A LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

A LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

ON the 5th of November, in 1975, I received the following letter, dated 4th November:

“Dear Mr Saidi:

“I have been following very closely your work as a journalist. I have been particularly concerned about your misconceptions regarding our approach to nation-building in this country. As you yourself know, I have given you every opportunity to reform. Regrettably, I have found no improvements in your performance: on the contrary, evidence clearly demonstrates a deterioration. Consequently, your performance continues to be inconsistent with the philosophy and spirit of the paper which must be the mouthpiece of the Party and of which you are a leader,

I am, therefore, left with no option but to fire you with immediate effect. I wish you luck in your future endeavours in any field of your choice.

Yours sincerely,. (signature) President.

“Mr William Saidi, Times of Zambia , Ndola .”

The letter was handed to me personally by asn emissary who had been flown from Lusaka for this specific purpose. I read it as he waited for my reaction – or something. I held myself together, refusing to show alarm or shock to the man sitting in my office, waiting for an explosion of either tears or four-letter words. He would report all that in great detail to the president. I felt an irreverent sense of superiority. These people feared me to the extent they would fly an emissary all the way from Lusaka to Ndola just to deliver as letter to me. I knew the man who had brought the letter because his first name was similar to one of my own – Sylvester. Quietly, I put down the letter and thanked him. If I had commented on the contents, he might have had to take out his notebook to write it all down. I wasn’t sure I would be able to speak coherently or decently.

I was stunned, if not flabbergasted. The president of the Republic of Zambia , Kenneth Kaunda, had featured nowhere in my employment by Times Newspapers Limited. This company was owned by Lonrho Zambia Limited. As far as I was aware, the chairman of |Lonrho in the country was Tom Mtine. He and I had a sound working relationship.

Shortly after my appointment as deputy editor-in-chief of Times Newspapers Limited in 1974, he had handed out some advice to me: Don’t fraternise with your juniors. Now that you are at the top, you must keep a distance from them, socially. The specific reference was to Chao Daka, now the chief reporter of the newspaper in Kitwe and a personal friend. We had worked together from our days at The Central African Mail.

Our friendship continued, even after he left The Mail, now owned by the government, to join the then privately-owned Times of Zambia as a reporter. Chao Daka’s real name was Adyele Ngulube. His original home was in the Eastern Province, near the border with |Malawi. Chao said he had changed his name during the struggle for independence in Northern Rhodesia. I believed he was referring to his membership of a youth group which engaged in violence against the colonial regime. I assumed that Chao (which sounded distinctly Chinese,) Daka was his “Chimurenga name, in the context of that country’s struggle.

At one time, I was news editor of the newspaper. I interacted with all the bureaus’ chief reporter, but there was special bond with Chao. Our sense of humour, our mistrust of authority and our general view of what constituted news were almost the same. But I took Mtine’s advice. Gradually, I reduced personal contact with Chao. I was glad to notice that he had a thorough appreciation of my predicament. The last time I saw him was in Zimbabwe in the late 1980s, where he had come to attend a conference. He died shortly afterwards. I shall always remember him with fondness. Tom Mtine was a man of great charm and humility. You wouldn’t believe, on meeting him for the first time, that he was a tycoon, had a personal fortune which was rated among the biggest in the land. Yet he was so down-to-earth, so unassuming, the superstitious among his enemies was that it was his talisman: his personal charm.

The Times Newspapers offices were not far from Mtine’s offices in the centre of the city of Ndola. It was a short drive. I had telephoned him after the presidential emissary had left. He knew all about it, he said. His office, which I had never visited until now, was incredibly cluttered. There were piles and piles of files. But I was quite satisfied that Mtine knew where everything was: he was that kind of person – he knew where everything was. The only thing he didn’t know was this: why had Kaunda fired me so emphatically, so ceremoniously, as if I had committed the ultimate sin against his “commandments”?

I told Mtine my theory: a story about the struggle in Zimbabwe. He was inviting the nationalists to Lusaka to meet with him. He had told us (the media) that we were not to touch the story – until he had said so. We did that, almost to the letter. By now, we all knew what hell awaited any editor who crossed Kaunda’s path. Four years earlier, I had done that – inadvertently. His reaction was so abrupt and furious, for a moment I thought I would be deported out of the country – even if, by now, I had become a citizen of Zambia. We were ordered to State House to explain ourselves: Tom Mtine, Mike Pierson, the deputy editor in chief and myself, then writer of a column called The Sunday Times of Zambia Special. That meeting, attended also by Kaunda’s special assistant, Mark Chona, had all the elements of an explosive encounter between the most powerful man in the country – and a few minnows, except for Tom Mtine, who remained calm and collected throughout Kaunda’s tirade. My column had not touched on Zimbabwe, an issue so sensitive to the president that there was never any guarantee he would react rationally.

Still, he had the bit between his teeth: “Are you a spy for Smith?” he asked me. The voice was so filled with contempt I imagined whatever I had done or written must have resulted in some catastrophe for the country or for someone dear to the president. My denial was emphatic, so emotional, in fact, that I suspect Kaunda realized someone must have fed him information so untrue that there had to be an ulterior motive.

We left that meeting feeling chastised. True, we had been forgiven for whatever political infraction we had committed in our columns. But he seemed ready to giver us the benefit of the doubt.

In 1971, there had been an upheaval of sorts at the Times. The man Kaunda had appointed to replace the Englishman and former Kaunda friend, Richard Hall – my editor at the Central African Mail – was Dunstan Kamana, his former media assistant and a friend of mine. Dunstan had run the newspapers as real newspapers are run – not as conduits for Kaunda’s propaganda. Mike Pierson was a great journalist, an Englishman who loved Africa, as Hall did. Dunstan, once in the saddle, realized his own reputation as a journalist would be under scrutiny: The Times of Zambia and its sister Sunday edition, were to be as professionally produced as they had been before he came on the scene. Little did he interfere with the editorial content, particularly the editorial comment. This was absolutely unrelated to editorials written in The Zambia Mail, now under complete government control.

Kamana was fired and Kaunda appointed Vernon Mwaanga to replace him. Mwaanga was recalled from the United Nations, where he was the country’s permanent representative. It was a climb-down and in his autobiography, Mwaanga writes of how he had been taken completely by surprise. Kamana was to be reassigned to a job at the head of as parastastal: he was not going to take it lying down, and he said so plainly enough. Later, he was appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union. In 1973, I went to Moscow for a meeting of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Union. I visited his home in a classy area of the Soviet capital, but only his wife was present. He had apparently gone off on some diplomatic mission out of the country.

