Promotional Information

About the Author

Jennifer Bakody is a journalist and aid worker who’s spent the last twenty years working for BBC, CBC, CNN, France 24, Radio France Internationale and the UN in Canada, the Congo, France, Haiti, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. She grew up in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and studied journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax. She currently lives in Singapore, with her husband and daughter.

Reviews

“It is my hope that the humanity portrayed by Radio Okapi Kindu will help to rally the world around the many forces for positive change in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” ― Dr. Denis Mukwege, 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, world-renowned gynecological surgeon & founder & medical director of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo

“I have visited the Congo as a journalist, observing in action the largest United Nations mission on earth. But I always wondered: what would it be like to be one of those UN workers, in the country not for weeks, but years? This book answers that question in a way that is nitty-gritty, vivid, funny, up close and personal ― and has compassion for what the Congolese have suffered for so many years.” ― Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, and Bury the Chains: Prophet’s and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves

"One dramatic highlight is the brilliantly understated account that one of Bakody’s colleagues gives of how he was brutally beaten by soldiers in retaliation for a story he wrote about the army’s poor performance in battle. Thanks to Bakody’s talent for snappy dialogue, eye for detail, and humorous prose, the book never flags, even when its pace slows down to capture the everyday slog of running a radio station." ― Nicolas van de Walle,Foreign Affairs

“Bakody manages right from the start to frame her story around the team of Congolese journalists, thereby avoiding the stereotypical pitfalls of a young Western woman going to ‘find herself’ in a remote place in the deepest and darkest and most dangerous part of Africa that all too often provides the backdrop for these books. Radio Okapi Kindu is definitely among my favorite aid worker memoirs now.” ― Tobias Denskus, Aidnography

“She [Bakody] spent nine months in this remote outpost, her sense of purposes fuelled by a determination to create a public record that would deliver accurate and even-handed information to a population exhausted by six years of civil war. This is her engaging account of that experience.” ― Sarah Murdoch,Toronto Star

“She captures a sense of Kindu and of her likable, hard-working and often fearless staff as they adjust to a changing postwar world nonetheless fraught with danger.” ― Chris Smith, Winnipeg Free Press

“Here, at last, is a book about the Congo that evokes not anger and pity, but admiration and hope. Radio Okapi Kindu is a heartfelt memoir of an Africa that few correspondents or visitors ever get to see.” ― Michael Meyer, author of In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China; and The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed