(Photo credit: Sarah Ozo-Irabor)

Samantha Asumadu is a writer, journalist and former documentary filmmaker .

She has written for the Guardian, Telegraph, Open Democracy, Black Ballad, Media Diversified, Ceasefire Magazine and New Statesman and been interviewed on Radio 4 Womans hour, LBC, BBC World and other BBC programmes including BBC World Service, BBC London and the Victoria Derbyshire show.

Her decades long commitment to grassroots activism led to her campaigning about women’s representation in Theatre, child abuse in war zones, media equity, the Nationality and Borders Bill, Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) and Sickle cell anemia.

As a journalist she was based in East Africa, where she covered stories such as Acid Attacks, Blood Minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Kampala bombings of 2010 for news outlets including CNN, Deutsche Welle, Sky News, France 24 and Agence France Presse.

She directed and co-produced her first film for Aljazeera English in 2009. The Super Ladies is about three Ugandan women rally drivers and a race with a dramatic outcome. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and in 2016 Samantha was a judge at the Editorial Intelligence UK Comment Awards and was on the advisory panel for the British Film Institute's Black Star Season. In 2022 she was shortlisted for the Paul Foot Investigative and Campaigning Journalism Award and the National Investigation of the Year, Media Freedom Award.


I am writing two books. The first is called Between a Rock, a Hard Place and a Dystopia - At the centre of this unconventional memoir is a celebration of the white, brown and black working classes. The unsung heroes and the dirtbags. 

It's a true story from the point of view of a former foreign correspondent about precarity, family and mental health.

The memoir explores the functionality of learning and playing musical instruments and DJing to explain a lifetime of pattern seeking. The people Samantha encounters in life, work and activism and the journalism she undertakes become patterns to both seek and avoid on Samantha's journey towards mental health and peace. 

Class overshadows every interaction and stage in life as she seeks affinities with both romantic and work partners and holds people to higher and higher standards while she herself teeters on the edge of madness and potential greatness.

I first started writing it in 2012, though I didn't know I was writing it then. Over the years I have written more and in 2018 I was planning to make it a women foreign and war correspondents anthology. Now it's of a memoir.

The idea for the memoir came after author Louie Stowell read my 2018 article in the Telegraph How working on a construction site taught me the truth about Brexit . Again I didn't realise it but it's an ethnography of a building site and the working class people who worked there. My original draft which is somewhat different to the published version is included in the book.

The second book is called Radical Empathy: The Columnist Class, Egos and Accountability Based on my 2018 essay of the same name.

“A fundamentally unserious trade full of aristocratic wastrels”

~ Anonymous freelancer, who does not wish to be creditied

A collection of polemical essays, critiquing the elite UK media class and columnism.

Take a tour through the UK's media from someone at the edges.

In 'The columnist class, egos and accountability' Samantha discusses her experiences within the “columnist class” and the editors and gatekeepers standing in the way of the voices of black working class women being heard.

In 'Britain is Just as Culpable as Saudi Arabia for the War in Yemen' she reflects on Britain’s culpability for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the ongoing Yemen war.

In 'Britain’s homelessness crisis shames us all', Samantha considers the roots and lessons of a national scandal and what George Orwell's book Down and Out in Paris in London published in 1933 reveals about our society today.

Whilst knowing know it’s hard for some to care about prisoners, Samantha describes how and why we should all care about a prison system used to effectively torture individual prisoners whilst reflecting on the disruption she encountered from the Ministry of Justice when investigaing Indeterminate Prison Sentences for Public Protection.

In 'On the Nationality and Borders Bill and the UK Left' Samantha acknowledges that The Nationality and Borders Bill presents a grave danger to Britain’s ethnic minorities and asks why then has there been so little opposition to it from the UK left?

In 'There's a War on Black People in Britain' Samantha juxtaposes the deportation of Black British people to Jamaica to the Stansted 15 case and Windrush scandal and posits that there is an escalating war on Black British people that the media must do more to challenge.

15 essays that are evergreen and contemporary.

Also based on conversations with columnists, including Owen Jones, Hugo Rifkind and Suzanne Moore. Plus editors such as Max Strasser at New York Times and Ramzy Alwakeel at Open Democracy, and freelancers Ben der Merwe and Lo Jones.

