By Bill Saidi
INDIRECTLY, I owe my career as a columnist to Tim Nyahunzvi. He and I go back to 1959, when we were both at African Newspapers in Salisbury. Until a few years ago, I had no idea that he had just come out of jail at that time.
There was a state of emergency in Southern Rhodesia at the time. Agitation against the colonial regime of Sir Edgar Whitehead had so intensified, the government reacted in the only way it knew how: with violence.
I have not probed too keenly into Tim’s “crime”, It would not surprise me if it involved some stone-throwing – they could throw you inside for that.
In 1963, Tim and I were reunited at The Central African Mail in Lusaka. Another Zimbabwean with whom I had worked back home was Vincent Mijoni. He was older than Tim and I and had made some kind mark in theatre in Bulawayo, where he was based.
I was production editor of the weekly newspaper. I am not particularly artistic, but laying out a newspaper had always fascinated me. After all, back in Salisbury, I had had to learn to put together a weekly newspaper, The Bwalo la Nyasaland and the African Parade.
I did this without the aid of any official company manual. My “manual” was old issues of the two publications. There was very little guidance from the senior staff. But I managed to “muddle through”, learning the ropes as I went along.
After a brief period of laying out the Lusaka paper, with the active guidance of the editor and his deputy, Richard Hall and Kelvin Mlenga, I was beginning to get “into the groove” when Tim suggested something – out of the blue: why didn’t consider writing a regular for the paper? He reminded me of Bits and Pieces of Harare, a column I had written for The African Parade. The Harare was Harare township. I knew it like the palm of my hand. I had lived there since it was opened in 1938 – a year after I was born.
I hadn’t realised, until then, that any body else had paid much attention to the column – apart from myself and the others working with me on the magazine. I was highly flattered. Tim had obviously enjoyed the column. What was more was that he had enough confidence in me as a writer to suggest I could try it here, in a foreign country on a newspaper, edited by two very professional journalists with so much experience at the job they would know a “dud” if someone tried to pass it off before their eyes as the “genuine article”?
Fortunately for me, I was always obsessed with writing and reading, even when I was in Standard One in 1947 at the Methodist Church school near the cemetery in Magaba in what is now Mbare. I remember being mentioned by my teacher in connection with a composition I had written – in English.
So, with the encouragement of Tim and the others I started writing Lusaka After Dark. Only later, did I realize I didn’t know the city of Lusaka as much as I knew my turf of Harare township or even Salisbury itself. But with guys like Tim, Kelvin and Richard Hall standing by me, I persevered. Soon, I was beginning to enjoy writing the column.
In fact, I realised I was hooked on writing the column every week when I began to look forward to sitting down on my typewriter to write it. Years later, back home, a reader of The Herald would write to me to say how much she enjoyed reading my column with its “elegant prose”. I thought it made me feel ten feet tall: I had “arrived” as a columnist – yet there was still more to come.
What I might call my “crowning glory” was to be invited to write a weekly column for The Sowetan of Johannesburg. By any standards, this was an honour I felt humbled to accept. I owed it all to Len Kalane, a former editor of that country’s City Press, a Sunday paper with a reputation for treading where angels fear to tread. – journalistically speaking
Len and I had first met in the United States in 1993.
We were in a group of 30 journalists from all over the world, but particularly from the developing world. We had been invited to the US to visit their newspapers. Len and I struck up a friendship as we were “neighbours”. We kept in touch later, on the email mostly. But it was at The Standard that he got in touch, seriously... He was evidently on the hierarchy of The Sowetan when he made me this exciting proposition: write a regular column for the paper and do other occasional features for them.
I was the deputy editor of The Standard and had a lot on my plate already. We agreed all I could spare time for was a regular weekly column. He called it The State We Are In. Then there was my work for The Standard: I also wrote a regular weekly column.
I sought permission from the editor, Davison Maruziva, to write a column for The Sowetan. There would be no conflict of interest, obviously... But Iden Wetherall, the Group Projects Editor, wasn’t too excited: he said it might take up a lot of time, thus eating into my work for The Standard. I am afraid I was defiant. It probably soured by relationship with Iden for all time. But it was truly exciting for me to appear in a foreign newspaper regularly and under my own name. I was billed as the top columnist of the newspaper. But the downside was the reaction from Zimbabwe, specifically the government.
