A Conversation on African Migration, Statelessness, and Belonging

Join the Pulitzer Center on Thursday, April 29, at 1pm EDT for a conversation with grantees Ty McCormick and Hassan Ghedi Santur, both journalists and authors who have reported on Africa with the Center’s support.

McCormick will discuss his recently released book, Beyond the Sand and Sea: One Family's Quest for a Country to Call Home, which was informed by his work as a grantee covering Europe’s “pay-to-stay” policies encouraging Africans to stay home. The book is about one family’s yearslong journey from a Kenyan refugee camp to America, “a distant land where anything was possible,” and touches on themes of statelessness, identity, and belonging.

Santur will share his own experiences as a Somali-Canadian journalist and discuss his reporting on Africa and migration. His Pulitzer Center-supported project, A Second Chance in Somalia, focuses on a rehabilitation center’s mission to rescue young men who have defected from the terrorist group Al-Shabab and give them a second chance at life. Santur’s 2017 book, Maps of Exile, also examines African migration to Europe, placing the individual stories of migrants and current migration trends within historical and structural contexts.

McCormick is an editor at Foreign Affairs who has reported from more than a dozen countries in Africa and the Middle East. While he was the Africa editor at Foreign Policy, he led the team that worked on the Pulitzer Center-supported project Europe Slams its Gates, which won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.

Santur is a contributing editor at Warscapes online magazine and is currently based in Nairobi, Kenya. He has written three books and previously worked for many years as a radio journalist producing documentaries and current affairs shows.