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