In 1975, it was my turn. But like Kamana, I wasn’t going to take this lying down. In retrospect, I believe what spurred me to fight the dismissal was the confidence which Tom Mtine displayed in my story. I told him I had written a letter to Kaunda after he had publicly condemned the story in which his plans to invite the Zimbabwean leaders to Lusaka had been published. He asked if I had a copy of that letter. A day later, after he had read it, he told me he would show it to the president.

Later, a few days later, he invited me to his office – from the company house which I still occupied

as deputy editor-in-chief. The president had eventually found the letter I had written. Effectively, I was in the clear. I had been fired for the wrong reason. But, said Mtine, it would “unpresidential” for Kaunda to rescind that decision so soon after I had been fired.

Still, the episode convinced me that the African journalist was truly an endangered species a s Frank Barton said in his book. But my relations with Kaunda did not improve. Years later, after my return to Zimbabwe, I had President Robert Mugabe asking me at a meeting with other editors: “What did you do to Kaunda?

My reply was long and detailed. I have no idea of its effect on the president – to this day.

NEARLY-KILLED IN COMBAT

By Bill Saidi

MY closest encounter with death while on duty occurred in 1968. I was 31 years old, had been a journalist since 1957. I most likely owed my survival to my youth and a fairly steady and healthy style of living. Like all of us in this game of trial and danger, I took a tipple once in a while. But only occasionally did I actually go paralytic.

I was on freelance assignment for The Times of Zambia. There was an imminent referendum in the country. Independence had been achieved in 1964. Now, President Kenneth Kaunda desired to seal his victory with the conversion of the political system into a one-party one.

I was lying in hospital in the little town of Fort Jameson in the Eastern province on the border with Malawi, a country then ruled by one party, the Malawi Congress Party, under the leadership of one man, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the president-for-life.

Kaunda, it now seemed certain, had similar designs on his country.

Two or three days earlier, I had been battered and left for dead outside a bar in a busy part of the town. My assignment was to sound out the population on the prospects of a Yes vote in the referendum. Perhaps it had been a mistake to choose a crowded bar as my first port of call. But at that hour, the shops and the markets were closed; there were no crowds waiting to board buses to the suburbs or townships from the town. The only crowded locations were the watering holes.

Fort Jameson was then a lively town, well-laid out by the colonialists, who had named it after one of their early pioneers. The people were enthusiastic about independence and were keen to participate in the referendum.

Until independence, they had had little of any substance whatsoever to say in the running of their country. Now, they were being asked what they thought of turning it into aw one-party country.

The atmosphere in the bar which I had selected at random was lively and enthusiastic. I sat next to two men who seemed to me enlightened enough to engage in a lively debate on the issues.

For me, Zambia’s independence had been a historic affair. This copper-rich former member of the ill-fated federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had a Parliament dominated by Kaunda’s UNIP, with the small African National Congress of Harry Nkumbula a small opposition. It dominated the populous Southern Province of the country.

But Kaunda’s determination to gain complete political control of the country seemed to follow the path chosen by other newly-independent African states, Ghana, Guinea, Tanzania, and Malawi among them.

Like many other journalists in southern Africa, I was skeptical of the one-party doctrine, first introduced by Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. By 1968, he had been out of power for two years – the first victim of a military coup on the continent. My encounter in the bar was, unfortunately, with two diehard supporters of the ruling party, UNIP. As I lay in my hospital bed, I realized what had triggered the attack was my Nyanja accent: it was so distinctly alien, the two must have concluded fairly early that I was a foreigner –as indeed I was. When they asked me that direct question, I was ingenuous enough to reply in the affirmative. I was immediately dragged outside, where I was pummeled into unconsciousness.

After I had come to, the nurses told me I had been unconscious for two days. They said I had sustained a fairly serious head wound, apart form other diverse injuries all over my body. I was lucky to be alive, they said.

It occurred to me I had not succeeded in obtaining, from the two men in the bar, their views on the referendum. But then there was this intrusion: how could I even contemplate such a dumb question when my very life had been in the balance just a few hours before?

I lay there for another day. The Times of Zambia had been informed and the editor, Dunstan Kamana, had been apprised of my plight. Dunstan was a friend, apart from being a colleague in the profession. He and I visited the UK together in 1964. We had formed a firm friendship. When, in 1967, I had been fired from The Zambia Mail – after the take-over of The Central African Mail by the Kaunda government in 1966 – I turned to him for help.

He was positive about the job, except of one thing. By then, there was an unwritten decree that no aliens would be employed in such key government institutions as the media. Dunstan would have employed me right away, if it hadn’t been for this canker – I was a Rhodesian, the citizen of a country which, since UDI in 1965, had lost the diplomatic recognition of many other countries in the world – including Zambia..

In fact, to make the journey to the UK in 1964, I could not obtain a passport from the Salisbury regime, even if, by then, they still enjoyed diplomatic relation with many countries. The hitch, it occurred, was that I was registered in that country as an alien. The solution was rather unique: my father was from Nyasaland, although he had died there in 1951. Even if I was born there, I could not be a citizen of Southern Rhodesia. Still, I was able to claim the citizenship of the country still then known as Nyasaland, a British protectorate. So, I journeyed to the UK with the passport of a British subject.

I returned to Lusaka from Fort Jameson feeling completely recovered, which I probably shouldn’t have. I now had a second child with the wife whose first child we had shipped to be looked after by my mother in Mufakose, Salisbury. But I had no job.

Dunstan again came to the rescue: I wrote a weekly column, Around And About With Tippy Banda, for The Times of Zambia.

Any likelihood of a job had to wait until I had obtained citizenship, which was like wishing on a star – in many ways. But Dunstan was undaunted, neither was I. Clearly, I had something to offer journalism. At The Central African Mail, I had written a regular column which captured the imagination of many readers. My topics, though mostly social satire, would once in a while excite a different kind of readers: a politician, for instance.

For one column I focused in a politician who had somehow come a cropper. One man decided the character in the column resembled him in too many ways to be mistaken for anyone else.

I was in a bar in the centre of Lusaka when he spotted me. He approached me with malice aforethought. I realized then that he was not intending to begin a conversation with me. He had clenched his fists. But I was quicker than he was: as he grabbed the sleeve of my blazer, I slipped out of it and ran for my life. I lost a beautiful blazer…no more than that.

