Tim Cocks Biography

Tim Cocks is a Reuters journalist with a nearly two decades experience covering Africa, currently based in Johannesburg. He was previously Reuters West & Central Africa bureau chief for three and a half years, based in Dakar and before that  spent four years in Lagos as Nigeria bureau chief.

            As a correspondent for Reuters since 2005, and a freelancer before that, he has covered two dozen African countries, including Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Madagascar, Kenya, Liberia, and South Sudan. He was security correspondent for Reuters in Iraq for two years from 2008/9. He has done live interviews with NBC, CBS, HuffPost Live, BBC and Britain’s Channel 4.

            Fascination with religion led him to study Philosophy and Theology at Oxford. He received a first-class bachelor's degree in 1998, winning two prizes and a British Academy scholarship to do an M Phil in philosophy. Completing the Oxford M Phil required writing a 30,000-word thesis and six 5,000-word papers.

            His wife, Monica Mark, is a Nigerian whom he met in Ivory Coast and the former West Africa correspondent for The Guardian, now with the New York Times.