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.