The Fort Jameson battering had an aftermath that was to affect my life for all time

PUBLISHERS: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

By Bill Saidi   IN 1993, on a visit to the city of Tucson, Arizona, in the United States, we foreign editors met an editor and a publisher who had agreed to disagree. They would part company, amicably, because one of them would not support the other’s favoured presidential candidate. The editor would leave his job, he told us, happy that he had not compromised his principles. The publisher had told him to support a particular presidential candidate. His reply was an unequivocal NO WAY! How heroic, how courageous, I thought. I was reminded of my two mentors and heroes – Richard Hall and Kelvin Mlenga. It’s a brave editor, anywhere in the developing world, who would defy the publisher or the owner of the company, so openly – and not get the boot. In my experience I have been told to go and start my own paper, if I didn’t want to take orders from above. To a proposal, made by some of his colleagues in the Zambian Cabinet, that I take over as editor-in-chief of Times Newspapers, an influential cabinet minister responded with the categorical declaration: “Saidi doesn’t like to take orders.”ow he In the United Kingdom, there will always be the example of Harold Evans. He quit as editor of The Sunday Times, rather than serve under Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of the publishing company. The Australian-born media mogul has garnered a reputation for dictatorial tendencies towards his editors. Most of the real professionals quit. Murdoch’s emperor-style rule has led to editors speaking of him in highly inflammatory, if not derogatory language. Some must see him as the ugliest example of a publisher. There are many such examples in Africa too, In Zimbabwe; there is the government, the owner of the largest media conglomerate in the country.  It must represent, collectively, the ugliest face of publishers in the country. Editors have been fired right, left and centre. The reasons are usually the same – not toeing the line. There are many such publishers all over Africa, in which most governments are de facto publishers. Only in South Africa, has the government deliberately kept away from running any newspapers. They have enough clout in the SABC, they must believe. But this is counterweighed by TV and radio stations owned entirely by the private sector. So far, not even the lunatic fringe of the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) - which must include the likes of Julius Malema - has convinced the government it ought to muscle in on the independent newspaper owners. Ghana, which pioneered the African one-party, one-leader, one-newspaper system, has long shed the image of this monolithic, monstrous behemoth running everything in one country. But many leaders still find it extremely attractive, paying only lip service to real democracy. Zimbabwe, apart from the government, in its role as publisher being one hell of an ugly example, has a number of publishers who must quality for the sobriquet “ugly as sin”. There are privately-owned companies whose publishers might – pound for pound – be even uglier specimens than the government. At The Standard newspaper in Harare, journalists have preserved on their notice board a declaration by publisher Trevor Ncube: it says those among them not satisfied with the pay could leave. When I joined the paper in 2006, at the invitation of the then editor, Davison Maruziva, I asked the staff why they hadn’t quit. They said, almost in unison, there was nowhere else to go – which Ncube probably knew. So, they have been stuck with him ever since. Thirty of us editors from overseas were visiting the US during a presidential year. This was a presidential election year, which coincided with the ongoing demise of Communism in Europe. The Berlin Wall had collapsed. On the surface, democracy had triumphed in all of Europe. Of course, we now know that the picture was far more complex than just the replacement of the hammer and sickle by another one, signifying complete pluralism. The US government had invited editors, including myself, to visit the country for a month. Not only were we to view, up close and personal, US democracy at work during the presidential elections. We were also to visit as many big and small newspapers as they could squeeze us into, right across the vastness of this country. There were editors from Africa, Europe, Asia, Australasia and Latin America. I was the only one from Zimbabwe. By then, I was working for Modus Publications. It was in the glorious capacity of editorial director of The Sunday Times. Previously owned by Herbert Munangatire, it had been bought by Elias Rusike’s Modus Publications. At that time, Rusike was riding high. But it wouldn’t be long before he realised he had taken on more than he could chew. Munangatire’s editor was a former editor of The Manica Post, Tim Chigodo. I was appointed editorial director by Rusike, the former chief executive of Zimpapers, owners of that weekly. Chigodo and I had worked together at The Times of  Zambia in the 1970s. He was my subordinate then and was still so back home. There was little doubt that he did not enjoy working under me. I was effectively in charge of the whole shebang. Then there was Munangatire himself. We had known each other since 1957 when I joined The African Daily News as a cadet reporter. He was something senior at The African Weekly.. He was a good reporter, by all accounts and, from my own point of view, a good journalist, I always admired his grasp of the English idiom. But once I decided to instill my own imprint on the editorial content of the paper, there was upheaval. Munangatire was heard to complain:”What is Saidi doing to my newspaper?” Fortunately, he never said this to my face, or we probably would have had a right royal row. At African Newspapers, Munangatire had a nickname – Mhupu. The Shona translation is someone of a flamboyant nature, which he was. I have always set great store for the authority and autonomy of the editor. Some critics have told me this is old-fashioned. A sort of “team” must have a decisive influence on the paper, they say. There ought to be consensus. I have always subscribed to that dictum too. But I have always drawn the line where “the soul” of the paper is concerned. The editor has values and tenets to which he must strongly subscribe, some times religiously. All these must be reflected in the paper – or else the readers might find the paper’s thrust a little wishy-wash – neither one thing nor the other. Rusike once raised this matter with me, at some point during my various editorships with Modus. There was little need to speculate on the source of this grouse, as far as The Sunday Times was concerned. I responded vigorously in defence of the autonomy of the editor. I did not protest in any undignified, extremist language, but I did hint, though, that an editor who was not assertive in defence of their editorial autonomy was no better than a puppet or a dummy. Dick Hall and Kelvin Mlenga, both strong-filled editors, had taught me that cardinal lesson. In Zimbabwe, the matter had been raised by none other than Willie Musarurwa himself. He had been appointed editor of The Sunday Mail, presumably on the strength of his liberation war credentials. He had remained with Zapu after George Nyandoro and James Chikerema had either been expelled or had quit – I was never briefed, independently, on the reasons for that split, which occurred in the 1970s. The party was then based in Zambia. But xenophobia has been mentioned in the corridors of party power. In 1980, Musarurwa stood for election on a Zapu ticket, but lost. Zapu had won impressively in Matabeleland in the elections leading to independence, but not in Mashonaland. But before he was subsequently removed in 1985 - rather unceremoniously - as editor of the government Sunday paper, Musaruwa had spoken publicly and strongly on the autonomy of an editor, even one on a government newspaper. His view was so strong he had suggested, in an open address, a law which would bar the Minister of Information (or anyone else in the government) from firing the editor of a government newspaper. His dismissal must have come as the biggest shock of his professional life. I met him a number of times after that. He looked subdued, but not entirely daunted or deflated. He seemed to accept his fate stoically. He continued to write powerfully as a columnist for Modus Publications, after Geoff Nyarota had joined that company. I shall always remember Willie as someone who had this incredible capacity to laugh at any situation which others thought was deadly serious. We arrived in Lusaka around the same time in 1963 – he, to work for Zapu and me for The Central African Mail. He had the car and I didn’t. But he always seemed hard-up for cash. One day, after picking me from Matero, the ramshackle township in Lusaka, he knocked down a chicken as he drove us towards the city. The chicken died on the spot. The owners made a big fuss. They demanded compensation in cash. This was particularly after they discovered we did not speak good Nyanja. He just had to pay – or Willie, as the driver, had to pay. He turned to me and said he didn’t have any money. I was aghast: the Zapu representative in Northern Rhodesia had no money? He said quite simply the party was not a bank or a business. So, I had to pay for the chicken. Willie found this extremely funny. The journalist had bailed out the politician – how many times did that happen? I wondered aloud... But, before we both returned home, we were3 to have a particularly unpleasant confrontation in Lusaka. It probably determined our future relationship, even as editors in the same stable.

