A Captive's Tale: Amanda Lindhout on the Story of Her Somalia Kidnapping

A Captive's Tale: Amanda Lindhout on the Story of Her Somalia Kidnapping

by Rebecca Johnson

Photographed by Norman Jean Roy, Vogue, September 2013

Kidnapped in Somalia, Amanda Lindhout spent fifteen months in terrifying captivity. Only after meeting journalist Sara Corbett did she feel ready to tell her story.

Every life is made up of a series of decisions—good ones, bad ones, opportunities of a lifetime, and those, in retrospect, that look extraordinarily ill considered. Five years ago, Amanda Lindhout, a struggling 27-year-old Canadian journalist hoping to make a name for herself, decided to visit Mogadishu, Somalia, a gorgeous wreck of a city perched on the Indian Ocean along Africa’s east coast. Once a sparkling jewel of the continent, Somalia had descended into lawlessness, with constant fighting by factions of Islamist militants and a fledgling government powerless to stem the violence.

Even seasoned journalists hesitated to go there. Lindhout was not a seasoned journalist. She grew up in a poor, rural area of Canada and, after graduating from high school, went to work as a cocktail waitress in Calgary. Whenever she amassed enough money, she would quit her job to travel, inspired by the old copies of National Geographic she’d pored over as a kid. She started in the Western Hemisphere—Venezuela, Guatemala, Nicaragua. When the money ran out, she’d return to waitressing until she had saved enough to travel again. As her confidence grew, she became more adventurous. Latin America gave way to Thailand, then Bangladesh, followed by India and Pakistan.

Roaming the world, Lindhout found a joy and expansiveness in her life she had not previously known. Traveling was, she says, like a “narcotic.” As she began meeting journalists who made their living on the road, she grew restless with waitressing and yearned to make more of an impact. Journalism seemed just the ticket.

Like other ambitious young reporters, Lindhout made her way to such post-9/11 hot spots as Iraq and Afghanistan. To prepare, she read the equivalent of TV Reporting for Dummies over and over. Her employers were dodgy at times—she was an on-air reporter for the Iranian state-sponsored news service; she was briefly on assignment for Combat and Survival—but she also sold a few pieces to more legitimate places like cable news channel France 24. In Baghdad, however, she found herself frozen out by the more conventional members of the press corps, many of whom seemed inexplicably cold to her.

One night, a friend told her why. Early in her brief tenure with the Iranian news channel, she had criticized the press corps for staying inside the safe zone of Baghdad to report. Someone had posted the commentary on YouTube. Lindhout was mortified. No wonder the other reporters were aloof. She realized she needed to get away from Baghdad and start fresh. Her role model was Dan Rather, once a nobody reporter at a second-rate television station who defied all warnings one day and stayed in Galveston, Texas, to report a dangerous hurricane. It made his career.

Lindhout needed her own Galveston, a story so stunning nobody would be able to turn her down. She decided on Somalia, the reporters’ no-man’s-land. What happened next is like something out of “The Monkey’s Paw,” the children’s cautionary tale that warns us to be careful what we wish for. Within 72 hours of landing in Mogadishu, Lindhout and Nigel Brennan, a photographer and former boyfriend she had persuaded to make the trip with her, were kidnapped by a group of Islamic militants and held for ransom. Over the next fifteen months, she was beaten, starved, tortured, and raped. After months of negotiations and failed bargaining, Lindhout’s and Brennan’s families were finally able to raise more than a million dollars to secure their release. She had found her Galveston. But it had nearly killed her.

Read an excerpt from the new memoir A House in the Sky

Almost from the moment Lindhout was out of the hospital and back home in Canada, she was inundated with offers from publishers to tell her story. As she slowly worked to recover her mental and physical health—despite how malnourished she was, for almost a year afterward she could barely eat anything but potatoes—she spoke with a series of potential ghostwriters. Again and again, she heard the same pitch—what did it feel like to suffer hell on earth? Lindhout, who could barely bring herself to think about what she’d been through, let alone contemplate reliving it, declined all offers.