This blog has excerpts from the books and tips for writing non-fiction and more

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Excerpt from the introduction of Between a Hard Place, A Rock and a Dystopia

NOT FOR SALE OR DISTRIBUTION

© Samantha Asumadu

“My advice to a budding war correspondent was “never take such a risk that you simply become your rivals next biggest story” - Giles Dilnot, former Daily Politics reporter and friend

The Wannabe - Introduction

It was the dead babies that did it for me, specifically the dead black babies, toddlers I suppose would be more apt. They confirmed to me I wasn't cut out to be a foreign correspondent.

Does empathy get in the way of good journalism? One would hope not but depending on the situation you are in it can. 2012 World Press photo winner Massoud Hossaini said “Women were asking me, ‘Help, help, help. I couldn’t. I was recording and I was taking pictures.” whilst he and other photographers are most likely not psychopaths, in that moment they didn't act on any empathy they may have had by intervening.  That's what made them journalists and me a wannabe. 

I edged back from the tableaux in front of me, two dead black toddlers laid out on a table outside of a small one story structure. I thought they were both girls but I couldn't be sure. Killed the day before after days of heavy rain had finally pushed the mud from the top of the mountain onto their village of 300 people, they lay there genderless in death. They laid there unknowing they were the source of such interest and intense mourning as survivors and young journalists surrounded them.

As I edged back the other journalists edged forward. My boyfriend, stringing then for Aljazeera called back to me for something. I couldn't quite hear him between my suppressed tears and the survivors wailing. I was holding his tripod so maybe it was that. My white boyfriend edged forward eager to capture the dead black children on his camera. I edged backwards. 

We had met the year before in London. He  was in the midst of doing a broadcast MA eager to go back to East Africa and be a fully fledged journalist, confident that a stint in Kenya meeting western journalists for whom Nairobi was a hub  would give him the news editor contacts he needed before heading to Kampala with his new camera purchased for him by his surrogate Uncle, a big shot lawyer in the city. We had been incredibly lucky to meet each other in that transition year via friends of friends of friends. I proudly started working for Sky’s now defunct showbiz website, interviewing D list celebrities about Z list events.

He introduced me to the latter work of writers such as Michela Wrong and Ryzard Kapuskinski. Both white writers who had somehow managed to capture truths, corruption and atrocities in their reporting trips in Africa. Her for Reuters and the Financial Times, later writing a seminal book, I Didn't Do It For You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation about  the history of Eritrea. A hard to remember title but an unforgettable book about a place rarely written about and its survival through foreign occupations. And he for the Polish Press Agency and later some of the most evocative writing I’ve read to this day on Africa's revolutions in the fifties and sixties.

Of course, now some of it is disputed but in the year, I started reading his books, he died and Margaret Atwood another of my hero authors wrote his obituary for the Guardian. She called him ‘A person - one of the few, surely - who could be trusted to tell the truth about complex and difficult events, not in abstract terms, but in their concrete details - their colour, smell, feel, touch; their weather’ confirming to me that his was the path. My boyfriend left for East Africa and 5 months later, my contract for Sky showbiz having ended, I followed him.

Yes! I was heading to East Africa to make documentaries, but I too would try my hand at Kapuskinski’s style of reportage. My exciting trips, I imagined, wouldn't just be about getting the story. I would be part of the story, I would get to know the people, the political context and describe the environs authentically. So I stopped reading the Daily Mail and started going to talks by African writers.

One evening in my tiny studio flat in West London perhaps a year before I got on the plane to Entebbe, my then student, later foreign correspondent boyfriend and I watched a film called Shooting Dogs, a dramatisation of the atrocities and evacuation during the Rwandan Genocide. During it we cried. It was fittingly brutal. In one unforgettable scene a woman reporter admits that while she had been disturbed and emotional about what she witnessed happen to children whilst reporting in Serbia, she’d come to realise it was because the children were white as she had never let it get in the way of reporting on the black children being cut down in similarly brutal ways as she reported in Africa.

As I edged back and the other journalists clamoured forward I remembered her comment, part of a conversation with the protagonist I think, the white male protagonist of course in a film about an African genocide. I remembered my boyfriend and I crying. It had been a bonding moment.

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