I was in the United Kingdom in 2008 when Len e-mailed me to say my column had been dropped without warning from The Sowetan. I was flabbergasted and wrote to the young lady who dealt with the column on that paper. Incidentally, Doreen Zimbizi, a Zimbabwean, had worked for The Chronicle in Bulawayo when I was editor of The Sunday News in the early 1980s. It’s a small world: here we were, in the new millennium, working together on a South African newspaper.
I launched a vigorous campaign to find out why the column had been dropped without so much as a by-your-leave politeness from the editor to me. I concluded, from the rudeness with which the column had been treated, that something other than professional consideration had crept in.
There had been a change of editors, apparently. Len Kalane confessed he had no idea why the column had been dropped. But even he hinted there had been interference, however remote, from the government or Zanu PF or someone close to both. Later, Len himself left The Sowetan newspaper altogether. But I was convinced it had nothing to do with the affair of The State We Are In
The truth is I had enjoyed writing the column tremendously. It did interfere with my relations with the hierarchy of The Standard. When the opportunity arose for them to get rid of me they grasped it with all hands – I was fired when I was in the UK.
Obviously, I shall always remember writing for The Sowetan: that the column ran for a number of months meant – to me, at least – that, even outside Zimbabwean, people found what I wrote intriguing, worth giving space to. There is no honour bigger than that for a columnist – any columnist. I wasn’t a syndicated columnist, but having my byline in a foreign newspaper gave me a feeling that I had at last ARRIVED as a columnist.
I’ve had a lot of fun writing columns for different newspapers in Zambia and Zimbabwe. I have always suspected that in journalism, in general, you are a Zero if what you write or publish doesn’t make waves, doesn’t get people to sit up and notice, or provokes no more react ion than So what?” For a regular columnist, the challenge is enormous. Every week, you have to write something so riveting readers feel compelled to read what write you all the time. Unfortunately, not all of them will feel they have to write to you every time they read a particularly good piece by you. Geoff Nyarota, when we worked together at The Daily News, once told me something that I proved was true: don’t think because t hey are not writing to you, people are not reading your column. I wrote Bill Saidi on Wednesday for The Daily News until I was appointed editor of The Daily News On Sunday.
Being recognised as a columnist can have its drawbacks. Tim Nyahunzvi once told me that he met a receptionist at a hotel in Gweru who was crazy about my column – until she discovered how old I was. She told him she had always loved the column – until I indicated in one piece that I was not a young man. She sounded devastated, he said to me.
I came face to face with this dilemma at The Daily News. I was told from the switchboard that someone wanted to see mer. I asked who it was. A young lady, they said. This could be interesting, I thought. I was quite satisfied that whoever she was she might have something juicy to tell me – for a story.
After all, I was the Assistant Editor, apart from being a columnist as well. She came into my office. I stood up to welcome her. I could recognize immediately the shock on her face. It was as if she had made the blunder of her life. After we had sized each other up, she withdrew from me. She stood near a widow, looking out. I could imagine what was going through her mind: How do I get out of this without looking completely stupid? I decided I would let her stew in her own juice. I didn’t say anything. You could read the embarrassment on her face like a bout of smallpox.
“Thank you for seeing me,” she said, almost with a choke of humiliation in her voice. I thanked her profusely, mostly to put her at ease, even at that late hour.
A colleague told me his daughter wished to meet me. Why? I asked him, in genuine confusion. He would have told her about me – surely? I was a fairly mature man, a grandfather, in fact. He said she still wanted to meet me. They came together one day. “This is Mr Saidi,” he said to her, introducing me. “I am very pleased to meet you,” she said. “Same here,” I said gallantly. And that was it.
A column I wrote in Lusaka for The Sunday Times of Zambia in 1971 culminated with my first “encounter” with President Kenneth Kaunda, who asked me this unforgettable question: “Are you a spy for Ian Smith?”
But at The Standard, for which I also wrote a regular column, a flood of letters came from furious readers: I had commented on Christianity and the message that all good things waited for you in heaven, even if you life ion earth was full of misery. Some of them said I would be punished severely for this blasphemy.
I responded with the defiant reminder of a cover story of Time magazine years ago: IS GOD DEAD? That seemed to silence everybody.
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