 

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS BEFORE UHURU

By Bill Saidi

EVERY time I try to regale people with my first meeting with Queen Elizabeth II, a blanket of scepticism, or downright resentment descends on the scene. It’s almost impregnable, until I swear on the graves of a number of my ancestors – to be telling th naked truth.

Others characterise me as this inveterate name-dropper: I never met the Queen, they say. They allege I mention this fictitious confab to boost my ego and promote my phony reputation as a globe-trotter.

Yet I did meet the Queen – first, in 1947, as Princess Elizabeth. To call it "a meeting" is probably to overplay the incident. I was ten, sweating in my school khakis at the old airport in Belvedere. How would any of us children from the primary school at the Methodist church in Magaba have said No to the King of the British Empire?

We were at the airport to meet the royal family – King George VI, the Queen and two princesses. As British subjects, how could we protest – at our age? The hour was evil – after lunchtime, when we would normally be at home.

The walk to the airport was short. But we were hungry, which made it longer. A bit of bitterness crept in.

More than 45 years later, at one of the many CHOGM jamborees I have attended around the world, I told the Queen about our epic meeting in Salisbury. She asked how old I was then: Ten, I said. She was 21 and a princess...We talked briefly – I can’t remember exactly what about. But she sounded apologetic.

CHOGM is the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. Zimbabwe hasn’t attended since 2004 when we quit the so-called Club..

At one CHOGM in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1975, I met James Callaghan, then the British foreign secretary. I was introduced to him as an editor at The Times of Zambia. It was once described by rightwing British politicians as "rabidly anti-British". Callaghan, without saying a word, wagged his forefinger in my face. Simultaneously, he made clucking sounds of disparage with his tongue.

The climax of all these summits, for me, was a meeting with Margaret Thatcher in 1979. She had won power for the Tories over Callaghan’s Labour Party. She was in Lusaka for the CHOGM which would hammer out the outline of what became the Lancaster House Agreement. Some have acclaimed it as Lord Carrington’s greatest diplomatic coup.

I shook hands with Mrs Thatcher. I was introduced to her as the chairman of the local chapter of the Commonwealth Press Union – which I really was at the time..

Mrs Thatcher, now reportedly in ill-health, was then a formidable personality. She had these piercing eyes which seemed to bore into yours until they seemed to dissect your brain cells, piece by piece.

Another personality I met at this summit was an old friend, Edgar Tekere. He was a key member of the Zanu delegation. We had become friends while living in Mufakose in the politically turbulent early 1960s. He was then a burgeoning politician. I was a journalist on the rise.

In Lusaka, we asked each other about life, to which we both responded with the most inane cliché possible – "just fine".

In 1980, we would reunite in independent Zimbabwe - he as a cabinet minister, me still as a journalist.

Other notables I reunited with after independence included Enos Chikowore. Before he went to the United Kingdom, he had been a Highfield landlord. A close relative of mine had been one of his lodgers. We talked heavy politics. He was a sort of heavy noise in the NDP. I was a journalist on The African Daily News. In 1980, we met at a reception at a five-star hotel in Salisbury. We still talked heavy politics, but included the social scene as well. Years later, his daughter became my secretary at The Herald.

They both died a few years later. I was shocked. We had kept in touch. I knew how much independence had meant to him, after all the work he had put in.

George Silundika died even earlier. There was a famous NDP march from Cyril Jennings Hall in Highfield to the Harare police station – when Harare was Harare, not Mbare. We talked heavy politics. I was still at The African Daily News, covering the march. He was a heavyweight in the party. We walked together. Years ago he had been at school at Empandeni in Plumtree. Years later, I was among the students who inaugurated the Catholic mission’s first secondary school. Silundika and I kept in touch, even after he became a cabinet minister in 1980.

After his much-too-early death, I wondered – perhaps for the umpteenth time – why there was death after life. Quite often, I still wonder and leave the matter in abeyance, exhausted.

The two men whose death shook me to the core were George Nyandoro and James Chikerema. I knew them from 1957. They were practically my elder brothers.

They didn’t make it into the cabinet in 1980. I think they ought to have. But, like my ruminations on the mysteries of death, I leave the subject alone, desperate for solace elsewhere.

RETURN TO HERALD HOUSE|…19 YEARS LATER

By Bill Saidi

ONE DAY in May in Harare in 2009, I bumped into Timothy Stamps. We were both surprised. We had last met in 2001. It was high up in the Swiss Alps, in a place called Cran Montana .

The surprise was generated by the venue of this latest meeting – the George Silundika Avenue entrance of Herald |House. This is the head office of Zimbabwe Newspapers (1980) Limited, the state-owned newspaper conglomerate.

Most of the surprise was on the doctor’s part, not mine. After all, why would a regular columnist on a newspaper – even a State newspaper – not call at the head office of the publishing company?

He could be dropping off copy for the week, or collecting his dues for the month.

Stamps then wrote a regular medical column for the paper’s weekend edition. I too wrote a regular column for the same newspaper, more than 20 years ago. I wrote as Comrade Muromo. Farai Munyuki was editor then, having taken over from Robin Drew. Veteran readers of the media in general will remember me mentioning, on a few occasions, how Stanlake Samkange had mentioned to Willie Musarurwa that some people familiar with his style of writing believed he, Samkange, was Comrade Muromo.

Musarurwa knew I wrote the column. He had always admired and encouraged me. He told me all this in confidence one day, since we worked together at Zimpapers. We had worked together at African Newspapers in the 1950-60s.

We had jointly interviewed Chief Munhuwepai Mangwende aty his palace in Murehwa, when it was spelt Mrewa.

