Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Jan. 13–When this country opened the way for an independent press at the turn of the decade, the blossoming of newspapers of nearly every political persuasion was widely hailed as a critical stepping stone toward true multiparty democracy. But here, as elsewhere in Africa, rather than marking a clean break with an…
On Dec. 23, 1995, six agents of Nigeria’s State Security Service (SSS) arrested Nosa Igiebor, the editor in chief of the best-selling weekly magazine Tell, as he prepared to leave his Lagos home for work. Igiebor, a 1993 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award, had just resurfaced after months in hiding. While he was…