OLD FRIENDS COME CALLING

By Bill Saidi

MY very first year at Zimpapers was incident-filled. I was 43 years old, living with my second wife and five children, one of them hers from the past. Another was my former wife’s. During my second month in the country, Zimpapers had approved my application for a car loan. Everyone said I would be the first African to be accorded this privilege. In Zambia, I had been entitled to a company car, a company house, membership of the elite Ndola Club – paid for by the company - and an expense account.

I had resigned from Times Newspapers in circumstances which somehow bore the hallmark of my 17-year stay in that country: the president of the republic, Kenneth Kaunda, had, for the second time, taken extreme umbrage to something I had penned in The Times of Zambia. He took such umbrage he made a public display of his fury – at a press conference at State |House in Lusaka. 

I was denounced by name. I was in charge of the papers in the absence on leave of the editor-in-chief, Naphy Nyalugwe. I first heard of the conference on the State radio in the office of the editor-in-chief in Lusaka. I was in the capital on company business. Evidently, the President’s Office was unaware of my presence in the capital. I drove to the State House from the office, anxious to be present at such a momentous conference.

Meanwhile, I heard all of the conference proceedings on the car radio on my way to State House. By the time I arrived, it was all over. I sort of barged in. I was fortunate to enter as the President and his Special Assistant at the time, were walking out of the conference room. The Assistant then was Milimo Punabantu. He was a former editor-in-chief of Times Newspapers. He it was who had initiated the post of deputy editor-in-chief, specifically tailoring it for me. At that time, he had said to me he felt there was need for “an old hand” on the group’s editorial hierarchy. By then I had with Times Newspapers for more than ten years -.hence the new post of deputy editor-in-chief. 

I was to be based in what was considered the engine room of the group, the printing and production headquarters in Ndola. It was a heavy responsibility. In the final analysis, I would have the last word on what did and what did make it into the paper. Even the Chief Sub-editor would have to take account of my view of any story destined for the daylight of print.

But we had fallen out. In fact, he was editor-in-chief when I had my second brush with Kaunda in 1975. Punabantu didn’t raise a finger in my defence. I fought such a lonely battle; I was convinced Punabantu had been upset when I won back my job. Incidentally, he was replaced by John Musukuma, the former Central African Mail sports editor who had gravitated to public relations. Musukuma was junior to me at The Mail. But here was in 1977, about to lord it over me as editor=in=chief. It was a humiliating experience – and he, fortunately, appreciated it too.

 

But back to the press conference whose sole subject was me: Punabantu sat there with Kaunda as I was pilloried for an editorial I had written on how the law handled erring VIPs and erring ordinary people.

The president himself read the editorial aloud – I suspect on Punabantu’s advice - haltingly, pausing rather dramatically as if to highlight a grammatical faux pas. Listening to it all made me rather angry. But the denouement clinched it for me: “Why doesn’t he go back to his own country?”

He would not have done it more effectively if he had signed a deportation order against me – except that I was then a citizen of Zambia. But the writing was most blindingly on the wall. The jig was up for me. I don’t imagine many people have had this nightmarish experience. You are being publicly rejected by the head of a state. There is no subtlety here. The head of state is telling you to your face: Get out of my country – or else. The effect may not be similar to being thrown to the wolves. But the whole world will know about it. You are marked as one of the few journalists in the world to be kicked out of a “foreign country” strictly on the basis that you had stuck too much to the principles of your profession – stating an opinion you held strongly, perhaps too strongly to be stomached by the one person in the country who could make you pay the ultimate price for such courage – or foolhardiness.

Sadly, I prepared for my departure for Zimbabwe. Lonrho were not in a hurry to get rid of me – although I knew there were some at Times Newspapers who would have given an arm and a leg for me to be kicked out in a hurry. Naphy Nyalugwe was not one of them. He held a huge farewell party for me in Ndola. I suspect he must received a few brickbats for that. Just to add salt to the wound, his speech was peppered with such praise for me - I was a loyal deputy”, he said, Tom Mtine, though he did not attend the party, was the most magnanimous of the lot. I should take my time. There was absolutely no need to hurry. I didn’t need to give any notice until I had settled my future. In time, I had received a reply from Zimpapers: there would be a job for me. They would pay for everything – my flight and accommodation in Harare while I looked for a house of my own.

