Fergal Patrick Keane (born 6 January 1961) is an Irish foreign correspondent with BBC News, and an author. For some time, Keane was the BBC's correspondent in South Africa. He is a nephew of the Irish playwright, novelist and essayist John B. Keane. Early life Born in London, Keane grew up in Dublin and later in Cork. His father was the Listowel-born actor, Éamonn Keane. He attended three primary schools in Dublin: Scoil Bhride, a gaelscoil (Irish-language school), St. Mary's College and Terenure College, and, later, one primary school in Cork, St. Joseph's. In a 1999 interview with the Independent, Keane said that his gaelscoil education proved useful in later life: "The grounding in the Irish language I had at Scoil Bhride has never left me. In a foreign country when I'm on the phone and don't wish people to understand what I'm saying, I speak Irish and no Serb listening in is going to crack the code." His secondary education was at Presentation Brothers College in Cork, where Keane says he was encouraged to join the school debating society, and where he won the Provincial Gold Medal for Public Speaking (on the subject of police brutality in Ireland). Today, Keane continues to draw on this experience acting as a public speaker, event chair and after dinner speaker. Career On finishing school in 1979, Keane started his career as a journalist with the Limerick Leader. Subsequently, he worked for The Irish Press. Later, he moved into broadcast journalism with Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ). Keane joined the BBC in 1989 as Northern Ireland Correspondent, but in August 1990 he was appointed their Southern African Correspondent, having covered the region during the early 1980s. From 1990 to 1994 Keane's reports covered the township unrest in South Africa, the first multi-racial elections following the end of apartheid, and the genocide in Rwanda. In 1995 he was appointed Asia Correspondent based in Hong Kong and two years later, after the handover, he returned to be based in the BBC's World Affairs Unit in London. Keane was named as overall winner of the Amnesty International Press Awards in 1993 and won an Amnesty television prize in 1994 for his investigation of the Rwandan genocide, Journey into Darkness. He is the only journalist to have won both the Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year award and the Sony Radio Reporter of the Year in the