CPJ Guest Blogger Muhyadin Ahmed Roble reflects upon the recent death of his friend and colleague, Yusuf Keynan, and the grave implications of working as a journalist in Somalia.
The following is a CPJ blog post by Muhyadin Ahmed Roble/CPJ Guest Blogger
My mother once sarcastically told me she could allow for my death, but couldn’t live with seeing my leg or hand amputated or with a lost eye after reporting from a battlefield. It was when she first learned that I had been secretly studying journalism in May 2005. The news made her distraught. She wanted me to go to school for medicine upon completing high school and become a doctor; my father wanted me to be a sheikh–an Islamic scholar. I wanted to be a journalist, but didn’t dare tell them.
“Being a journalist is like being a soldier, and that is a bit like a dead man walking. I don’t want such a career for you,” she told me in a soft voice an hour after I survived a huge explosion 10 yards from the speaker’s podium at Mogadishu’s largest football stadium in 2005. The country’s transitional Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, in his first trip to the capital since he had taken office in Nairobi, was speaking to large crowd of people there.
