Voice of Witness

An excerpt from our Zimbabwe editors:

ZIMBABWE, JANUARY 2009

It has been raining in Harare for the last few days and the city is overgrown and green. Weeds grow tall and lush beside the roads. I am struck by how silent everything seems. All is quiet, as if the entire capital is holding its breath, waiting. But for what? Nobody knows. Zimbabweans, it seems, have stopped waiting for anything in particular. They’ve spent years waiting and know better than to get their hopes up. The best they can hope for now is something, anything, different.

We drive at night. There are no streetlights. Our headlights pick up people walking by the side of the road. Others walk down the median. No one looks directly at us. Traffic lights aren’t functioning either; they’re merely empty, hollow eyes in the dark. Just a few other …

Since 2004, the Voice of Witness series has been publishing collections of oral histories that illuminate human rights crises throughout the world. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC said this about the series:

“These books are amazing…beautifully produced, with incredible editing and literary sensibility. Voice of Witness has done a better job than I’ve seen anybody do with having people tell their stories in a way that really engages you.”

Voice of Witness is a nonprofit organization. Right now it needs your help.

It currently has a book in progress that will give a platform for dozens of Zimbaweans affected by the long and disastrous reign of Robert Mugabe. Our two editors have just returned from Zimbabwe, where they interviewed dozens of witnesses around the country, and engaged local interviewers to continue the work of collecting eyewitness testimony in a country where freedom of expression …

In this month’s Sojourners Magazine, Richard Vernon says of Voice of Witness:

“The series does not so much weave a tapestry from different experiences as braid a rope, a lifeline by which we might haul ourselves into a less ignorant, more actively compassionate future. In them, the specific illuminates the general, destroying preconceptions, stereotypes, and cop-out responses along the way.”

To read the full article, click here.

On February 10, Out of Exile editor Craig Walzer and Voice of Witness series editor Dave Eggers will be speaking at an event co-hosted by the ENOUGH project at the Center for American Progress. They will be joined by Out of Exile narrator Abuk, Wunlang School founder Franco Majok, and ENOUGH co-chair John Prendergast, who has said of the book,

“This collection of powerful, moving stories amplifies the voices of the Sudanese people with a sensitivity and deference that puts them at the center of the narrative, where they belong, rather than as statistics or scene setters.”

With an introduction and additional interviews by Valentino Achak Deng and Dave Eggers, these narratives were compiled by Walzer during his extensive travels through Kenya, Sudan and Egypt. He will be touring with the book again in May. If you

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