Meanwhile, I reflected on my 17 years in this alien country, to which I had been invited at a period in my life when everything looked distinctly dark and unpromising.

The truth, which I dared to confront now, was that Zambia had changed my life completely. Not only had I learnt to fight for my rights. I had also learnt to be a real man, independent-minded, unafraid to confront adversity head-on. My most challenging task was to defy the odds – not to accept defeat and to fight on and on. What it did was to transform my entire attitude of the world as a journalist. There is no high-minded philosophy at play here, no lofty declarations of a hitherto unknown truth. It is just that journalism can be more than just a job. It ought to be more than just a job, particularly in Africa. At that period, after 1957, with the whole continent awakening as if from a long slumber of subservience to the rest of the world, African leaders were mostly obsessed with total power.

The last segment of society they expected to challenge their absolute power was the media. I had come out of my skirmishes in Zambia relatively unscathed. But I did not fool myself. I was returning to the land of my birth, where the clouds of uncertainty were also visible on the horizon.

All the politicians who mattered knew of my background in Zambia.

Some of them, now in the new government, would be watching me. Others would not hesitate to remind their colleagues of my escapades in that country – which some may have witnessed at first hand. With some, I was on first-name terms. With others, there was a  frostiness between us which you could have cut with a knife.

For instance, a few weeks after my arrival, someone whispered that had they known of my flight schedule they would probably have “done something”. If I had decided to return home by road, they were certain that I would not have made it to what was then still Salisbury, my old stomping ground.

All this may have been idle speculation or the rumour-mongering of people who considered themselves “enemies” of everything they thought of as “enemies of the revolution”. I knew I would be in for a tough time. I had created a reputation – like it or not – that some people would be eager to exploit for their own nefarious ends. 

I was arriving in a country whose newspaper landscape was dominated by the Zimpapers stable. Moto was on the periphery as a magazine. The Zimpapers group had launched a newspaper specifically designed for its African readers. Geoff Nyarota and Tonic Sakaike and others worked on it. But they would soon be absorbed into the mainstream newspaper.

Sakaike had worked under me in Lusaka, at the Times. Soon, Stephen Mpofu and Tim Chigodo arrived. They too had worked under me in Zambia.

But the biggest surprise was yet to come: Farayi Munyuki was to come in as editor of The Herald. He too had worked under me at The Times.

This would be a great team to replace the whites who would be leaving shortly as the government strengthened its stranglehold on the major newspaper in the country. Suddenly, for me, it all looked promising. Most of the staff had worked on newspapers in a recently-independent country. They knew the challenges.

What they didn’t know – and what even I didn’t know – was that this one would be a tougher-going job than the one in Zambia. We would be together again, but the future would be bleaker than it had been for us in Zambia.

Home would be sweet home, but not for long – at least not for journalism in general.

 

  

 

 

 

 

