Isha Sesay left cable news to write about her time
covering the 2014 abduction of 276 Chibok schoolgirls by the
terrorist organization Boko Haram: “An ‘othering’ of Africa still
exists in newsrooms.”
: “I Didn’t Want to Do Any More Trump”
Isha Sesay became a TV news star in 2014, leading a CNN news
team to a Peabody Award with her coverage of the kidnapping of 276
schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria, by the Boko Haram terrorist group.
The Britain-born journalist, 43, stayed with the story over the
years, spending time with many of the 164 girls who escaped or were
eventually released as part of the negotiations with the Nigerian
government, as well as with the families of the 112 still
unaccounted for — even after public attention moved on. But in
August, the CNN International anchor quit cable news because, in
part, she was tired of Trump stories (“There was no respite”). She
put her experiences covering the schoolgirls into a book, Beneath
the Tamarind Tree, which Dey Street published July 9.
Where are the Chibok schoolgirls now?
The majority of the freed girls are at the American University
of Nigeria in the New Foundation School, a specially created
preparatory school just for them. These girls were stolen from
school and had been held in captivity for years and yet came back
with a thirst for education. Sadly, 112 are still unaccounted for.
We can safely say a lot of them married their captors — not out of
free will. Boko Haram has said some died during airstrikes, but
that’s unconfirmed. And we’ve also seen videos where at least some
of the girls have said that they do not want to come back. They’ve
been brainwashed. That’s a really tragic situation for the parents
who are still heartbroken.
When is the last time anyone has heard from these girls,
or their kidnappers?
The last video they released was January 2018, which CNN
struggled to confirm. It was a 20-minute video that showed 14 girls
on camera, saying they would not return. The government may have
more information, but part of the problem is there’s a kind of
information blackout. The last major statement made by the
government was that they don’t know whom to negotiate with because
Boko Haram has split into factions.
Has the government given up on retrieving them?
For sure. Speaking to one of the key Bring Back Our Girls
activists, and also the mother of one of those girls, they feel
utterly abandoned. It’s one thing for your child to be taken and
for the government to say, “We’re trying. Here’s what we know so
far,” and it’s another thing to be completely ignored and
dismissed, particularly in a country like Nigeria that is so
status-obsessed, so class-conscious. These girls are poor, they
don’t have famous names, they come from a part of the country so
far off the beaten track it might as well be another planet. People
just don’t care. Parents have died from the heartache. More than a
dozen have died.
Why did you write the book?
I wanted to humanize these girls. They’ve stayed nothing more
than a headline, and I wanted to show that girls all over the world
have hopes and dreams, inner lives, ambitions, visions for the
future. This story hit me in a deeply personal way because my
mother is from a place not that different from Chibok. She was born
in a town in Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the
world, in a home that had no running water and electricity, and
rose to having a Ph.D. in English language and linguistics and
being the first woman to [run for vice president] in Sierra Leone.
I see firsthand the power of education. But for the grace of God, I
could have been born in a place like Chibok.
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What can readers do to help?
We must not forget the 112 who are missing. The only reason the
Nigerian government even acknowledged fully what had happened in
Chibok was because of the groundswell of public outcry. The voices
of global citizenry can shame governments into taking action. The
world is so deeply interconnected now. What happened in
northeastern Nigeria is a flare — it’s a warning of instability,
and places that are unstable can become safe havens for dangerous
individuals and groups. What they plot in those spaces could
potentially affect us here in the United States. Nobody should look
away and say, “That’s not my problem.”
In 2014, “Bring Back Our Girls” was on everybody’s lips. People
were tweeting and demonstrating. Then it just disappeared. It
speaks to me of the ease to which the West, specifically America,
can look away from the crimes perpetrated against black and brown
people, in particular women. The ease with which we so quickly move
on. I look at other cases of kidnapping — not mass kidnapping —
like Natalee Holloway, JonBenet Ramsey, Madeleine McCann. We should
remember those children, and we should also remember close to 300
African children being taken. I tried to keep doing it within the
CNN apparatus, but organizations have different focuses these days,
and the story also moved away from being easy for TV.
The book gets into the hierarchy of what’s covered in the news.
What is that hierarchy?
Look at the way Ebola was covered. Ebola was ravaging Africa,
and coverage in the U.S. was miniscule until it impacted those two
Americans in Liberia. There was a sense that we were weighing out
whose lives matter and deciding how much coverage that gets.
There’s very much an “othering” of Africa that still exists in
newsrooms, a tendency to normalize tragedy that comes out of there.
I saw it and heard it. Every day, decisions are being made as to
what to cover, what’s the top story, the second story, the third
story. More often than not, it is my experience that Africa and
black and brown people are at the bottom.
Courtesy of CNN
Sesay with a Nigerian
government minister during her Peabody-winning coverage of the
schoolgirl kidnappings.
You’ve said one of the reasons you left CNN was Trump …
I hit a crossroads at CNN. It was a perfect storm of factors.
There were editorial decisions that would have involved moving from
L.A. [to Atlanta], which I didn’t want to do, but also I just
didn’t want to do any more Trump. Even at CNNi, we were doing at
least 75 percent Trump. There was no respite. I had hit a fatigue
with Trump and it was sucking all the oxygen out of the room. I
have a charity that empowers adolescent girls in Africa [W.E. Can
Lead]. These stories matter to me, and this is what I want to put
my energy in. I just wanted more agency in my life.
Interview edited for length and clarity.