Outside Westgate

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

History, Science, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Society & Culture

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2014

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the wake of public tragedy there is a space between the official narrative and the stories of the people who experienced it. Today, we crawl inside that space and question the role of journalists in helping us move on from a traumatic event. NPR's East Africa correspondent Gregory Warner takes us back to the 2013 terrorist attacks on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Warner reported on the attack as it happened, listening to eyewitness accounts, sorting out the facts, establishing the truth. But he's been been wrestling with it ever since as his friends and neighbors try not only to put their lives back together, but also try to piece together what really happened that day. Special thanks to Jason Straziuso, Heidi Vogt, Robert Alai, Didi Schanche and Edith Chapin.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening...
0:03.0	Okay.
0:04.3	All right.
0:05.5	Okay.
0:06.9	All right.
0:08.3	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:11.3	Radio Lab.
0:11.8	From...
0:12.8	W-N-Y-C.
0:14.7	See?
0:15.0	Yeah.
0:16.5	And NPR.
0:19.1	An upscale mall in Nairobi has turned into a battleground.
0:22.6	Armed men stormed Westgate Mall in the Kenyan capital just before lunchtime, firing weapons
0:30.6	and throwing grenades.
0:31.6	What appears to witnesses to be at least a dozen gunmen have taken hostages inside.
0:40.6	Others have reported that the... There have been reports, there have been unsubstantiated reports.
0:44.0	No, no, let me not do those ones.
0:45.8	Kenyan police and counter-terrorism officers are on the scene.
0:49.3	I almost feel like I need to start with a caveat that all these other stories that we've, you know,
0:54.0	gotten to do together......'s been frequent gunfire, have been me telling you a story as a journalist. I feel like this story, it's going to be a story where I'm going to have to stop being a journalist at some point. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. Oh, I keep waiting for you to say the podcast, but we don't do that anymore. Oh, we don't say that anymore. The guy you just heard that was NPR's East Africa correspondent Greg Warner, who's done a bunch of stories with us. Recently, he came to us with another one. It was all about a struggle he was having trying to figure out how to tell a story that is true.
1:29.1	I'll just leave it to that.
	...

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