He was jailed. Beaten. Marked for assassination. Seme Ndzana survived to keep exposing misdeeds in the African nation of Cameroon — now, from a second-floor walk-up in New Haven.
Ndzana moved to the Newhallville apartment three weeks ago. Still in boxes on the front porch are old copies of Le Nouvel Independant, the fiery newspaper he published in his homeland before barely escaping with his life.
Meanwhile, in his bedroom, Ndzana continues to rile Cameroon’s established powers by publishing the online African Independent, including this exclusive interview the other day with an official of a rebel group claiming responsibility for a fatal bombing.
While he hustles to pay the rent and feed his family with business consulting gigs, Ndzana is looking to expand his online publication. He is determined to keep both Cameroonians back home as well as the “African diaspora” informed with hard-hitting journalism that he has always made a point of calling “Independent.”
“I don’t want anyone to control me when it comes to journalism,” Ndzana declared in an interview at his home. His passionate response to the question — “Why do you keep calling your publications the ‘Independent’?” — revealed the fire that burns beneath the 53-year-old’s easygoing demeanor.
“If people control, you can’t do your job! Nothing should stop a journalist when he has an investigation.”
That’s easy for your garden-variety American-born reporter to say. Ndzana’s journey from Africa to New Haven reveals what it can mean to live up to such a declaration in other parts of the world.
That journey began in Yaounde, Cameroon’s capital, in 1992. (Note: The following account comes from him; it wasn’t independently verified on the ground in Cameroon.)
At the time, the former French colony, which became independent in 1960, was in the birth stages of democracy in a post-Iron Curtain world. After Ndzana left his job as a banker he developed his reporting chops as a freelance writer. In 1992 he became a staff reporter for a Yaounde newspaper called La Nouvelle Expression. His exposes quickly brought him to the attention of what he considered a French-puppet government. One investigation, into French control of Cameroonian commerce and the transfer of profits abroad, led to a national boycott of French goods. Another investigation, into mismanagement of the national airline, led to the CEO’s resignation. He was developing a conviction, which he’d develop in a later book, that emerging republics can serve as covers for aristocracies to preserve their rule.
According to Ndzana, the paper stopped refused to print some of his controversial pieces that involved some of its financial backers. So with start-up capital from his former banking colleagues, he launched his own weekly newspaper, Le Nouvel Independant, in 1993.
He had money to pay a staff and printer for four issues. He couldn’t get paid ads; he said the government bullied potential clients. A government-linked distributor “sabotaged me” on circulation.
So, Ndzana said, he and his approximately dozen reporters distributed the newspaper themselves. “We knew the newsstands.” They kept publishing fueled largely by circulation revenue. And they kept making trouble, whether with exposes about a bumbling agriculture minister or outspoken opposition to policies like the government’s proposed journalism code.
A 1994 editorial personally criticizing longtime President Paul Biya landed Ndzana in jail for the first time, charged with insulting the leader, inciting people to revolt, and failing to submit an article for pre-publication review by government censors. The prison, built for 800 inmates, held 4,000, Ndzana said. “Every day there were bodies that are going out.” The guards beat him, he said. He was behind bars for three months before he got to appear before a judge, who dismissed the charges.
A 1995 editorial, also attacking Biya, earned Ndzana another three-month prison stay. The phrase that got Ndzana in trouble: He called Biya a “thinking animal.” The government didn’t get, or appreciate, the Aristotle reference. The judge did, when Ndzana finally appeared before him, and Ndzana was again released.
That enraged the government’s justice minister, who appealed the verdict to a three-judge panel — three judges the minister himself got to choose.
Ndzana realized his prospects were looking grim. Especially when he and the staff retired to the nearby bar after putting the paper to bed one week. He noticed two strangers by the bar; next thing he knew he was out of it. His staffers wrestled him away from the strangers, who were armed and trying to grab him. Ndzana said he learned later that his drink had been drugged.