THE JOURNALIST AS CANNON FODDER

By Bill Saidi
TO portray a typical African village, there was this little grass-thatched hut. Then there was a black woman, good-looking and healthy. She was not bare-breasted, as you would expect in such portrayals by white people. But what she wore was scant enough to leave little to the imagination. Her skin was a sparkling brown.
Then there was the child, also brown-skinned and healthy. He completed the tableau of a typical, average African village home in Southern Rhodesia – circa 1949.
All this was on display at the Salisbury Agricultural Show in Salisbury in 1949.
I was the kid. I forgot to mention the man, the father in the village – but he was so unforgettably portrayed I have had no vivid reminder of his appearance over the years. It was just me and “my mother” that I remember. She was one of the most striking girls I had ever seen anywhere. I was 12.
We were all from what was then called the Salisbury African School (West). It is now called Chitsere. Every time I pass near it today, I am reminded of my portrayal of this typical village kid. For years, I have felt very “used” by the white people. My mother, my stepfather and I lived in The Old Bricks. I often slept in the kitchen.
Most of the residents in this very first African “location” in Southern Rhodesia were poor. We were poor. But there were even poorer people: huge families crammed in these semi-detached houses in this real ghetto. People in the villages were even poorer. My mother and I would, once in a while, take a bus to the village to visit relatives. They would celebrate when we brought them bread, sugar, sweets, jam and buns.
Years later, when I had somehow distinguished myself as a newspaper reporter of some repute, I was asked by the editor of The African Daily News to do a “family” profile of Dusty King and Dorothy Masuka. Dusty was Freddie Gotora, perhaps one of the best African footballers in Salisbury at the time. He played for Civil Service FC, for many years the champions of the Salisbury and District Football Association’s league. He was also an automatic choice for The Yellow Peril, the Salisbury first XI.
Gotora had lost one of his forearms playing soccer for my old school, the Salisbury African School (West) in 1945 – I think. He remains an icon among the old folk of Harare Township, now, of course, glorified in the unexciting name of Mbare.
Dorothy Masuka was, as she is today, one of the most successful entertainers in the country, even at that time. As far as I knew, they were not married. But they worked for a bicycle company in Charter Road, Sable Cycle or something. The idea was to present them as the ideal young married couple. The purpose, I suspect, was somehow linked to the company’s promotion of its sales.
Years later, I felt used again. So, there was a reason I was picked to do this fake portrayal of marital bliss. I have held no grudge against the two stars. I interviewed them as man and wife in a typical happy scenario in their home in the Beatrice Cottages – former prisoner if war camp for captured Italians in World War II... It was called “kuMatariana” by all of us in Harare Township.
Much later, after I had relocated to Lusaka and started working for Times Newspapers I felt very used again. Both The Times of Zambia and The Sunday Times of Zambia, on which I worked, were effectively owned and controlled by the government of President Kenneth Kaunda. In 1971, I was hauled into his office at State House in Lusaka. The idea was to spell out to me and anyone else on the papers what was r4equried of us: don’t criticise the government, including the president – or else. For the life of me I cannot pinpoint what particular impulse prompted me to defy all these orders from the beginning.
But here is an example: the president’s speech at the customary opening of a new semester at the University of Zambia was almost always “routine”. You could almost write it blindfolded, altering only the month or the year or the number of students enrolled. In the 1970s, as deputy editor-in-chief, I decided we ought to give the speech a bit of “zing”, the sparkle of a real story.
Towards the end of it, Kaunda made remarks highly critical of the running of the institution. It read like pretty strong stuff, the stuff of which lead stories are made. I asked the Chief Sub-Editor to rewrite it so it had “teeth”.
I did no more than stick to the principle of the “inverted pyramid”. The next day, the Special Assistant to the President, Mark Chona, rang me from Lusaka (we were based in Ndola, where the paper was printed). Why had I changed the president’s speech? I explained, as calmly as I could, that we thought the point of the speech which we highlighted was a new element to the situation at the university. He was fairly fuming, I could gather from his pregnant pause on the line. In future, he said in a cold, fiercely formal tone, I was to publish the president’s speeches as they were presented. Before I could respond with something cryptic like “but that is not journalism”, he had hung up.
It was Mark Chona again who, a year or two later, sent an emissary from Lusaka to Ndola with a letter from President Kaunda, in which I was advised of my dismissal from my job – obviously over another gaffe. I figured then that he must have decided it was payback time. I had not heeded his earlier warning.
The timing of my dismissal seemed, - to me, anyway - replete with the sort of grim vengefulness of someone determined to score a point. On the Saturday of that week, I drove from Ndola with my uncle, Canisius Mhango, and his daughter, Emma. Along the way, my Lancia Fulvia, knocked down a stray cow. It overturned. Fortunately, none of us was hurt. But the car was a virtual write-off. We eventually traveled to Lusaka, where I was on duty as duty editor of The Sunday Times of |Zambia. I returned to Ndola the next day.
