Across Africa, journalists are being kidnapped, tortured and killed – often by people whose identities are known but who face no punishment. Reports gathered by RFI and press freedom groups show these incidents spreading from Burkina Faso to Guinea and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where journalists who refuse to toe the line are silenced or forced to flee.
In Burkina Faso, respected investigative journalist and editor of newspaper L'Evènement Serge Oulon vanished on 24 June, 2024 after an armed group stormed his home. He has not been seen since. Over the following months, around a dozen other journalists in the country were abducted in similar incidents.
Oulon's face appeared on the cover of the last published edition of L'Evènement in July 2024, as if the twice-monthly newspaper – one of Burkina Faso’s most respected outlets – is waiting for its editor to return before publishing again.
Security forces have also repeatedly forced their way into the Norbert Zongo National Press Centre in Ouagadougou, named after the journalist murdered in 1998 who became a symbol of press freedom in West Africa.
Silencing dissent
Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who seized power in Burkina Faso in a coup at the end of 2022, no longer tolerates dissenting voices. Only “patriotic journalists” are allowed to work in peace – those “who limit themselves to publishing articles pre-written by the presidency”, one Burkinabe colleague told RFI.
The rest – along with opposition figures, lawyers, magistrates, religious leaders and members of civil society – are routinely arrested, or conscripted to fight on the front lines against the jihadist insurgency that has shaken the country for a decade.
Some later reappear in short videos, dressed in military fatigues and reciting statements of repentance under visible duress.
But Oulon has not been among them. Is this because he refused to bend? Or because he is no longer being detained?
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Five days after his abduction, the Anti-Corruption Award was given to Oulon in his absence – an annual award presented by Burkina Faso's National Anti-Corruption Network.
The jury recognised “the rigour and meticulous work carried by a stripped-down, clear and limpid style” of a journalist “with ethics ingrained in his body”, a colleague said.
The last time Oulon received this award was for an investigation into embezzlement within the Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland, a government-backed militia created to help the army combat jihadist insurgents, in which Traoré is implicated.
Summoned by military courts, ordered to reveal his sources and repeatedly threatened, Oulon stood firm – until his disappearance.
Disappearance in Conakry
In Guinea, Habib Marouane Camara – journalist and administrator of news site Le Révélateur 224 – was violently pulled from his car and arrested by gendarmes and soldiers on 3 December, 2024, as the sun set over Conakry’s gridlocked streets, witnesses said. Like Oulon, he had refused to submit.
The 36-year-old was a leading figure in Guinea’s media landscape. Audiences valued his sharp commentary, uncompromising views and outspoken defence of free expression.
“I’m living proof of that,” said Sékou Jamal Pendessa, secretary-general of the Guinean press professionals’ union. “When I was also arrested, he never stopped denouncing my detention and the responsibility of the government spokesman, Ousmane Gaoual Diallo.”
Camara knew he was in danger, particularly since he had defied the minister who was prosecuting him for defamation.
Since his disappearance nearly a year ago, the authorities have remained silent, prompting his wife, Mariama Lamarana Diallo, to write an open letter to transitional president Mamadi Doumbouya.
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In it, she expressed her anguish and that of her children, asking to “know the truth to have peace of mind”. She has received no reply.
On 6 December, 2024, the Dixinn Court of First Instance in Conakry found that Camara's arrest was "carried out without orders from the constituted authorities and outside the cases provided for by law”.
The NGO Reporters Without Borders (RSF) subsequently referred the case to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, which is already examining the cases of Foniké Menguè and Mamadou Billo Bah, two Guinean civil society figures abducted on 9 July, 2024.
With a drop of 25 places, Guinea recorded the steepest decline in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index published by RSF.
“It’s unfortunate, but the facts are there,” Pendessa said. “The main independent media have been banned by the regime, and not a day goes by without a journalist being threatened.”
Clampdown in DRC
The situation is equally dire in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. According to RSF, more than 50 attacks against journalists have been recorded since 2024 in North Kivu province, controlled by the M23 rebel group.
“It’s a catastrophe, and I weigh my words,” said Tuver Tuverekweyo Wundi, former provincial director of Congolese national radio and television service in Goma. “Around 30 community radios have been silenced. Media professionals have no choice but to flee or submit to the new authorities.”
His colleague Fiston Wilondja never got that chance.
The body of Wilondja, from the Bukavu Media Monitoring Centre, was found on 5 August, 2024 “with a battery cable around his neck” after being “kidnapped, tortured, tied up, strangled and killed”, according to the Congolese National Press Union. He was still wearing his press card.
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“The perpetrators were armed men identified in a rebel battalion, as the governor acknowledged, but there was never a trial – even though witnesses heard them say ‘you talk too much in the media’,” Wundi said.
Wundi fled Goma after 11 days in M23 detention. “I could no longer work. The rebels wanted me to sing the praises of their actions. So I took my conscience clause, so to speak,” he said.
Arriving in the capital, Kinshasa, Wundi was arrested again, this time by government intelligence agents, and spent four days in a cell.
A small consolation came when RSF awarded its press freedom prize this year to the Congolese organisation Journalist in Danger, for which he is the correspondent in Goma.
“It’s a great honour to see our work recognised, but now the real task begins – to keep informing people in the east,” he said.
States as perpetrators
These examples reveal a disturbing trend, RSF’s Africa director Sadibou Marong warned.
“Increasingly often, it is states or local authorities – the very ones who are supposed to protect journalists under international law – who commit these crimes,” Marong said.
So what can be done?
“Document relentlessly, denounce, file complaints, flood the courts so that traces remain,” Marong said. “So that one day, since no authoritarian regime is eternal, justice will finally be served.”
This story was adapted from the original version in French by RFI's Carol Valade.