He went into hiding. The three-judge panel handed down a one-year prison sentence and a fine equivalent to $200,000.
“That was impossible for me [to pay]. They knew that,” Ndzana said. “They just wanted to silence the newspaper.”
An opposition leader helped Ndzana and his wife Evelyne, who was pregnant with their first child, cross through the bush to a Nigerian border village. Three days later a canoe arrived.
“Our travel on the canoe lasted eight hours to the first Nigerian town,” Ndzana related. “Then we went on to register as refugees with the Nigerian HCR [High Commission for
Refugees] in Lagos and we stayed in Lagos for four months.
“The Apostolic Nuncio [Vatican ambassador] in Lagos helped us pay for travel
to Burkina Faso following the advice of a priest who introduced us to him.”
In Burkina Faso, Ndzana was helped by a leading journalist named Norbert Zongo. Zongo raised money from other journalists to help the family survive until, in 1998, Ndzana was granted asylum status.
Before his departure, Ndzana and Zongo would talk about the perils of their trade. Zongo, too, edited and published a newspaper called The Independent. He tempted the ire of his government with his investigations, including one into the killing of the president’s brother’s driver. “He believed in doing his job. He wouldn’t leave an investigation because they were threatening you,” Ndzana said.
Ndzana left Burkina Faso in September 1998 for New Haven. Three months later, Norbert Zongo’s “burned body was found” in a car. He’d been assassinated. (Read about that here.)
The family settled at first in Westville’s Cooper Place, with the help of Interfaith Refugee Ministries (since renamed Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, or IRIS). Ndzana scraped to support his growing family. That was either at some times than at others. With his financial background he landed a job as a commercial credit analyst at a community bank in Waterbury until it was sold. He worked at a print shop for a while, spent five months managing honor boxes for the Register‘s circulation department.
Meanwhile, he went to school. He earned a masters in financial services at UNH. Then he got his MBA from UConn, where he won a business plan competition. The plan was to revive his dream: Create a new newspaper called the African Independent. The idea was to write about Africa as well as about the African diaspora. World news, described through “African civilization’s voice.”
“I came here, I saw African-Americans, Brazilian-Americans, Haitians, even in Africa — the culture is not transmitted,” Ndzana said. “This is a civilization that is dying. Everyone is looking West. It’s terrible. African values are being lost. This culture of Hollywood, violence, greed — those are things this generation is following and getting into trouble.”
Ndzana never got the money to launch a for-profit paper. He has been paying the house bills by lining up consulting gigs for investors and companies needing market research. Evelyne finished up her high school degree, and went on to study nursing. (The family moved back to New Haven from Ansonia last month so she could be closer to class.)
Meanwhile, Ndzana launched his African Independent online. When he had time, he wrote articles, first about the Iraq war, then about news back home in Cameroon as well as the legal system here in the U.S.
He found he could dig up Cameroonian news unavailable in his home country. An example: He had suspicions about a supposed investor President Biya had lined up to put together a $6 billion bauxite mining deal. Ndzana tracked the man down in New York. He landed an audience by pretending to offer a business proposition. He also researched the man’s background.
“I discovered that he’s nothing. Someone who’s going to invest $6 billion? He has only a secretary!”
Ndazana’s conclusion: President Biya is using people like this investor as fronts for how he’s spending “money he has been stealing for 26 years” from his country “to establish a dynasty.”
Ndzana’s subsequent article received over 10,000 hits, he said. It went viral in Cameroon.
He publishes when he has the time; colleagues in other countries occasionally contribute stories. He can’t pay them.
He’d like to. He’d like to publish his site for a living. He hasn’t lost the Independent dream.
Want to help? To make a tax-deductible charitable donation to Ndzana’s African Independent, make a check out to “Online Journalism Project”; write “African Independent” in the subject line (important!); and mail it to Online Journalism Project, P.O. Box 3288, Westville Station, New Haven CT 06515.