On the following Monday, 5 November 1975, while trying to recover from the trauma of the accident, Mark Chona’s emissary turned up at my office with the letter of my dismissal. If this had been intended to deepen my shock and precipitate some sort of emotional catastrophe, it didn’t work. As I have said before, my reaction was one of anger. Had the president read my letter of explanation? If he had, was he saying it was of no consequence to the outcome of this “breach of discipline”?
I was reinstated in 1977. But the episode deepened to a new, frightening level, the extent to which journalists at such State-owned newspapers were expected to “toe the line”, or do their national duty by following to the letter the instructions of those at the top. They were not, in the end, your garden variety civil servants. But then, were they any better than any pen-pushing public servant doing his boss’s bidding without question? .
That question ought to put to rest, once and for all, the whole proposition that a government should be allowed to run newspapers of any sort. Publishing newspapers is a business based on the volume of advertising and circulation. Both targets are determined by the credibility of the so-called product – do enough people find its content is believable, that it has no particular to axe to grind , such as selling the government’s policies, regardless of the state of the economy or the number of opposition politicians jailed on spurious charges of subversion?
The suggestion that public funds ought to be squandered on loss-making government newspaper companies is a travesty of the concept of the taxpayers’ money being spent for the benefit of taxpayers. Newspapers owned by a government whose politicians are latent proponents of the one-party system of government represent, in essence, political skullduggery of the most subtle, but evil kind...
Most governments in Africa control most of newspapers, radio and television. Exceptions today include Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Kenya and little Swaziland...A few, such as Zimbabwe, have a few genuinely independent newspapers. But they operate in an atmosphere of such tension - with the government – they are forever on their guard. The governments have spelt out clearly what they expect from these papers. You can be sure this doesn’t constitute, in the end, “all the news that’s fit to print”, or “telling it like it is”.
There are people in those governments whose opposition to any idea of a free media is almost pathological. It has assumed, for them, the scale of a disease.
The rationale, in some quarters, is that the government in power needs to keep the people informed of their programmes. They do this through radio, television and newspapers, which they control. The control can be total: in other words, absolutely nothing negative can be allowed to gain any publicity. In Zimbabwe today, the only independent radio stations available to the people broadcast from outside the country. For some years the government has been trying to interfere with the broadcasts of the Voice of the People and Studio 7, which is part of the Voice of America, the US government’s external broadcasting service. Like the VOP, its entire staff is Zimbabwean. Most of them previously worked for the government broadcasting services.
Zimbabweans living in the communal areas used to be the State radio broadcasters’ captive listeners. But now with the easy availability of shortwave radios, many of them now tune to both VOP and Studio 7. Both broadcasters have correspondents within Zimbabwe, some clandestinely.
Proposed legislation “opening up the airwaves” has still not been transformed into law. The dilly dallying is Zanu PF’s way of demonstrating its reluctance to such “wild fancies” of unbridled media freedom.
What the Mugabe government has been anxious to drum into the journalists’ mind is that only if they are loyal and patriotic will they be allowed anything like free rein in their work. The message has been hammered home through the high-profile sacking of any “dissident” editors from their jobs in the State media.
Willie Musarurwa and his successor at The Sunday Mail. Henry Muradzikwa, were both given that treatment. Muradzikwa was luckier than his predecessor in one respect. After the Sunday Mail sacking, he was reassigned to head the government news agency, Ziana. From there he was promoted – to head the government broadcasting services, now styled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings.
But after the 2008 elections in which Zanu PF was fairly creamed by the MDC formations, he was fired. He was not reassigned immediately to any government job.
As long as Zanu PF remains a part of any government, there is little chance there will be a properly constituted dispensation of a free media in the country. Zanu PF has become so used to using journalists as cannon fodder, it is difficult imagine the party at last declaring emphatically: “You are now free. Go and do your stuff!”
If, like the Malawi Congress Party in Malawi and the United National Independence Party (UNIP) in Zambia, this party loses any vestige of power completely in the next election, there is a real chance of the total freedom of the media in Zimbabwe.
If Zanu PF manages to retain even a toe inside the door of real freedom, it could take another 30 years before that party can finally give the journalists in the country the respect and dignity it has denied them since 1980.