I mention the incident on Samkange again because it seemed, at the time, to place me in very comfortable, rarefied literary company.

After our handshake with Stamps, I mentioned Cran |Montana. His next question was: “So, what are you doing here ?” He could hardly disguise his surprise.

I mumbled something in which the word “work” seemed to register with a mighty thump with Stamps. “You have come back home then?” he asked. There was a note of triumph in his voice.

I once interviewed Stamps in his surgery in Harare, when he was a city councilor. This was before he entered Parliament on a Zanu PF ticket. I was then working for Zimpapers, which I joined in 1980 as assistant to the editor, the late Robin Drew

In Switzerland in 2001, I represented, indirectly, The Daily News. I was a regular columnist since its launch in 1999. The invitation was directed to me personally, which raised a few hackles with some people in the editopriqal hierarchy. Stamps represented the government, on which I was bound to comment. The subject of the conference was Democracy around the world..

Stamps and I did our part, speaking to any willing audiences on how we saw the development of democracy in our country was being pursued. The 2000 parliamentary elections had sparked much debate around the world. For the first time, a feisty opposition party had won more seats than any other opposition since independence in 1980,

Today, that opposition is in a government with Zanu PF. I am on a contract with The Herald whose publishing company, Zimpapers, I left in a huge huff in 1990.

Zimbabwe is undergoing change – no question of that.

Of course, this time I might get fired, which would be part of a pattern for me.

In 52 years in journalism, this is one of only three newspaper groups from which I have resigned: I have not been fired. I have been from four, two in Zimbabwe and two in Zambia .

A slight explanation: although I was fired from Times Newspapers in 1975 in Zambia , I was reinstated as deputy editor-in-chief. in 1977. None of my dismissals were related to a felony, such as embezzlement of company funds, an assault with GBH on the person of the chairman or the chief executive officer, or the editor - or for fondling the private secretary,

All of it revolved around journalism, with the employer and I not agreeing totally on what we believed was the essence of this noble (?) profession.

I was fired from The Standard in 2008 – on the e-mail. I had attended a conference on Zimbabwe at St Antony College at Oxford University. That too had raised a few hackles..

I was invited to join The Standard in 2006, when I was 69 years old, as deputy editor. Initially, the editor, Davison Maruziva, had invited me to chair the judges’ panel for their inaugural Cover to Cover short story writing competition.. Later, I was offered the job. My association with the company went back to the mid-1990s when I contributed regularly to their weekly column, Cutting Edge. Trevor Ncube was then editor and Iden Wetherell his deputy. Now, Ncube is chairman of the company and Iden, the group projects editor.

I joined Zimpapers at 43, before it was taken over by the government through the Zimbabwe Mass Media Trust. I know people who believed it was nothing short of a miracle that I was not fired immediately after the ink had dried on the deal between the government and the South African Argus Group.

But I did last ten years, operating in an office of my own all the time, in Harare and Bulawayo. I was probably the first African in the editorial department to have an office entirely to himself at Herald House.

It seemed inevitable that we would part company, sooner rather than later. In Zambia, I had interacted with both Zanu and Zapu, making implacable enemies, as well as permanent friends. These were politicians willing to accept that, as a Zimbabwean journalist, I was not an impediment to, or a cat’s paw, in their political ambitions – personal or national.

My dismissal from Times Newspapers by then President Kenneth Kaunda was over the coverage of a Zimbabwe political story. I was reinstated through the vigorous intervention of Tom Mtine, the chairman of Lonrho Zambia Ltd, then owners of the newspaper company. I was virtually exonerated, but got no apology or compensation for loss of income.

The irony is that one of the first meetings I ever covered as a cadet reporter for The African Daily News in Salisbury in 1957 was the inaugural conference of the Southern Rhodesia African National Congres, the precursor of all anti- colonialist groups.

Two luminaries of the movement, James Chikerema (deputy president) and George Nyandoro (secretary general) had become very familiar to me before the meeting in Mai Musodzi hall.

In fact, we remained close up to the time of their deaths, back in an independent Zimbabwe . They became like elder brothers to me, Some people thought it was slightly unhealthy for a journalist embracing wholeheartedly the doctrine of objectivity.

Others thought it placed me in a unique position, professionally. These men knew much, much more about the struggle than many other people did..

The point is my career as a journalist developed almost in tandem with the struggle. Moreover, I knew one of the heroic luminaries long before he was involved in the struggle. Edgar Tekere and I were friends from the early 1960s, years before he and Mugabe trekked to Mozambique in the 1970s.

It was inevitable that, having watched the genesis of the struggle in Mai Musodzi hall, I would be unlikely to be overawed by the players, or their stature.

Anyway, as a journalist it has always been my belief that if you stick to reporting on the truth, or commenting on what you know about intimately, nobody should accuse you of being deliberately obtuse or misleading.

Of course, politicians cannot be assumed to see things the way journalists do..

Under the guidance of such people as Lawrence Vambe, Nathan Shamuyarira, Phillip Mbofana and Kelvin Mlenga, I had cut my journalistic teeth at African Newspapers. I had been invited to join them after a short story of mine, The Downfall of Sandy had been published in The African Parade.

The history of journalism is anchored on unmasking what people in general have always suspected to be the tendency among politicians not to tell them the whole truth – or being obsessively economical with the whole truth.

One famous publisher once declared the function of the journalist was “to expose, expose and expose!”

The New York Times has the slogan All The News That’s Fit To Print. Most newspapers have their own slogans too: Without Fear or Favour, Telling It Like It Is, The Truth And Nothing But The Truth.

It used to be assumed that whatever was published in a newspaper was the truth: “It has to be true, because I read it the paper.”

Over the centuries, newspapers have emerged which treated the truth as lackadaisically as the politicians: hence the tough laws on libel and defamation.

Unfortunately, as with many political decisions, the powerful people have colluded to make even such laws punish the journalists, rather than the people who are invariably the subject of their stories – mostly the errant politicians and their friends and fellow travellers.

In Zimbabwe , there has been a long struggle by journalists for reform in the defamation and libel laws, which are weighed against the media.

That, however, was not the exact reason for my departure from Zimpapers in 1990, Towards the end of my ten years there, I wrote little for the papers. In fact, The Old Bricks Lives, my first novel in Zimbabwe - which I had titled To Die In The Old Bricks - published by Mambo Press in 1988, was written mostly while I “worked” for Zimpapers.

Part of The Brothers of Chatima Road, my second novel with College Press and one which bettered, in sales and royalties, my first one with them, Gwebede’s Wars, was written there too.

