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DeWayne Wickham
It is a fitting recognition of the life of Maya Angelou that this issue of the Morgan Global Journalism Review includes a tribute to the grande dame of American poets – and focuses on the struggle for press freedom on the African continent and in the Caribbean.
Before Angelou, who died on May 28, became a critically acclaimed poet and author, she worked briefly as a journalist in Egypt and Ghana. A few years after Angelou left the journalism profession she wrote her seminal autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, in which she chronicles her personal search for identity.
As a poet, author and journalist, Angelou was obsessed with the search for truth. And just as her unrelenting push for openness and honesty was the cornerstone of her writings, it is the focus of the articles that Candia Dames and Welma Mashinini Redd have written for this volume of the MGJR. They probe the limits of press freedom in two countries – the Bahamas and Liberia – where the news of Angelou’s passing produced a widespread expression of grief, if not a commitment to the transparency that was the hallmark of Angelou’s life.
Their articles and Angelou’s untimely passing remind us that when it comes to openness in government, at home and abroad, the struggle continues.
This volume is also enriched by the remembrances that Armstrong Williams shares of his long friendship with Angelou; Richard Prince’s insights on the time Angelou spent as an editor of two African newsmagazines, and Tonyaa Weathersbee’s piece about the elucidating experiences Angelou had as an American expatriate in Ghana.
All of this offers readers an understanding of Maya Angelou’s contributions to journalism – and the hurdles that journalists still face in trying to make governments as transparent as the extraordinary life she led.
DEAN'S CORNER