Bouquets and brickbats, the lot of a daring journalist
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As one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents Christina Lamb has risked her life more than once, writing about terrorism, torture and tyrants, but one of her most famous subjects was just a young girl when they first met.
Lamb likes to talk about how Malala Yousafzai has these two sides: “Malala is a fascinating mixture of being very politically mature and wise beyond her years, but also still just being a 16-year-old girl who fights with her brothers and likes playing games in the garden and joking. She’s just a girl. I always tease her because if you put a microphone in front of her she becomes a different Malala, and speaks like a politician. It was very nice to see that other side of her, not just the political side.”
Lamb’s bestselling book ‘I am Malala’ is one among seven she has authored, the most recent being ‘Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World.’The latter takes her back to her early years as a journalist when she was based in Peshawar and her dispatches with the Afghan Mujaheddin fighting the Russians saw her named ‘Young Journalist of the Year’ in the British Press Awards in 1988.
She has won Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times as well as the Prix Bayeux, Europe’s most prestigious award for war correspondents and was awarded an OBE by the Queen in 2013. She also won Amnesty International’s Newspaper Journalist of the Year award for reporting from inside Libyan detention centres. She describes her most harrowing reporting as being that on the plight of Zimbabwe. Since 1994, she has described the devastation and destruction by Robert Mugabe and how it seems to be getting worse every time she returns.
As a mother, Lamb has sometimes found her personal life under public scrutiny. In an article for the Daily Mail, she recalled how in 2005, she wrote an article about the time she interviewed General Pinochet a day after being released from hospital following an emergency Caesarean section. Her son Lourenço, born ten weeks early, was still in an incubator. She told a journalist: ‘I was writing about it several years later, and I was shocked at what I’d done. I was trying to say that some of the decisions I made early on in motherhood I wouldn’t make now. How, in fact, becoming a mother had changed my approach to my job.’
Her article triggered much debate, with people arguing both that she should not have had a child if her career was going to be such a priority, and others pointing out that male journalists were seldom asked to make such choices. Lamb, who was undercover in Zimbabwe at that time, missed much of the furore, but she still had a brave defender.
Lamb remembers that her mother wrote a letter to the newspaper saying that when her daughter became pregnant, she had been very worried about how Christina would juggle a demanding and dangerous job with being a mother. Says Lamb: “But she said she really admired how I’d done it and the proof was my son — a bright, happy, well-adjusted child. More pertinently, she added that, having seen what my husband Paolo and I had achieved, it made her wonder whether she had been right to give up work all those years ago.”
Lamb has had other closer shaves though – she was on Benazir Bhutto’s bus in 2007 when two bombs went off, killing at least 120 people. She has since tried to be very careful about the work she takes on. But she scoffs at the idea that any job is ever truly ‘safe’. “Yes, I do dangerous work, but you can get hit by a bus anywhere,” she points out.