Interview with a Dead Man

After five months of bloody civil war, relative peace returned to Congo-Brazzaville in October 1997. Covering the last days of the fighting, I saw something in the streets of the devastated capital that moved me to reflect on the conflict and human suffering I had witnessed across Africa. This is the piece that is permanently posted on this blog in the lefthand column. It is essentially an explanation of why I and other reporters do what we do.

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.