Between May and July 2023, I interviewed 15 Burundian exiled journalists who arrived in Belgium between 2015 and 2023. In January 2024, seven of these journalists accepted to participate in my project. With them, I conducted additional interviews. At the same time, I extended my invitation to another Burundian former journalist residing in Belgium.
Between April and May 2024, I travelled to Burundi, where I have interviewed 20 journalists and former journalists residing in the country. Considering the wealth of material already collected, I decided not to interview any other journalists.
To select the journalists to interview in Burundi, I proceeded through snowball sampling. I asked my contacts in the Burundian media landscape if they were interested in participating in my project, and/or if they knew other journalists who might be. Among my contacts were Hutu and Tutsi journalists working in the main media outlets in Burundi. At the same time, I asked other contacts who are very familiar with the Burundian media landscape to suggest other names to contact.
The list of names I obtained included female and male journalists who were Hutu, Tutsi or Ganwa, came from different media outlets (public, private, perceived as supporting or opposing the ruling party), and had worked in different periods of the history of Burundi, between the 1970s and today. The group of journalists interviewed includes different social categories and media outlets but is not intended to be scientifically representative. Histoire(s) vécue(s) du journalisme au Burundi does not aim to analyse the history of journalism in Burundi but to pass on the individual histories of some of its protagonists, who indirectly tell the history of journalism.
The interviews with the journalists were done face-to-face and followed a conversational format. They lasted between 30 minutes and several hours, depending on the journalist’s availability. One only question was asked: “Can you tell me about your professional trajectory?”. Some journalists spontaneously explained their motivations for pursuing this career; otherwise, I asked questions aimed at finding out more about them. If necessary, I sometimes asked clarifying questions to better follow the sequence of the events being narrated; however, I did not ask to clarify elements that contradicted or did not mention information that I already had on the journalist or her/his activities prior to the interview. With this approach, I wanted to respect the journalist’s desire to share with me what s/he decided to share, privileging some elements over others. Otherwise, I would have adopted the attitude of a journalist, a historian or a researcher with a specific research question in mind, which I was not.
All the conversations were recorded and transcribed. Then, I turned every transcript into a written account, which I sent to the journalist concerned for review and approval. In the account, the words used by the journalist were not changed. I rearranged some passages to put them in chronological order; I asked for additional information where necessary; sometimes, I proposed to delete certain irrelevant passages and suggested or asked to find less “sensitive” or controversial wording. Some of the journalists in exile in Belgium agreed to meet with me a second and sometimes a third time to provide the additional information requested and to finalise together the account. Then, the journalists reviewed the prepared account, corrections were made if necessary, until the finalisation and approval of the text’s final version, ready for publication. Through this approach, I aimed to reproduce as exactly as possible what the journalists agreed to share with me and with the public.
Before publication, four persons, familiar and unfamiliar with Burundi’s media context, proofread the manuscript of the book Histoire(s) vécue(s) du journalisme au Burundi and the series of stories published on the website.