Elias Rusike and I first met in Lusaka in the 1960s, when he worked for the Zambia Broadcasting Corporation’s news department. I worked for The Central African Mail, a brash, anti-colonialist and anti-federation weekly, to which I had been invited from Salisbury by Kelvin Mlenga. We had worked together on The African Daily News.

Rusike was the first black chief executive of Zimpapers during my second year with the company. He arrived with heavy Zanu PF baggage, but tried to offload it for a more pragmatic, professional and independent publisher’s portfolio. It was a desperate struggle.

When he left in the wake of the Willowgate scandal, I was not surprised. He records all this in his little book, The Politics of the Mass Media, panned by some for not being more frank in cataloguing the inherent obstacles for a government to publish its own newspapers and expect readers to believe them to be honest and objective purveyors of the truth.

An illustration of this was my own dismissal as the editor of Rusike’s Sunday Gazette. Going into the seamy details might not be profitable for either of us, or even for the government. Suffice it to say, for me, the highlight was a personal telephone call to me from the then Vice-President of the republic, Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo.

Rusike and Geoff Nyarota are the two people with whom I have been most closely associated in newspapers during the last 29 years; Rusike allowed both of us to look at the manuscript of his book, as all three of us were at Modus.

Years later, when The Daily News, in which Geoff and I were involved, hit the streets, it knocked The Herald off its perch at the top of the circulation ladder in a few years.

The arguments for and against government newspapers are steeped in political rhetoric or ideologies, some of them of the doctrinaire Pravda or People’s Daily Marxist hue, others extolling the free enterprise spirit.

I quit The Herald in 1990, after both Rusike and Nyarota had left, for Modus Publications, which Rusike had taken over. My decision had as its prelude a one-sided conversation with Sam Gozo outside Herald House, in which he berated me for “the lies” he alleged we were peddling.

.Sam and I went back many years, to the 1960s, when he was at the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland , and I was at African Newspapers. In Zambia , Sam worked for the mines while I worked for the newspapers – again. We returned home around the same time, Sam to work briefly for the government and me for the newspapers – again.

He paid little heed to my protests about not having written a word for the papers for quite a while. I was shocked to hear of his death after my return from an unintended furlough in the UK in 2008, during which I was fired from The Standard.

Working at Modus, with Geoff and Elias, ought to have provided me with a period of non-controversial journalistic challenges. There was soon tension – between Elias, on the one hand, and Geoff and I, on the other. We both left with little ceremony.

For me, working for Horizon (1995-98) magazine was an oasis. There were shorter hours, matched only by the pay – in size. But there was peace, in my life, at least.

Then, out of the blue, in 1996, Geoff asked me to be editor-in-chief of a paper he planned to launch. He was surprised when I begged off, preferring to be deputy editor-in-chief. Frankly, I was quite satisfied that if I was announced as the editor-in-chief, the future of that paper would be short.

As it turned out, I became Assistant Editor on the flagship title of the company, The Daily News, which lasted four years. By that time, both pioneering executives of the publishing company, Geoff and Wilf Mbanga were no longer at the helm,

Nothing can take away from ANZ, the publishing company, its pioneering role in the newspaper arena. Most of this credit belongs to Strive Masiyiwa who, in a manner of speaking, put his money where his mouth was: his commitment was to freedom, not only of expression, but of the individual’s right to fly as high as their wings could take them,

My own dream was of independent newspapers which would awaken the people to their responsibilities as custodians of their own independence. I am against government newspapers. I have worked there and I know it can be hell on earth – unless the publisher respects the editors’ right to independence..

They would not leave it to the politicians, on the pretext that they, as part of the liberation movements, had sole responsibility for charting the destiny of the country.

If you look, objectively, at what is happening today, you must conclude that real change in the political air.

People such as Tendai Biti, who never carried an AK-47 rifle in their lives, now speak fearlessly of a future Zimbabwe in which all the people have a political as well as an economic stake.

By Bill Saidi

09-06-2010

The African journalist “not endangered” any more?

