Howard W. French

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832 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 20 Dec

Howard W. French’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.

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New Books in Intellectual History · Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French · 20 Dec 2025 podcast

And it just took over my life.

I had planned initially to go to law school, not really firmly, but a vague plan to go to law school.

I had always loved writing.

I really never considered journalism as an option for me.

That's not the kind of writing I was interested in as a very young man, both as a college student and soon after graduating.

I imagined myself somehow writing books, but at that age, I didn't really know what that might mean, you know?

So that's where the orientation toward writing came from.

And then another series of accidents intervened and

You know, I met a very distinguished West Africa correspondent, also an African-American from the Washington Post named Leon Dash, who lived for some of the time I was in Ivory Coast in the same country, and we became friends.

He's, you know, half a generation older than me, but he took an interest in me and kind of served as a model in some ways and gave me advice.

And eventually...

told me that I should pitch, meaning offer, the occasional freelance piece to the Washington Post.

And so I started to do this, and this was almost the very beginning.

There were a couple things before that, but this was really the most meaningful hook or lure into journalism that I experienced.

Eventually, the Post started paying me to go places, you know, like there's a coup in Chad, get there right away.

There's something going on in Cameroon, get there right away.

And this was just totally thrilling to me, you know, as a man in his early 20s being a totally different person, like heedless of danger, didn't really care how much money I was being paid.

Someone was paying me to go somewhere and to write about it.

And that was just, you know, that's all I needed.

Well, I think some freelancers still begin their lives as journalists that way.

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