Zimbabwean journalists confront post traumatic stress disorder

By Lance Guma
10 April 2006

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a medical condition that has for a long time been associated with soldiers coming from conflict zones. PTSD is a mental condition that often follows a terrifying physical or emotional event. Persons who survive the event have persistent, frightening thoughts and memories, or flashbacks of the ordeal. Former Daily News photographer Urginia Mauluka told Newsreel many African journalists suffer the condition and do not even know it. It wasn’t until she attended a recent seminar in London that she understood more about the condition.

Like many journalists in Zimbabwe she covered the violent land seizures that were also accompanied by violent election campaigns throughout the country. ‘The majority just soldiered on without wanting to become the story. There was so much at stake and they could not be seen to be concentrating on their own trauma and not that of the general populace,’ she said. Mauluka says for African journalists talking about PTSD seems to be a luxury. ‘There has been conflict after conflict on the continent and local journalists have been the first to cover traumatic scenes on the ground.’

She narrated how a colleague from Rwanda and working for the AFP news agency could not eat meat again. This followed her coverage of the Rwandan genocide in which there was human flesh and blood everywhere. In Zimbabwe former Standard journalists Ray Choto and the late Mark Chavunduka were tortured by the army in 1999 after writing a story relating to a coup attempt. Mauluka herself has faced harassment and beatings while taking pictures for the banned Daily News. ‘I actually had to get treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ she said.

Mauluka went on to say, ‘ I can pinpoint some areas where probably colleagues and even myself were suffering from PTSD but never confronted the issues. It was with this background in mind that the Association of Zimbabwe Journalists in the UK, of which I’m a member, organised a seminar with the Dart Centre Europe to try and bring African journalists together to talk about journalism and trauma on the continent.’