By Bill Saidi
IT was almost a dream come true, for me, when Modus launched The Sunday Gazette magazine, with me as editor. In the five years that I worked for Elias Rusike’s newly-acquired possession 1990-1995, this venture was more spectacular and exhilarating than anything else I had done before.
I had put together a dummy and showed it to the chairman of the board, the late Eric Kahari. His comment, after looking through it, was: “It’s so good – can you top this?”
I had written every word myself. It was a labour of love. Later, I realised I had not put so much energy into one project as I had done with this dummy – except what I have always rated as my two most cherished novels – Day of the Baboons and The Brothers of Chatima Road.
The magazine did well: its contents appealed to many readers who were inclined towards literature and the arts in general. But Elias Rusike had his eye – quite naturally, I suppose – on the balance sheet. Before he pulled the plug on it, I had received a warm, congratulatory letter from Terence Ranger, still then a luminary at the University of Zimbabwe. He praised it as something he had looked forward to for some time.
I was not exactly shattered when we had to shut up shop. But I know I had a great time editing that magazine and the two men who helped me, Farai Nyandoro and Praise Zenenga, went on to bigger things. I like to believe they were spurred by what we had done on the magazine.
Yet it paled into insignificance, when placed side by side with the fine madness that was The Daily News adventure in 1999. I entered that adventure in the minor role of Assistant Editor. The initial pay was scandalous: by then I had chalked up 22 years in journalism, 17 of them in Zambia, where I had finished up as deputy editor-in-chief of Times Newspapers, that country’s largest publishing group.
Apart from winning joint first prize in a 1966 short story contest in Zambia, I had published three novels, two in Zambia and one in Zimbabwe. This was the much-praised The Brothers of Chatima Road. One reviewer had bubbled with such admiration for it; he had proposed it for a secondary school textbook.
Yet here I was, in a skyscraper off Samora Machel Avenue, about to start work as the Assistant Editor of The Daily News. Geoff Nyarota was Editor-in-Chief and Davison Maruziva, who had been his deputy at The Chronicle, was his deputy here again. Both had much less experience than I had. In their favour, perhaps, were spells of formal training. Nyarota had spent time at Zimbabwe Newspapers, and Maruziva had done it, of all places, in the UK.
Yet they knew and I knew that there was, as in all other fields of human endeavour in this world, no substitute for experience. As we launched into the nitty-gritty of the adventure, they let nature take its course: they deferred, decently, to my superior hands-on expertise.
Not much has been made, even now, of the fact that Nyarota had initially offered me the job of editor-in-chief. In 1996, while I worked for Andy Moyse’s Horizon magazine, he had come to me with his proposition: he was about to launch a new publication. Would I be interested? Could we discuss it over lunch at The Pavillion at Meikles? It would be all on him, he said.
Now, not to put too fine a point to it, Nyarota and I had an ups-and-downs relationship since first meeting at Herald House in 1980. He had then just come to the editorial department of The Herald. Previously, he and a few others, including Tonic Sakaike, had worked on a pretty ill-disguised “African” companion of The Herald.
But by 1980, a new dispensation had been ushered even into the staid and rather racist cloisters of the new company. In an independent Zimbabwe: not even the smugly “superior” people at the Argus Group in South Africa, could pretend that Harold Macmillan’s “wind of change” had left Herald House untouched. The Herald was about to be hit by a whirlwind of such force some of the staff would not know what hit them.
Meanwhile, there was a curious development which caused me, personally, some moments of deep reflection and anxiety. Almost at the same time, Nyarota and Abby Rusike resigned from The Herald, both of them to join the government media.
I was the new Assistant to the Editor, Robin Drew. In ranking, I was above them. In Zambia, I had been above Rusike at Times Newspapers. He was business editor and I was, by then deputy editor-in-chief. We had had an altercation over a story which I had eventually turned down for use in the paper. It was on the grounds the man interviewed had what I knew to be a “shady record”.
Rusike was visibly angry with me. Shortly afterwards, as Zimbabve emerged into nationhood, he resigned and left for Salisbury. I followed later, to become Robin Drew’s assistant.
But even with the salary unfit for a cadet reporter, I reveled in the Daily News adventure. I was asked to write a piece for the inaugural issue, which I did with gusto, as it was of my memories of work on The African Daily News. For some strange reason, the concluding paragraphs of the piece were lost. I initially suspected sabotage.
Later, I decided to put it down to the excitement of a new adventure: there were people on the staff who were clearly overwhelmed by the enormity of the task before us: launching an independent daily newspaper to fight for the market with the government-owned, well-established Herald.
For me the teething problems of the newspaper were nothing to be upset about. I had been in at the beginning of a number of new ventures. Rarely was anything smooth sailing at the start. Eventually, The Daily News found its stability. Whatever else people said later about his editorship, Geoff Nyarota carved a niche for himself in the annals of newspaper publishing with The Daily News.
There was, to be sure, a period during which the management seemed to hang in limbo. There were changes at the top. But editorially, the newspaper prospered well beyond our wildest dreams. People seemed to have been waiting for the paper for years. Soon, it eclipsed The Herald in circulation. To say that this alarmed The Establishment is an understatement. I wrote a regular column, Bill Saidi On Wednesday. There were occasions when some people thought the editorial comment in the paper reflected the views expressed in my column. Initially, Nyarota, Maruziva and I alternated in writing the editorials. Our styles were different, but since they eventually passed through me there was an attempt to regularise their presentation.
Nonetheless, I was not duly alarmed when a caller asked me: “Are you a Zimbabwean?” I said I was. Was he? I asked. There was no response to that question.
There had never been, in the history of publishing in the country since independence, a newspaper that had caused so much controversy as The Daily News. For me, the reasons were clear: the newspaper pulled no punches. It was thoroughly irreverent of The Establishment. As far as I know, it never used abusive or insolent language in discussing politics, particularly in highlighting the failures of the government and the governing party.
But what it was doing had never been done before so openly. I suspect this is what set The Establishment fuming. The accusation was that it was undermining the authority of the government, that it was subversive in some of its comments.
For me, The Daily News adventure was something to die for or to kill for. I wouldn’t exchange it for anything on earth. It ushered into Zimbabwe a thoroughly new kind of journalism, one in which there was not a trace of fear or hesitation. In years to come, people will speak of the period during which this paper ruled the media roost with such exclamations as “Wow!” or “By Jove, they did it!”
Others might ponder quietly: “How did they get away with it for so long?”
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