Guided by locals, a correspondent found places full of poetry slams, art shows and surf contests.
Dionne Searcey covered social, political and economic issues in 25 countries in West and Central Africa, with a focus on Nigeria’s war against Boko Haram, for four years for The New York Times. Now back in the United States, she reflects on how she challenged herself to go beyond bad news. |
One afternoon, a few days after I moved to Dakar, Senegal, in 2015 to take on the role of West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, I braved my first solo driving trip into the busy downtown to look for the city’s version of IKEA. |
I got lost amid the half-finished office towers and clogged streets and wound up going the wrong way on a one-way street. Frustrated, I rolled down my window to ask a man walking along the street for directions. He rounded my car, opened the passenger door and hopped in. |
“What are you doing?” I said, startled, looking at the stranger in my passenger seat. |
“I’m guiding you,” he said. |
 | | Dionne Searcey, our West Africa bureau chief from 2015-19, traveling by helicopter from Maiduguri, the largest city in northeastern Nigeria and the hometown of the extremist group Boko Haram.Laura Boushnak for The New York Times |
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The man directed me through traffic straight to my destination — and then hopped out and went on his way before I had a chance to properly thank him. Google Maps and Waze were unreliable in Dakar, and many people couldn’t afford a smartphone anyway. So people navigated by asking directions. Personal escorting was a common act of kindness that strangers offered to lost drivers. I was embarrassed for being nervous. |
I realized I was responding to being in a deeply unfamiliar setting — but also to being in a society that Hollywood portrays as a continentwide war zone full of machete-wielding militiamen and witch doctors, leaving the impression a lion lurks around every corner, making you feel you always must be on guard. Paranoid State Department travel warnings didn’t help matters. |
The truth is that Senegal is one of the most peaceful places I’ve lived. But I did have to travel to other places that were at war. The New York Times had prepared me for the worst of what I might possibly encounter on this new assignment, a safety measure it offers to all of its international correspondents. |
They offered extra life insurance policies and emergency evacuation insurance and measured me for my own bulletproof vest. They enrolled me in a hostile environments training course where I learned how to treat bullet wounds and mitigate demands for bribes by border police. They gave me a GPS tracker that would emit a ping to help the paper find me anywhere in the world. I filled out forms with proof-of-life questions that only I would know in case I got kidnapped and my captors were to call the office and start making demands. If the bad guys offered my maternal grandmother’s middle name, then my employers could trust that they really had me in their clutches. |
But for me, the best preparation for my new job was reading the criticism of Western reporters who seemed to focus on wars, on disease, on famine, on corruption, on voodoo or wild animals, furthering stereotypes of savagery. Scholars have argued that kind of reporting leads to the perpetuation of a belief that tragedy in Africa, a place presented as so “backward” seeming, is inevitable and not newsworthy. |
It felt like some Westerners living in Dakar had bought into that mind-set. They dabbled in Dakar, buying African art made by French painters and taking African drumming lessons from other expats. While I was living there, some diplomats were banned from walking along the main coastal road, one of the loveliest stretches in the whole country. That ban came after a few late-night muggings, a type of crime that occurs in any major city. |
 | | Ms. Searcey in rural Senegal after an interview with a farmer about her love for baobab trees.Tomas Munita for The New York Times |
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I knew that as a reporter for one of the most important newspapers in the United States, I had a huge responsibility to cover important stories, and that included the bad news. |
Looking at my home country as an outsider offered a whole new perspective. |
EDITOR’S PICKS We publish many articles that touch on race. Here are a few you shouldn’t miss. |
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