‘There’s no knowing how people will respond to your work’ CNN’s NimaElbagir

In this interview, NimaElbagir, a senior correspondent with the CNN recounts her experience hunting for stories, the risks involved, what drives her and what other career choice she would have made. Excerpts

Your exposé on modern slave trade in Libya resulted in a huge outcry globally. To what extent would you say you anticipated this?

“Not at all, I feel that we as journalists we do the story and then we just put it out there and you can never predict how people will respond to your work. We have been so incredibly fortunate that it has struck a chord with people and it’s that that has allowed it to have impact, because it resonated with people and people voiced their upset and their horror and that forced leaders around the world to act So I don’t think that we could have predicted it because we weren’t the ones who are the reason that this work has had the impact that it has had, it’s the people out there who took the work and acted on it who are the reason this work has had the impact that it has”

Why did you become interested in the modern-day slavery/ Libya’s case specifically?

“It was a story that when I first heard a refugee describing to me what had happened to him, I found it hard to believe, so unbelievable that this kind of thing was still happening. I had to go away and find out more about it. Even on what we call it, I had to go off and speak to legal experts about what is this, is it involuntary servitude?, is it modern-day slavery?, is it slavery? and legally these people came back to us and said this is slavery, in the most ancient sense and when we realised that, all of us, whether it is me or the rest of the team, or our managers who commissioned this and supported this, all of us felt that we couldn’t not do this story “

Going undercover to unravel secrets must be dangerous; how have you been able to stay safe despite the obvious hostile environments you’ve had to work in?

“We have a great team, we have a great security infrastructure, we have experienced managers and it’s that support that makes the risks manageable. So I’m lucky in that sense that I operate with the resources and support of the biggest platform in the world and that’s a huge privilege and I don’t take that for granted and that’s why I continue to do these stories because I am enabled by the infrastructure that is around me to do these stories”

You recently spoke at the African Women in Media Conference. What would you say are the major challenges you’ve faced in this industry as a woman?

“Access. Access to the people that can commission my stories was a huge thing that I faced as an African woman. You are out there in the field, you don’t know any of these commissioning editors in any of these international media that you’re pitching to so I think it’s just that geographical distance. I was also lucky that I had a story to tell that other people could not tell. I say lucky, but it was horrible as it was a story that unfolded around me back home in Sudan, Darfur, but in a sense it meant that the commissioners needed me so that allowed me to overcome that obstacle but I think that that is the biggest obstacle that you face as someone out there in the middle of the field, it’s not like London or New York or DC where freelancers can walk into the offices of commissioning editors. So that is probably the biggest challenge I faced”

With the increasing campaigns in support of gender parity across the world, do you think women in journalism will suffer less discrimination?

“I hope so. I hope this will change things. The difference that I have seen is that people are now willing to acknowledge the existence of bias whether that bias is conscious or unconscious and we are now actually having a conversation. Whether that conversation leads to tangible change remains to be seen, but I always find that when the genie is out of the bottle, it’s very hard to put it back in”

What is your advice to young ladies across Africa looking up to you and aspiring to become world renowned journalists like you?

“Just do it. Just go out there and do it. We have such a wealth of stories in Africa that need to be told and are fascinating and that people from outside of those communities or countries find very difficult to access. So just get out there and tell those stories and you will be amazed by how people respond to them”

If you were not a journalist, which other career would you have pursued?

“I come from a family of journalists. I have only ever wanted to be a journalist. I truly couldn’t imagine doing anything else”

What is the one thing that keeps you going when you face challenges on the job?

“The people who are so brave and are willing to tell their stories, every trip that we do I come back thinking about how we do justice to that”