In our series of letters from African journalists, Umaru Fofana looks back at how reporting on Sierra Leone’s civil war 25 years ago got personal and what dangers correspondents still face today.
WARNING: This report contains descriptions some readers will find disturbing.
During the bloody rebel war that raged in Sierra Leone for more than a decade, fake news and rumours abounded – without the aid of social media.
At a time when only the elite had landlines and there was no internet or mobile telephones, reporters often had to go in person to find out information.
I would then have to go the telecommunications HQ in the capital, Freetown, to make a reverse-charge call to London to be able to file a report for the BBC.
Six years in to the conflict, on 9 October 1997, I ventured out to confirm a report that the military’s HQ had been bombed by a Nigerian military jet.
In apparent reprisal, the soldiers were said to have set ablaze the private residence of the exiled president.
It was at the stage in the war when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels – notorious for being intoxicated on drugs and hacking off people’s limbs – had teamed up with the military junta who had recently taken power.
Nigerian troops – part of the West African intervention force known as Ecomog – were stationed in the outskirts of the capital, with no mandate to intervene at the time.
I set off, walking past a roadblock manned by soldiers and their rebel allies. Somehow they knew I was headed to the burned-out residence.
About half a dozen of them chased me. “Stop!” they shouted, cocking their guns. “Running away would be fatal,” I said to myself. So I stood still.
When they got closer, one of them pulled a trigger. My right tibia bone was shattered.
I hopped on my left leg as they goaded me to their checkpoint. They kept kicking and hitting me whenever I fell down, shouting at me to get up.
Source: BBC