Incident

I love working with Gary Dimmock. For anyone who doesn’t know who he is, he’s an investigative reporter for the Ottawa Citizen. He’s all about controversy and exposing societal injustices. What better place for him to find this type of work than Rwanda.

Freedom of the press is a huge issue here. For example, even a photo of an important person or politician taken from the wrong angle (yes, I know the word “wrong” is subjective) has resulted in editors being canned. It’s a heck of a challenge to overcome when working in the media, especially coming from Canada.

Last evening, Gary and I needed to go get a shot of a one of the wealthiest (if not the wealthiest) person in Rwanda. He owns over 600 properties apparently, a palace of a house and some money making businesses in town. I’m staying vague to keep the story quiet for now.

We needed a shot of the guy’s house within the context of the poverty that surrounds it. Driving up to the house, we passed some ladies with baskets on their heads walking up the road. We parked up the road, waited for the ladies to walk our way, and then I started shooting with a long lens.

Security guards start sprinting up the road with their nightsticks. They rip my $7,000 camera out of my hands and run back into the compound with it. I tell the driver to watch the stuff in the car while Gary follows the dude with the camera. He gets tough with the guard, asking him to return the gear.

The camera is behind the brick wall of the property by the time I get down to the gate. Gary is trying to work out a deal with the guards but they only speak French. Therefore, Gary asks me to translate for him while I’m trying to have my own say. Meanwhile, the guards are yelling and getting upset about Gary’s seeming attempt to intimidate them, and about 30 Rwandan civilians have gathered at the end of the driveway to watch the whole ordeal.

It’s the good cop bad cop routine…guess who I was playing? The guards start getting really upset about Gary’s aggressiveness. On one hand, I’m on Gary’s side and I know that we have to stand up for our rights here. As Gary reminded me on many occasions, taking the camera was theft. I passed this message onto the guards, who weren’t exactly warming up to us yet.

They proceeded to tell us we needed permission to take photos of the house. We countered by saying we were taking photos of the women with baskets—not a lie by any stretch of the imagination. We also noted the fact that the house was not a government building and was therefore photographable. They responded to us with lies: “this is a government building…(the guards) are police.” This statement changed a few minutes later to, “this is private property…(the guards) are like police.”

Initially, they wanted to keep my camera. Then they wanted just to keep the memory card. Then they wanted to keep the camera and the memory card. Then it was just the memory card again. Also, initially, the patron of the house was said not to be home. But after asking many times and waiting for 45 minutes, the patron came to the door.

Gary managed to speak to him a bit (I love to watch this guy work) and I managed to reassure him that I could simply delete the images to solve both of our current dilemmas. To be continued…

At the end of the day, I got my camera back with memory card and we drove home with yet another ridiculous Rwanda story.