AT the height of its popularity in 2001, The Daily News carried a lead
story in which it reported that police vehicles were being used to transport farm
implements seized from white farms, presumably to destinations linked to Zanu
PF bigwigs.
The story quoted an eyewitness as saying police vehicles loaded
with the implements were seen leaving a recently seized white farm.
On the next day, the police descended on the premises of the
newspaper in Harare. I was the Duty Editor for that particular issue and was
asked if I had anything to do with the headline and the story. I said I did. I
was told by the interrogating officer that I was being held responsible for
publishing a story likely to cause “alarm and despondency” under the Law
and Order (Maintenance) Act. This law was first promulgated to deal with a rising tide of
African agitation against white rule in Southern Rhodesia in 1960.
The government of President Robert Mugabe had apparently
agonised very briefly over repealing what most of the members of his cabinet
used to view as one of the most repressive laws during colonialism. They had
not repealed it and, in fact, one of its victims, Emmerson Mnangagwa, had opined
at a meeting after independence, that he had found it “very handy”..
Four of us - myself, then the assistant editor of the paper,
the editor, Geoff Nyarota, the news editor, John Gambanga, and a senior
reporter, Sam Munyavi - were locked up in the police cells at Harare central
police station, charged under a section of this notorious anti-nationalist law. Fortunately, our lawyer found a judge, perhaps eight hours after our initial incarceration, who decided we could not be held overnight under those circumstances. By then, we had all been stripped of all our clothes, except our underclothes, ready to spend the night with rapists, thieves, murderers and a variety of hapless citizens found to be on the wrong side of
the law at that time - as we were.
The detaining officer, a sort of major domo in the law and order section, conceded grudgingly that three of us could be let out, but not Nyarota, For some odd reason, he was determined to
keep the editor locked up for a little while longer. Nyarota bade us goodbye,
with a stoicism that I had come to admire since getting to know him from 1980.
All of us learnt from our experience in the police cells some sober lessons about being a journalist in Africa: the government will treat you rough, very rough, but they are not invincible. In fact, you could have it in your power to humiliate them - as the judge in our case did.
All journalists in Africa and, indeed elsewhere in the world,
must always fight for their right to exist, to expose evil, to probe the nether
regions of power, the soul - if such a thing exists - of the power-hungry,
the dictator. Of course, the journalist must always be willing to applaud
where this is called for, but they must not be praise-singers, however
beautiful the tune might sound.
In 1980, when I returned to Zimbabwe from 17 years in exile in
Zambia, I was made aware for the first time of a book by Frank Barton, The
Press in Africa.
I knew Barton, having met him in Lusaka while I worked there. In
the book, he devoted a few pages to my encounter with President Kenneth Kaunda
in 1975.
Barton's book is an incisive, well-documented account of how
the press in Africa fared under colonialism, then after independence when,
according to Barton and the facts on the ground, it fared even worse - if
that was at all possible.
Barton dedicated his book to Africa's journalists, “an
endangered species”, he called us.
I like to think that, by now Barton has to concede that, far
from being endangered, we are still alive and kicking. It might even be more
appropriate to describe as an “endangered species” Africa's dictators,
although that might be premature and some kind of unforgivable wishful
thinking.
Barton’s account of the drama did not include the denouement of this
epic (to me) encounter with one of the most powerful men in the region at the
time.
Although I was fired from my job as deputy editor-in-chief of
Times Newspapers, I was reinstated more than a year later. I never
received a letter from the President.
The story would have made a riveting read, I think. In 1977,
more than a year after I had been dismissed, three of us sat in Kaunda's
office at State House in Lusaka: myself, the chairman of Lonrho Zambia Ltd, Tom
Mtine and the president.
There were no apologies: I was being reinstated in my job, the
president said. There would be a new editor-in-chief, John Musukuma. The
previous holder of that post, Milimo Punabantu - I would discover later - had
been “reassigned”, apparently to work in the president's office. As a reward?
Back in Zimbabwe, working for the privately-owned Modus
Publications, I was among a group of editors meeting President Robert Mugabe,
before the blood between the media and the head of state was polluted by this
common virus which afflicts such relationships: credibility.
After I had been introduced, Mugabe asked me: “What did you do
to Kaunda?”
One of the most frightening episodes in my half a century of
journalism was not the assault by an enraged Zambian politician outside a bar
in downtown Lusaka in 1965:
Nor having a forefinger wagged in my face by the British foreign
minister, James Callaghan, in Kingston, Jamaica in 1975, apparently for the
anti-British stance our newspaper in Zambia had taken against the UK's lack
of action in rebel Rhodesia;
Nor, before that, being locked up in the Zanu office in Lusaka
by the late Peter Mutandwa, a burly, bearded nationalist with an explosive
temper to boot, and being threatened with a beating for publishing a story
which he claimed showed Joshua Nkomo of the rival Zapu in favourable light;
Nor being stoned on the head by bouncer, in 1960, as I fled a
Highfield, Salisbury 'cat house' in which the main attraction was a
former South African beauty queen;
Nor being declared a prohibited immigrant in Malawi in 1974. This was
after the ruling party of Hastings Kamuzu Banda suspected that I had authored
an article in The Times of Zambia the previous year, in which it was actively speculated that
Aleke Banda was his heir apparent. I had visited Malawi and
had been feted, unexpectedly, by the same Aleke Banda, a cabinet minister in
Banda's government;;
Nor being knocked down in broad daylight, in the middle of
Manica Road, Salisbury, in 1980, by a vehicle belonging to the “licensed to
kill” security outfit of the new government, the Central Intelligence
Organisation (CIO);
Nor was it a thorough beating by unidentified political thugs
outside a bar in Fort Jameson, Zambia, which left me unconscious in hospital
for three days, in 1968;
Nor the sight of the mangled heap of metal that had been the
small printing press of The Daily News in 2001 in Harare;
Nor even the receipt of a bullet in an envelope, in 2006, with
the warning “Watch Your Step”, after we had published in The Standard in
Harare a cartoon of baboons laughing their heads off after reading the pay slip
of a soldier in the Zimbabwean army.
The moment of an emotional tsunami for me occurred as I sat
before the most powerful person in Zambia, in 1971, and being virtually
accused, by him, of being a spy in the pay of the most dangerous and despised
enemy among Africans in the region at the time, Ian Douglas Smith.
It was probably the first time in my life that I became aware of
the absolutely limitless influence of the journalist, particularly in Africa. I
began to appreciate why more journalists were killed in Africa, on average and
proportionately, than anywhere else in the world.
Even the mildest criticism of a leader was likely to prickle
their egos, or to force them to decide that your low opinion of them made you,
inevitably, an “enemy of the people”, that majority being represented by
them, as the leaders.
Perhaps I had read too many spy novels, including almost all the
James Bond adventures. In 1964, on my very first visit to the United Kingdom,
the author, Ian Fleming, gave me a book of his short stories “The Spy Who
Loved Me” in place of a one-on-one, face-to-face dialogue on writing, not
spy novels, but just writing.. His secretary, an old woman who looked nothing
like Moneypeny or any of the Bond girls in the novels and films, warned me it was a
”naughty book”. After reading it, I decided I had read naughtier works. Back in Lusaka 37 years ago, I sat in President Kenneth Kaunda's study in State House, with my fevered imagination conjuring up a scene of pure melodrama: myself, reduced to skin and bones, having been starved
for weeks, being strung up by the neck in some dark, dank, dingy cell: the
customary comeuppance for spies.

