How to interview a man you disagree with

Every interviewer has a tell. Mine, according to Lucy, is that I get extremely polite — dangerously polite, the way a cat gets slow before it pounces. When a guest says something I find sincerely wrong, my "mmh" acquires an extra syllable. Viewers have started counting them.

Here is the discipline: your disagreement is not the story. You are not the story. The story is the gap between what the guest is saying and what the audience needs to know, and your whole job is to hold that gap open long enough for everyone to look inside.

So you ask the question. Then — and this is the hard part, the part they cannot teach — you let the silence do the follow-up. Silence is the best interviewer I know. It has no ego, it cannot be flattered, and guests fill it with the exact things their press officers begged them not to say.

What you do not do is perform outrage. Outrage is cheap, it edits well, and it changes nobody’s mind — it just tells your side you are still on it. I did not leave Lugari and cross half of Kenya to become a mirror for people’s existing opinions.

And when it ends, you shake the hand. Every time. Not because you agree — because the handshake is a message to the audience: this is what disagreement looks like when adults do it. In this country, on this continent, that might be the most useful thing my show broadcasts all week.