I was sitting in a poorly lit movie theatre in a slum area, surrounded by excited and rowdy crowds eagerly awaiting the start of the World Cup final match between Argentina and Germany.
As the kick off time approached, I checked my phone and saw that Twitter was filled with enthusiastic soccer fans, both for and against Germany, sharing their thoughts and using hashtags like #TeamGermany and #TeamHitler to show their support.
So I joined in and tweeted my support for Germany.
Ten years later, while working for CNN International in the United States, this tweet would cost me my job and all the hard work and dedication I had put into achieving my dream career.
At the time I made the tweets I was just a teenager bursting under the shadow of a continent often left out in cultural warfare and playing catch up with Western inventions.
A decade later, I was reduced to a tweet and labelled an anti-semite and supporter of the terrorist organisation, Hamas; terms that I only wrote about in my pieces or while producing a television package for the international broadcaster.
But I am more than a tweet. I produced for all the prominent correspondents on your screen and covered stories from South America to Ukraine, Africa to the Middle East.
Now it feels like people like me weren’t meant to be here, not on this global stage. In retrospect, a lot of the people I grew up with never lived to celebrate their 18th birthdays or live to see their dreams come true.
But there I was, against all odds. I came not only out of the slums, but also jumped over the hurdles that came with them. If you live in a slum in Kenya, the way it’s designed is that you are not supposed to come out. It’s a dusty, tireless, backbreaking setup meant to decapitate one’s dreams.
I want to provide a brief overview of myself before continuing. My name is Idris Muktar Ibrahim, and I hail from Nairobi, Kenya.
As a child, I grew up in the impoverished neighbourhood of Korogocho, where my family lived in a cramped and poorly constructed dwelling with a roof made of dilapidated metal sheets. My mother was originally from Ethiopia, while my father was of Somali heritage.
The poverty levels in Korogocho were so severe, the houses were packed so closely together they barely allowed space for personal movement.
When it rained, the most dreaded time of the season, we would gather cups and plates and place them around the house as leaked rainwater would not allow us to sleep. Cooking any meal involved buying what we could and hustling the rest from our neighbours, a pinch of salt here and a cup of extra flour or oil from the next. This seemed to be the norm in the neighbourhood.
We shared what the next person lacked. But at the end of the day, my mother ensured we always had something to fill our tummies.
I was raised to be a devout Muslim. My mother and father both preached peace, love, and kindness. But, unfortunately, my father wouldn’t live to see the young boy he moulded for the world as his life was brutally cut short by robbers while he protected his place of work. He was a security guard.
In seeking answers to my father’s death in the hands of robbers, I found a calling in journalism. In young democracies like Kenya, the press often fights for those who are voiceless.
Journalism is the foundation of social change, and I believed and hoped to find justice. I didn’t find the answers, but my efforts weren’t curtailed.
When I was 18 years old, I met a news reporter and camera team filming a story in our slum and knew that was what I wanted to do with my life. A year later, I got a scholarship to study at United States International University (USIU).
As a student I aggressively applied for internships with news stations and worked my way from an intern to a fixer to a producer working to make sure I was able to support my family at the same time attending university.
When I graduated from USIU, I had the honour to freelance-produce for CNN on various stories for many kind and talented journalists who took the time to nurture and guide me.
At the age of 25, I lived my dream life, telling stories I loved and cared for. I met people from all walks of life and had camaraderie with who’s who in Africa.
My work and role defined me. I was in meetings with celebrities, key business leaders and politicians. On one shoot in Kenya, Equity Bank’s Group Managing Director, Dr James Mwangi, brought a helicopter to take my crew and I to his hometown to film the beginnings of Equity Bank. I flew high, soaring above the clouds.
This was just a kid from Koch (short for Korogocho), a statement I carried wherever I went. Still, a ‘Kochbaby’ always reminds me of my humble beginnings and motivates me to keep going.
In 2020, I was hired by Germany broadcaster Deutsche Welle as a junior correspondent for East Africa. At this point my star was shining and I was on TV and reporting internationally, giving nuance to local stories and explaining the region to a global audience.
Back in Koch, I had become an example that parents would use when narrating success stories to their children, a model to be emulated. I didn’t see this coming, not for a boy who grew up listening to gunshots and wails of women and men being robbed of their hard-earned salaries, or a mere wage on the weekend as they trudged through the streets of Korogocho.
As I said, I was flying high, both literally and figuratively. One week I was in Mombasa. The next I was in Addis Ababa or Johannesburg, wherever the story would take me.
Then the most profound thing happened; I was accepted to the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue a Journalism and Documentary Master’s programme, with a full-ride scholarship. I moved to the United States. Berkeley was incredible. Amidst the culture shock and learning to live in the West’s so-called mecca of liberalism, I was awarded the Mastercard Fellowship, Human Rights Center Fellowship, and the Foreign Correspondent Award. While at it, I was drawn to stories of communities overcoming adversity. I was therefore constantly researching and working on stories about the US’s most marginalised migrants and communities of colour. I graduated in May 2022.
I then accepted my dream job at CNN, where I was hired as a Newsdesk Producer on the international desk in Atlanta.
I thought life couldn’t get any better until I contributed to the reporting on a piece about the Israeli elections, and a pro-Israeli media watchdog investigated me. They dug deep into my tweets from when I was still a teen in the slums in July 2014 and found two that were, in my opinion, wholly abhorrent and unacceptable.
They called for my firing from CNN, and the network complied. I don’t blame my former employer, to be honest. As the world’s leading news network, they cannot have someone in their employment tweeting vile bigotry. Honestreporting.com also contacted various outlets to retract my awards.
It’s a catchy news story: Berkeley Grad, a CNN producer, professes support for #teamhitler and terror group Hamas. I would click on it, as many of you would.
But one part of the story is missing, my side.
Why did I write those tweets? Like many Africans, I was not exposed to historical facts such as the Holocaust. Growing up in a post-colonial Kenya, where my grandparents and their families went through horrible crimes from the colonialism masters, and where marginalisation and incessant genocidal-style massacres were still rife, we were so busy entangled in our struggles and freedom. Still, I would have never condoned such historical facts as what happened to the Jews. Grappling with the rise of social media, we tweeted in ignorance, yet had I been appropriately exposed, I would have never tweeted such things.
To give some context, in 2006, as a child, I supported Germany’s Bayern Munich. I remember my aunt bought me a knocked-out Bayern Munich kit during the 2006 World Cup, and I wore that uniform whenever I went out to play with friends. We had a Sheng song for Oliver Kahn, the German goalkeeper: “Oliver Kahn would die for the team!” It was this love for a football team, nothing more to it.