With me on the defence bench was Tom Mtine, a distinguished Zambian entrepreneur, the chairman of Lonrho Zambia Ltd, which owned Times
Newspapers Limited. I worked on their two newspapers, The Times and The Sunday Times of Zambia, as assistant editor.
Also on our side was Mike Pierson, the deputy editor, whose distinguished career in Africa saw him ending up in South Africa, then in Cardiff, Wales.
The president had his team, including his special assistant, a
man called Mark Chona, younger brother of one of Kaunda's closest allies,
Mainza Chona, once Vice-President of the republic.
The presidential roasting I received was over an article I had
written for a regular weekly column, The Sunday Times Special. All I had done,
honestly, was to rehash what was generally known on the grapevine: Kaunda's
hush-hush plan to turn the country into a one-party state “ through a
well-orchestrated referendum.
It had nothing to do with the struggle in Zimbabwe, in which
Kaunda was heavily embroiled. He had offered both Zanu and Zapu facilities from
which to prosecute the liberation war. Kaunda knew, as most other people did,
that, in spite of my surname, I was born and bred in the country right next to his across the Zambezi river, and that, like him, my father was from what was once called Nyasaland.
His question, bristling with appropriate, unmistakable and
almost regal indignation was: “Are you a spy for Ian Smith?”
Unfortunately, along with my article, in this same issue of the
paper, was a rather naughty editorial comparing Kaunda's ham-fisted
policies with those of an African dictator recently overthrown in West Africa.
The editorial, concluded, sagely, that if he did not mend his
despotic ways, Kaunda himself might end up the same way.
Fortunately for him, Kaunda's political demise took another,
rather mundane form: he was beaten fair and square in an election, after 27
years of uninterrupted, unbridled, virtually one-party rule in Zambia. By then,
in 1991, I had returned to my country of birth, Zimbabwe. When I was born in
1937, the country was known as Southern Rhodesia, a self-governing British
colony, which I left, for the first time in my life, in 1963 to continue my
interrupted career in journalism and writing in general, which I have done for
the last 50 years, with what some people might call “mild to warm” success.
It was established, eventually, that I was born in 1937, on 8
May. My mother insisted on this when my step-grandfather, a man from Nyasaland
who had married my grandmother after she had given birth to two daughters, one
of them my mother, with her first husband, gave the year of birth as 1936. She
disputed this with rather disarming logic. She pointed out that she had carried
on her back the second child born to my grandmother with this man, in 1936,
while she was pregnant with me. There was no way that could have happened after
I was born.
Her father, my maternal grandfather, was a Zezuru man named
Mushure, who had a wanderlust which forced him to leave the country to pursue
his dream of fame and fortune in, inevitably, the then Union of South Africa.
As far as I know, he never returned to Southern Rhodesia, although my mother
has told me they heard intermittent rumours of him being cited in this or that
town, a sort of Scarlet Pimpernel in technicolour.
My mother was very young when I was born. One example of her age
relates to her account of my birth. She says she was at the river when I was
born. This was at St David's mission, in what was then called Marandellas
district, where the oldest of my maternal grandmother's two brothers, Paul
Ching'ozha, was an Anglican preacher.
I have often wondered about my choice of a career: I was illegitimate and my mother, although she denies it to this day, probably thought of drowning me at birth. Isn't this
the stuff of which novelists and journalists are made?
Kaunda would not have appreciated just how deeply the accusation
of my being a spy for Smith had wounded me.
At the beginning of my adventure into the world of journalism, I
almost believed my mission was to take an active part in the struggle against
colonialism. The African Daily News, on which I cut my journalistic teeth in
1957, in Salisbury, was unabashedly a campaigner for the political, economic
and social amelioration of the African people. It cannot be ignored in any
political and social history of Zimbabwe, although there have been attempts to
do just that by people who seem to believe the struggle itself started with
Zanu in 1974.
For me, even before an introduction to George Nyandoro, James
Chikerema and Paul Mushonga, there was Josiah Maluleke and Kufakunesu Mhizha,
two trade unionists who sought to familiarise me with the workers' struggle
for decency. I also met Charles Mzingeli, who constantly mangled the English
language so thoroughly there was a standing joke in the newsroom of him
pronouncing furiously that “some certainly people” were selling out to the
whites.
Years after independence, in my search to establish why there
was never any extensive mention of Mzinageli as a leading light of the
struggle, I asked my old editor, Nathan Shamuyarira, if Mzingeli was really
such a nonentity. He said, quite passionately, No. Mzingeli had lit the light
which had guided younger men like Nyandoro and Chikerema, when he led his
Reformed Industrial and Commercial Union (RICU). I spent hours being virtually
lectured by Mzingeli on how the African worker was being abused by the white
employer and why he needed to rise up and campaign for improved pay and
conditions.
Even years later, after I had established a lasting friendship
with Doris Lessing of The Grass Is Singing fame, she sent me a copy of her
autobiography, Under My Skin, in which she devotes space to her acquaintance
with Mzingeli, at a meeting of the Communist Party in Salisbury. For some
reason, Mzingeli was not sold on communism, into which Lessing and her comrades
tried to recruit him. If he had been converted, the struggle might have taken a
different, perhaps radical twist, with Tovarisch Mzingeli a confirmed
Marxist-Leninist, before even Mugabe had heard of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. .
My first journalism mentor was Albert Dumbutshena, the chief
reporter of The African Daily News, a man who made no apologies for his
bibulous propensities. I shall always remember one of the most memorable
questions he asked me, after we had arrived on his company motorcycle at a bar
at Matapi hostels in Harare township. “Mfana, unePondo here?” Young man, do
you have a pound?
Over the beer which I bought, he regaled me with fascinating
stories of his adventures in journalism. I was enthralled and before long I was
trying to emulate him, down to his love for the booze, which he said made him
seek out the truth without fear.
Dumbutshena invariably wrote the lead story for the paper, pounding away on his ancient Remington typewriter as if coaxing it to pick out
the appropriate nouns and rejecting the adjectives which might clutter up his
sentences.
Dumbutshena wrote well and was so reliable a reporter I believe
they tolerated his occasional bouts of incapacity through alcohol because when
he was sober, he always came through.
My mistake was not to allow for the difference in age and
experience between us. He was edging towards 40 and I was just 20. He had
blazed a trail, although quite often the alcohol overwhelmed him. My chance to
shine came when he took leave for a rather long period and I was appointed to
assume his mantle and use the motorcycle as well. Dumbutshena had taught me
many things, among them accuracy and speed, doggedness, and the cultivation of
reliable sources and during his absence I tried to put into practice everything
he had taught me. I too now wrote the lead story, as this was during the
elections in 1958, when Garfield Todd's liberal policies were being
challenged by the United Federal Party of Edgar Whitehead. I covered most of
Todd's meetings all over Salisbury, meeting him many times too.. Only once
was I assigned to cover a meeting of the Dominion Party, the forerunner of the
Rhodesian Front party in Hatfield. I think I also covered the UFP, but my main
assignment was Todd's United Rhodesia Party.
I learnt much of our politics at the time. The UFP won and
Whitehead became the new prime minister. A year later, there was upheaval in
Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia and there were states of
emergency in all three countries of the federation.
I learnt lessons during the emergency: all the nationalists,
including Nkomo, Nyandoro, Chikerema and many others were locked up and the
prospects of their release seemed, at first, remote. The accusations against
them were that they were trying to overthrow the white governments. As
journalists on The African Daily News, this incensed us and we quite openly
supported the nationalist struggle. Once in a while the paper
editorially railed against the more extremist conduct of the leaders.
Meanwhile, most nationalists flocked to the newspaper offices in
Sinoia Street, for tidbits on the political goings-on and some times to persuade
us to print their views, however extreme. I was once appointed acting editor of
The Bwalo la Nyasaland. Kamuzu Banda, whose campaign against the federation
pulsated with what amounted. to maniacal zeal was locked up in Southern
Rhodesia for his pains. An editorial I wrote at this time called on the
government to release him as he was fighting a good cause” - or words to that
effect.
The managing director called me to the office and scolded me for daring to support “this agitator”. It was the harbinger of more such admonitions from publishers, ev en after independence.

by Bill Saidi