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Kenyan journalist Joseph Mathenge won CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Awards
Mathenge risked his life during the Westgate Mall attack last year
The awards were presented in Dar el Salaam, Tanzania, on October 18
Joseph Mathenge hadn’t planned to be at Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya in September 2013, when gunmen – now associated with Islamist terror group Al Shabaab – infiltrated the shopping center and started shooting en masse in a blitz that resulted in 67 deaths.
The Kenyan photojournalist, who last month won African Journalist of the Year at the 2014 CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Awards, was with his son, Geoff Kihote, en route to take photos at a wedding. Geoff had been diagnosed with bone cancer, and the assignment was to help pay for his treatment in India. It was at that moment that Mathenge got a call from a friend inside the mall.
“I happened to be in a dilemma, because a friend of mine just called,” he recalls. “She was trapped in Westgate, held hostage by terrorists, and here is my son. I had to actually think about it. “
It was his son who told him they had to go.
When they arrived, they found chaos. People were streaming out of the mall, ducking for cover, at a time when they were trying to find a way in.
“There were gun shots being fired all over as we tried to look for access into the building,” recalls Mathenge.
Once inside, Mathenge and his son took turns taking photos and helping injured hostages. They also communicated with security and police forces to direct them around the mall.
“I told (my son) to be cautious and to be focused, because any minute we could be shot,” says Mathenge.
With security, they located the friend who’d originally called, and moved them out of the mall. At that point, they left the scene. The father and son pair spent about eight hours in the mall.
“We went to the car, transmitted our pictures to newsrooms, and then we went to a restaurant where we sat down and had coffee without talking to anybody. That was our way of actually settling down our minds,” says Mathenge.
“It was important for me to take pictures, to show the world exactly what was happening, to document the moment so that future generations could know exactly what happened.”
The series, entitled “Images of Terror”, first appeared in the Kenyan daily newspaper The Standard.
Exposing corruption
Mathenge was one of several African journalists honored at the awards, held in Dar el Salaam, Tanzania last month. Other winners included South African journalists Susan Comrie and Joy Summers, for TV network Carte Blanche, who uncovered corruption in a solar geyser installment scheme in South Africa’s townships. Their undercover reporting won them the G-E Energy and Infrastructure Award.
“It’s a story of big money, and promises to the poor that they were going to get hot water,” says Summers.
“(The solar geysers) were going to save the city a huge amount of electricity. They were supposed to be locally manufactured, they were supposed to create jobs. I don’t think they did any of what was supposed to happen.”
‘Voice to the voiceless’
Rashid Ibrahim, a cameraman for Kenyan network Citizen TV, won the News Impact Award for “Veiled Justice”, about the rapes of very young girls within a secretive Somali clan in northern Kenya.
“As cameramen, we like to hide ourselves behind the lens. Sometimes, you just put on your headsets, you focus and then you let the story flow,” says Ibrahim. This time, however, he says the story got to him.
“The child (we interviewed) was six years old. When I was looking at her, I just felt like crying,” he recalls.
The awards, which were launched in 1995, are a joint venture between CNN and the South Africa-based satellite television service MultiChoice Africa.
“You can see how the awards have expanded over time. It continues to grow from strength to strength,” says Nico Meyer, CEO of MultiChoice Africa.
“It’s actually giving voice to the voiceless.”
Read: Inside the 2014 CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Awards