In a career on the staff of the BBC World Service that lasted for 30 years, Kari Blackburn became one of the service’s most popular and respected journalists and executives. Beyond the BBC, she demonstrated an enthusiasm for Africa and a determination to do her bit to alleviate suffering and socal deprivation there that was exemplfied by her and her husband’s role in the development of a school in Northern Uganda, and their work in resurrecting it after rebel despoliation.
To many who came into contact with her, Blackburn embodied the values of BBC World Service and the international culture of its centre, Bush House. Her accomplishments included her part in pushing through vital structural changes and staff development, and in garnering huge increases in audiences in Africa, with special emphasis on East Africa. She helped to enable the BBC World Service to bring its programmes to large numbers of listeners desperate for accurate and relevant radio news.
Her care for overseas journalists with problems knew scarcely any bounds. She might be found at Heathrow overnight, ensuring that a female Somali reporter and her two children could get through immigration after an 18-month battle waged by Blackburn for their visas. On another occasion she immediately made available a network of advice and help to a Nigerian producer struck with breast cancer and a long way from home. A vast number of people right across BBC World Service, BBC bureaux in Africa and in BBC News and Current Affairs thought of her as a personal friend.
Kari Blackburn was born in Somerset in 1954. Her father was the educationist Robert Blackburn, a force in the United World College movement and a moving force in the establishment of the International Baccalaureate Organisation. After gaining a first at Cambridge in social and political sciences, she taught in Tanzania before joining the BBC in 1977 as a news trainee and then became a producer in the English African Service.
A natural news editor and programme-maker, she switched to English current affairs where she moved up the ranks rapidly, helped to launch the flagship Newshour and became assistant head.
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In 1992 she was appointed editor of the BBC Marshall Plan of the Mind Trust, the award-winning multimedia education project for countries of the former Soviet Union. She then returned to the African Service as head of the Swahili Service – and tackled Swahili to add to her Norwegian, German, French and some Russian. The African Service went on to become one of the largest BBC services in terms of audience – 21.3 million listening weekly. She was also involved intimately with the crucial “life-line” services to Rwanda and Burundi.
To her immense but quiet pride, Blackburn became head of the BBC’s Africa Service, and ran it in an era of huge success. Later she helped to steer the BBC Arabic Service at a time of transition and was then appointed executive editor of the Africa and Middle East region. Her last post was director of international operations for the World Service Trust, the centre of excellence in media techniques in development, aid and emergencies.
East Africa was her great love. She married Tom Boto, a Ugandan consultant in gynaecology, and they had a daughter and a son of their own and adopted a third child, a nephew of Boto’s, who was rescued from tragic circumstances and arrived in Ipswich aged 4, speaking only his local dialect.
By then the Boto-Blackburn clan had amassed a large circle of Ugandan friends in the UK, and many more throughout Uganda, where they took on the challenge of developing the local school in Boto’s home village.
After the Lord’s Resistance Army raid that plundered everything, the school is in the process of being replenished, and hundreds of children have come out of squalid refugee camps to reclaim their only hope of education. The family is determined that this work will continue.
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Kari Blackburn, journalist and radio executive, was born on March 30, 1954. She was found drowned in the sea on June 27, 2007, aged 53