Sierra Leone journalist Clarence Roy-Macaulay dies at 85

By KRISTA LARSON
Associated Press

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Journalist Clarence Roy-Macaulay, who covered Sierra Leone for The Associated Press for nearly four decades including the country’s brutal civil war and the Ebola epidemic that killed thousands there, has died. He was 85. Roy-Macaulay had been filing stories to the AP until about a week before his death on Wednesday, most recently contributing to a sports piece on Frances Tiafoe, the American tennis player of Sierra Leonean descent. He already had started sending in copy about preparations for the country’s upcoming election in 2023. When war broke out in Sierra Leone in 1991, Roy-Macaulay braved rebel attacks on the capital, Freetown, and years of harsh military regimes, to send the world accurate reports of his country’s turmoil.