Collin Haba - Summer 2004

I was out one day after completing high school looking for a vocational job as I waited for the university semester to begin. Along the way, I met a newspaper vendor, and we had a chat. He told me that he had been out selling newspapers the whole week and he had hardly sold any copies. I asked him why, and he said that everyone already knew what was inside.

That was the turning point in my life.

I strongly felt that, being in a country that is under reconstruction, I had found the part where I belong in the reconstruction process. The moment I walked into the university, I learned that the journalism program had earlier been suspended from the university because it was deemed an unnecessary expense and liability to the government, considering the role the media had played in the Rwandan genocide a couple of years earlier.

With a lot of lobbying and pressure, the School of Journalism was opened just at the correct timing of my joining the university. I managed to pass the school’s entry exam, and from then on, the road to changing the face of journalism in Rwanda had kicked off.

Despite a lot of criticism from both family and friends, I went ahead with the program. Together with my classmates, we started a university newsletter of which I was the editor for two years. With my graduation due in February, I look forward to being part of the of the first-ever daily newspaper to be published in the country.

Practicing journalism in Rwanda may not be that exciting, for private media hardly survives, and there is a lot of censoring of the media. However, being in a country where there are hardly any trained journalists, with the training and internships I have gone through, I feel a future of a professional press coming to my country, and being part of it, is nothing but exciting.

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