by Peggy Simpson
Firle Davies’ grandparents emigrated to Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) from a grim postwar England in the 1950s. Both of her parents became reporters, working for the Rhodesia state-owned media. So she spent part of her childhood on a farm with her mother and stepfather in the 1970s during the Rhodesian war, where they were under constant risk of being attacked. For the British whites like her parents who had come to Rhodesia and taken up farming, Davies said, “it was an incredibly intense time.” They comprised “a very tight community, very much under siege and embattled.” Davies said, “They all had a purpose, but I’m not sure if you asked them now [in 2009] what they were fighting for, that they’d have a clear answer.”
“The world has changed a lot from the days of minority rule, particularly white minority rule in a predominately black country,” she said, adding that her parents and their peers “really were out of time in that generation and in this country with what was happening in the rest of Africa.”
She travelled a lot. After her parents divorced, she switched back and forth between living with her father and her mother. They worked for years in the Middle East, in England and in South Africa.
That was a lucky break, said Davies, who will spend the 2009-10 academic year as the IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow. “It gave me a perspective that many people growing up here would not have had.” Without outside input from travel, she said many of the white settlers had a “lager mentality – a ‘batten down the hatches’ mentality.”
Davies knew from a young age she wanted to be a journalist and assumed she’d go to a British university to get trained. She spent a year at a Harare college, cramming in courses in English and history to qualify, which she did. But her parents couldn’t afford to send her. “So I got a job as a sound technician holding a big boom mike,” working for Visnews in the late 1980s, based in Zimbabwe. “That’s how I started, running after a cameraman.”
It also was her ticket to see some of the new leaders in South Africa, including [former President Thabo] Mbeki. “Even though I was a little sound girl, it was great to be part of the action.”
That wasn’t enough for long; soon she was covering some of the most brutal conflicts in Africa. By 1991, she was a freelance camerawoman based in East Africa, starting a decade of chasing crises across the continent, from genocide to cholera outbreaks to child soldiers to mass migrations of Africans displaced by civil war or armed conflict to mass rape as a weapon of war.
After a year’s break to cover business and regional news based in London as a cameraperson for ITN and EBN, in 1996 Davies returned to Africa, basing herself in Nairobi. She made film and documentary productions for Vivid Features and then for Associated Press Television Network (APTN).
She was one of a handful of female camerapersons working in sub-Saharan Africa; she covered stories in Somalia, the Congo, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Rwanda.
Nine years ago, she went to work for the BBC.
BBC Africa Bureau Editor Sally Hodgkinson said Davies “witnessed the physical, psychological and social impact that conflict, bad governance and corruption has on these societies.”
Allan Little, BBC World Affairs correspondent, worked with Davies on many difficult assignments, including Rwanda, Congo-Zaire and Sierra Leone. “It is always a relief to know that Firle is going to be there,” he said, because she will have found out who is driving events, will have met them and won their confidence and will try to see events through their eyes.
“She has exceptional insight,” he said. “She has great physical courage and is always anxious to get to the places where atrocities or crimes have been committed in order to hear directly from the victims themselves.”
This, he said, enables her to separate rumor from “verifiable, observable fact.” It makes her a highly reliable source, even while putting her at risk.
“She seems to me to be driven by a quiet outrage at human rights abuse and a faith that, in the long term, reporting the truth can be part of what makes a difference,” Little said, “and by the idea that those who have suffered have the right to be heard.”
For much of the last decade, Davies has collected “testimony from victims of torture, in many instances, not long after they had been beaten or released from torture. It’s very difficult to remain balanced and fair in the face of that horror. A woman whose buttocks had been beaten to where the pelvic bones were showing through her flesh. She will never walk again properly, certainly never sit down properly. I can see their faces, hear their voices. I’m not sure I understand why all of that was necessary.”
Davies says she and the director of a medical and psychological treatment center both had read Elizabeth Neuffer’s book, The Key to My Neighbor’s House. They talked about the book and how they stayed awake nights, “wondering how we are going to help the victims, the survivors; how to make them safe again.”
The director steered her toward the Neuffer fellowship. “I didn’t think for a moment I’d get it. I thought it would make me put pen to paper, to think about stuff.”
She relishes the chance to pull back and digest what she’s seen and done, to talk to people at MIT and to editors in Boston. “I’m finally realizing that it’s time for me to clear up the unsettledness in my brain, to make sense of it.”
Until now, she has sustained and replenished herself during these emotionally draining years by yoga and cooking for her friends. She rarely lets go emotionally. “I have an idea that if I started that, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I would be weeping for years. Or hospitalized in a strait jacket.”
Now, heading for an academic year in Boston, she expresses some trepidation at mixing with the “brains” at MIT. She isn’t going to dwell on the fact that she never went to college and instead is eager to get feedback from both professors and colleagues at MIT about her experiences in Africa. And she’s able to think of some frivolous things, especially the prospect of eating fish, something, she said, she can’t find in any form in Harare, where she is now based. “I can’t wait.”
Peggy Simpson is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.