Good News Stories from Africa: How Hollywood and the Media Get it Wrong
John Prendergast is a human rights activist and best-selling author who has worked for peace in Africa for 30 years, including helping facilitate the end of the Ethiopean and Eritrean conflict in the late ‘90s. The standard image of Africa is a starving baby, a continent of helplessness and a population ensconced in victimhood. These impressions are reinforced by the media, especially big-budget motion pictures that portray Africans as helpless or inherently violent. However, contends Prendergast, the reality is far different.
Prendergast is the founding director of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. He is also the co-founder of the Sentry, a new investigative initiative focused on dismantling the networks financing conflict and atrocities. Prendergast has worked for the Clinton administration, the State Department, two members of Congress, the National Intelligence Council, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace.
He is the author or co-author of ten books. His latest book, Unlikely Brothers: Our Story of Adventure, Loss, and Redemption (2012), is a dual memoir co-authored with his first little brother in the Big Brother program—a program in which he has been involved for over 25 years. His previous two books were co-authored with Don Cheadle, Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond (2007), a New York Times bestseller and NAACP non-fiction book of the year, and The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa's Worst Human Rights Crimes (2010). He is also beginning a book project on the Congo with Ryan Gosling and New Yorker writer Kelefa Sanneh.
The recipient of multiple honorary degrees and awards, Prendergast has taught at many American and foreign colleges and universities and is a board member and strategic advisor to Not On Our Watch, the organization founded by George Clooney, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Brad Pitt that advocates in support of global human rights. He appears in the Warner Brothers' motion picture "The Good Lie" (2014), starring Reese Witherspoon and is a primary subject of the book by Jane Bussman, A Journey to the Dark Heart of Nameless Unspeakable Evil (2014).
John Prendergast’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.
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Food for Thought: Podcast with John Prendergast