Q&A with Neil Munshi

"The toppling of Gaddafi... unleashed a flood of fighters and weapons south."

Throughout the Orwell Festival we’ve been sharing new writing and insights from this year’s finalists. The Orwell Prizes for Journalism 2022 shortlist highlights the finest politically engaged journalism published in 2021. To see the list visit our website here.

Neil Munshi is an editor at Bloomberg in West Africa, having spent the previous decade at the FT as a correspondent in Lagos, New York, Chicago and Bombay. He was born in Milwaukee and lives in Lagos with his wife and two children. We spoke to Neil about his approach to foreign reporting, his time at the FT - and the geopolitical issues running through his shortlisted pieces.

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You're based in Lagos and have worked across the world - from Chicago to Bombay. How important is it to you to be immersed in the place you're reporting from? How far does your work depend on your own life experiences - if at all?

I’d like to say that I don’t do parachute journalism, which is something of a dirty word. But of course, I do - all foreign correspondents do, especially those of us with regional mandates. To an extent you’re doing it if you live in Bombay but cover a story in Orissa, or living in Lagos and reporting a piece in Cross River. That doesn’t mean covering Africa while living in London, or Latin America while living in New York, which I think is a pretty ridiculous practice. But I live in Lagos, and for the past four years I’ve covered roughly twenty countries - I can’t live in all of those countries, and no foreign news organization can maintain bureaus in all of them. So, I’ve flown in and out of other places on my beat, even as I’ve focused in on a handful of countries - the Sahel countries Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso and then the Central African Republic - because I was interested in them, and they had some geopolitical resonance.

That last bit is really important for foreign correspondents at global news organizations, I think - or at least for me as a foreign correspondent. The stories I cover almost always have to have some connection to the wider world. That criteria forced me to be more strategic about how and when I covered the banditry crisis, arguably the biggest story in Nigeria the last few years, because the drivers and consequences are largely local. But it allowed me to go longer and deeper on conflict in the Sahel, because of how it is connected to Europe - particularly France - along with, increasingly, Russia, and to a lesser extent the US.

I think having been born to immigrants in the US is helpful in that it gave me a pretty global perspective from an early age. We travelled a lot, because we’d turn layovers en route to India into vacations. Being Indian, and having been to India a lot growing up, probably helped me find my feet quicker when I moved there later. Ditto being born in the Midwest and then being based in Chicago. But I don’t think that kind of familiarity is a prerequisite. There were plenty of non-Indian, non-Midwestern journalists in both those places doing better work than me. 

You've also spent the last decade working at the Financial Times, with its focus on the economy and finance. How have you found working with that particular lens? 

I didn’t study economics or finance, and had no intention of working for a business paper. I’d never even read the FT before I joined. But what working at the paper taught me is how numbers simultaneously ground a story - giving the reader something to grab on to - and give it sweep, some kind of global resonance - allowing it to travel. Small, local human-interest stories become relatable to readers all over the world when they’re attached to some kind of (uncomplicated) economic data. Political reporting becomes more appealing to the lay reader when it’s connected to the broader economic picture. It sounds obvious, but a few strategically placed numbers can really elevate a piece.

Two of your pieces focus on Russian mercenaries in the Central African Republic (CAR), including the surreal propaganda film ‘Touriste’, which glorifies their activity there. Has your reporting affected how you see events in Ukraine? If the world had paid more attention to Africa, would the invasion have been as much as a surprise?

I’m no Russia or Ukraine expert, but my understanding is that there were plenty of signs without needing to pay attention to Moscow’s activity in Africa. I think what my reporting in CAR, and on the making of ‘Touriste’, offers is a window into how Moscow uses proxies, irony, doublespeak, trolling and plausible deniability to expand its sphere of influence. ‘Touriste’ is all of that ratcheted up to the nth degree - an action flick glorifying mercenaries the producers, the men allegedly behind Wagner, the Kremlin and the CAR refuse to acknowledge even exist, doing things that all four vehemently deny ever happened.

I didn’t report these pieces with the idea that they were a series - but they fit neatly into a theme I’ve returned to over and over since I got to West Africa, which is how the French, having never fully reckoned with their colonial legacy, and unwilling to let go, are finally being forced out. That Russia is exploiting their departure is compelling, but to me it’s in some ways beside the point - this is about France and its inability to let go of its economic, military, and political influence in the region. It’s about people in west and central Africa being fed up with ‘Françafrique’ and turning in some cases to Russia or strongmen to help ease them out.

Some academics argue this is simplistic (which I’ll acknowledge, though simplifying things is part of what journalists do), but to me the toppling of Gaddafi is a key event here - it was French led and opposed by most people in the region. It ultimately unleashed a flood of fighters and weapons south into the Sahel that helped to topple governments and amplify existing jihadist insurgencies. The French intervened to quell that chaos and conflict, raising local suspicions, and over the next nearly ten years things only got worse. That opens the door for coups and strongmen and Russia, and on and on.

What is the best piece of reporting - or book - you've watched/read/heard recently?

My old friend Maura O’Connor’s piece ‘What It’s Like to Fight a Megafire’, in the New Yorker. It’s so well done - the writing by turns elegant and exhilarating. Highly recommended. Tortoise’s ‘Sweet Bobby’ podcast was very different, but also incredible.

Which journalists working today do you most admire?

Patrick Radden Keefe comes to mind - I’m reading his new collection Rogues. It is, as the kids say, all bangers. The other one is Katherine Boo, mostly but not exclusively for Behind the Beautiful Forevers, her book about a Bombay slum - easily the best book about India I’ve ever read. Part of what makes it so good is that it’s not one of those Big India Books (or Big Africa Books etc), where the intrepid foreign correspondent visits a village or town in each chapter and presumes to tell the story of an entire country or continent. Boo focuses on one tiny place - for 250 beautiful-written, deeply-reported pages - and never purports to tell you everything about India, yet somehow manages to do just that.