'I thought I was going to die'

Presented by Omar Bah

The Gambia. 2001. Beaten, bloody, and drifting in and out of consciousness, 21-year-old journalist Omar Bah lay curled in the fetal position, awaiting death in a cell so small he couldn’t stretch his legs. He had been writing articles criticizing the country’s dictator, Yahya Jammeh, when he was taken into custody by soldiers. Over the course of a day, Bah had been stabbed in the back with bayonets and his head bludgeoned with the butt of an AK-47. “They made a game of lifting me and throwing me in the air, and as I came down they kicked me and hit me with their gun butts,” Bah recalls.