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George Bennett |
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Editor in Chief /Main Architect of the CTN Project
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George Bennett has been coming to Africa for more than fifty years. Born in New Zealand, he did military service in the Royal West African Frontier force in Nigeria. This experience later helped him get a job as talks writer with the BBC African Service. He worked on many of the BBC's popular programmes for Africa including Focus on Africa and Network Africa (which he started). He became Head of the African Service in 1976. Retired from the BBC in 1988, he has worked in most African countries for many organisations including the International Red Cross, the European Union and Fondation Hirondelle. He was Director of Information and spokesman for UNOSOM, the United Nations mission in Somalia. He ran STAR radio in Liberia for its first two years and returned to work with its journalists when it restarted ten years later. George is married with four grown up children and three grandsons. When not working in Africa he lives in London and central France.
George Bennett is one of the main architects of the CTN project, launched in February 2007
CTN Editor-In-Chief George Bennett (right) and CTN Journalist Millicent Massaquoi (left) in the CTN newsroom
"In early 1997 a chance call to me in Nairobi from my Sierra Leone friend David John, then at Deutsche Welle, led to my connecting with Jean-Pierre Husi, Director of Fondation Hirondelle in Lausanne. Soon after that I had supper in Nairobi with Philippe Dahinden who was en route to Arusha. A week later he hired me as director of the yet-to-be STAR radio. Thus started a tempestuous two years in Liberia where we built up a strong audience during the Charles Taylor regime. My long association with Fondation Hirondelle has ebbed and flowed but I had always pressed for a radio journalism project in Sierra Leone. The young editors and reporters here are outstanding and - as I'd always hoped - the long hours of apprenticeshoip and training at Fourah Bay College have resulted in a first class daily package of news and information, heard throughout the country."
–George Bennett, August 2008, Freetown, Sierra Leone
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CTN reporter in Kenema, Mariama Khai Fornah, has been chosen by BBC Trust West Africa and Talking Drums Studio to cover the Taylor Trial from the Hague for three months starting in August 2008.