Mwenzi: A Data Journalist on the Trail of a Humanitarian Foundation.
Four hundred percent in seven years. For a disease no one has ever heard of.
Jonas Reuter sees the curve on a Wednesday evening, half past eight, in the almost empty open-plan office of a small investigative newsroom in Hamburg. It was supposed to be routine: an analysis of WHO mortality data, a comparison base for an HIV investigation he promised to deliver to a colleague by Monday. But the number in front of him cannot be right.
The disease is called Mwenzi. It appears in a program run by the Voss Foundation, one of Europe's most respected humanitarian organizations. Edmund Voss speaks softly. He rarely smiles. The world calls him a saint.
Reuter is forty-seven, divorced, with a nine-year-old daughter. He begins asking how exactly the foundation operates in Nigeria. Within days, the answers he receives no longer fit together. He flies to Lagos, then to Kano. He meets a Nigerian doctor who no longer knows whom to trust, and an old man on the edge of the city who explains, in his own language, what Mwenzi once meant before the foundation turned the word into marketing.
As he investigates, doors begin to close around him that he had never noticed before. As he investigates, his daughter sees less and less of him. As he investigates, he learns another word for help.
A literary investigative novel, documentary in tone, clinically precise in detail. About help as a language. About the silence in which meanings are shifted. About a man who finishes a story no one wants finished.
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