Radio Okapi Kindu (book review)
Jennifer Bakody’s memoir Radio Okapi Kindu-The Station That Helped Bring Peace to the Congo on her time as a UN communications officer and local radio station manager in Kindu, DRC in the early 2000s is definitely a great addition to your development-related summer reading list! After reading and reviewing quite a few memoirs of aid work(ers), Radio Okapi Kindu adds some interesting new nuances to the genre and managed to entertain me right from the beginning through Bakody’s gentle and unhurried style which allows her story to unfold and ‘breathe’ with a lot of nuances, details and space for her protagonists. Stories from and about journalists-not expat aid work in ‘Africa’ Unlike some aid worker memoirs, Jennifer 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