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
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