Mary Mitchell wrote a puzzling column for the Sunday Sun-Times. Her subject was the appearance of the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, at the UNITY conference of minority journalists in McCormick Place. Mitchell wondered what he was doing there, given that Wade was the first foreign head of state UNITY had ever invited to speak, since he’s “been accused of unfairly suppressing journalists by locking them up and threatening them.”

And sure enough, during an interview Thursday with a group of journalists he “showed shocking disdain for journalists in his own country,” asserting that the “Senegalese press is infiltrated by politics. I am telling you if you do not give them information, they are going to invent it. They insult people. They accuse people when they don’t even have any proof.”

But what troubled Mitchell more—she found it “appalling”—is that Wade’s speech Friday was disrupted. Someone shouted, “I want to speak in the name of my people,” and was then pummeled.