Founding member Robert Adams, family and friends have been busy trekking across Africa these past few months. Robert, one of the original Frontline TV agency cameramen, has been blogging the whole journey along with a little help from the rest of the entourage. Team Jangano 2009, as they’ve called themselves, recently reached Rwanda, where Robert reminisced on some filming he’d done there in the late 90’s after the genocide,
When I came to Rwanda for the first time in 1998, I arrived in a country completely defined by its recent bloody past: the signs of the genocide of 1994 were everywhere, from the bullet holes riddling lampposts and the parliament building to often blank and traumatised expressions on the faces of those I saw walking the streets of Kigali. Not to mention the legions of NGOs busy setting up shop to support the rebuilding and rehabilitation process. I was working with a newly assembled team of young Rwandans to develop a radio soap opera that would deal with reproductive health issues and would be broadcast on the BBC. The workshop participants included men and women, Tutsis and Hutus, English-speakers and French-speakers, former exiles and those who had been in Rwanda throughout the genocide. It was my first assignment as a freelance consultant after leaving my cosy research position at Reading University. link
The video above is from the beginning of their journey leaving Harare. The team have uploaded a whole raft of videos to their own Jangano 2009 YouTube channel.
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Robert Adams, one of the original Frontline TV cameramen and a founder member of the Frontline Club, is on the road. For six months Rob, his family and some friends will be on the road in Africa. From their home in Harare they’ll head to Cairo, Cape Town and back to Harare and all points in between. The family are taking it in turns to write on the blog,
It’s a little after 7, on an overcast morning in Harare. I’m sitting on our balcony, looking down over a valley full of msasa trees and birds. It’s hard to imagine that just a few kilometers away, beyond the hills on the other side of the valley, the vast majority of the population of this country are living in stress and penury…
…I suppose I am acutely conscious that as our adopted homeland sinks into the mire, with hunger and cholera and inexcusable selfishness by our political leaders, we are about to embark on what must, to some, seem like an absurd extravagance. I have been quietly haunted, the past few months, by the contradiction between Zimbabwe’s decline and our expedition. link
Follow the family Adams on the Jangano 2009 blog. We talked to Rob some time ago about his work on the film, Shake hands with the devil, about the Rwandan genocide.
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