strangest of them all. I filed this report in July 1995 (and it is another of the experiences mentioned in my Columbia Journalism School remarks; the photo is of the inscription on a poster my 'double' gave me):

I am sitting in the VOA news bureau in an office building in central Nairobi when the phone rings. On the line is a man who tells me his name is Alex Belida.

I assume it is a mistake, that he really is someone who wants to speak to Alex Belida. But he persists and I am astonished -- so astonished that I agree to an appointment so the caller can drop by the office.

The next day my mystery guest shows up and, with my tape recorder in hand, I ask him to state for the record his name:

“My name is Alex Belida.”

But, he quickly acknowledges, that is not his real name:

“My name is Mesafint Beyene. My nickname is Alex Belida. I got it recently from friends.”

Even I have to admit it is an unusual choice for a nickname, so I ask how he got it. It is a story that will thrill the hearts of all VOA executives back in Washington.

“I got that name because I listen to the radio day and night.”

And not just any radio. He listens to VOA and he especially likes to hear my voice:

“Mostly I like your voice. It’s a wonderful voice. When you present this voice about African affairs, East Africa and normally about Somalia and Kenya, Ethiopia, the sound is great. For me it is wonderful. That is why many friends, when I tell them about Alex Belida, this voice is beautiful. So they gave me that name: ‘your name is Alex Belida.’”

Mesafint Beyene is an Ethiopian refugee who has lived in Kenya since 1991. He says he loves his homeland. But he has no plans to return there and instead hopes to emigrate to South Africa, where he believes he will be able to find work more easily.

I for one am confident he will keep on listening.

(For the broadcast version of this script, I got Mesafint to record a variation of the standard VOA sign off: “I am not the original Alex but Ican say I am the copy Alex Belida, VOA news, Nairobi”. And one more note, a couple years later I received a postcard from him. He had made it to South Africa and from there, as I recall, he had moved or wanted to move to the United States.)

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Why?

It is October, 1997. I am standing in a rubble-strewn Brazzaville street as the city returns cautiously to life after a bloody civil war. Armed men are all around me, most of them looting, occasionally firing off bursts of bullets in celebration. But I am not concentrating on this anymore. Instead, with the hand holding my microphone limp by my side, my tape running senselessly. I am looking at another corpse -- this one of a man, perhaps in his 20's, his legs charred. I know there will be no voice to record. But his lips are apart, his arms outstretched, fingers together, as if in prayer. It seems another one of Africa's dead is trying to speak to me. And I feel I owe him this one last consideration. I think maybe he wants to share his anguish, his despair, his pain. Or maybe a last word to a parent or a wife or a child. I feel badly -- because I do not know for sure. I do know though that I have seen corpses like this before -- victims of war, or of genocide, or of famine, or of sickness. A symbolic path of the dead now runs through my mind -- a personal collection reflecting the real path their corpses have left across much of Africa: from arid Somalia in the northeast, across Sudan and into northern Uganda, down through steamy Rwanda, Burundi and Congo in the center of the continent. Some have been young men in uniform, their bodies shattered by a bullet or a shell. Some have been old men, thin beyond belief, weakened by hunger or disease. Some have been women, their dresses in tatters, their faces etched with silent agony. Some have been children, too young to die, their skulls cleaved in half. Some I have met in battle-scarred streets, some in burned-out buildings. Some I have seen sprawled amidst flowers in an open field, some floating, limbs bound, in muddy water. Some I have found in groups thrown into a dirt pit, some alone in the aisles of a gutted church. I have, at times, had imaginary conversations with these dead of mine -- their unrecorded voices playing on endlessly inside my head, sometimes loud, sometimes just a whisper. I tell them I am sorry and if it were in my power, I would restore them to life. But I can't. It's not in my power. Perhaps the only help I can give is to try to tell their story.

The Reporter

Alex Belida has been in international broadcasting since 1971. He spent nearly eight years in sub-Saharan Africa as a correspondent for the Voice of America, based first in Nairobi (1993-1996) and then in Johannesburg (1996-2000). He covered conflicts and humanitarian crises in Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville, northern Uganda, Angola and Lesotho as well as political unrest in Zimbabwe and catastrophic flooding in Mozambique. He suffered gunshot wounds while reporting in Somalia.
While in Africa, he was elected Chairman of the East Africa Foreign Correspondents Association in Nairobi and served as Treasurer of the Foreign Correspondents Association of Southern Africa during his Johannesburg assignment.
Before going to Africa, he served as VOA's Senior White House reporter for four years following stints as coordinator of the 1988 Presidential Election coverage and as National News Editor. Before those Washington assignments, he was based in Germany, where he served as Soviet affairs, East-West security and German affairs correspondent (1982-1985).
Following Africa, he served as Pentagon correspondent. In 2004 he was named Managing Editor and in 2007 became Senior Advisor for News at VOA. He retired in 2011.
Before joining VOA, he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in both New York and Munich, rising from reporter to Assistant News Director. He has a BA from Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University in New York. In 2006, he received the prestigious Alumni Achievement Award from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He also has an honorary doctorate in communications from the Somali National University.

The views expressed here are his own.

Regrets Only: An Africa Journal

Monday, April 30, 2007

The Imposter

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