AT the height of its popularity in 2001, The Daily News carried a lead
story in which it reported that police vehicles were being used to transport farm
implements seized from white farms, presumably to destinations linked to Zanu
PF bigwigs.
The story quoted an eyewitness as saying police vehicles loaded
with the implements were seen leaving a recently seized white farm.
On the next day, the police descended on the premises of the
newspaper in Harare. I was the Duty Editor for that particular issue and was
asked if I had anything to do with the headline and the story. I said I did. I
was told by the interrogating officer that I was being held responsible for
publishing a story likely to cause “alarm and despondency” under the Law
and Order (Maintenance) Act. This law was first promulgated to deal with a rising tide of
African agitation against white rule in Southern Rhodesia in 1960.
The government of President Robert Mugabe had apparently
agonised very briefly over repealing what most of the members of his cabinet
used to view as one of the most repressive laws during colonialism. They had
not repealed it and, in fact, one of its victims, Emmerson Mnangagwa, had opined
at a meeting after independence, that he had found it “very handy”..
Four of us - myself, then the assistant editor of the paper,
the editor, Geoff Nyarota, the news editor, John Gambanga, and a senior
reporter, Sam Munyavi - were locked up in the police cells at Harare central
police station, charged under a section of this notorious anti-nationalist law. Fortunately, our lawyer found a judge, perhaps eight hours after our initial incarceration, who decided we could not be held overnight under those circumstances. By then, we had all been stripped of all our clothes, except our underclothes, ready to spend the night with rapists, thieves, murderers and a variety of hapless citizens found to be on the wrong side of
the law at that time - as we were.
The detaining officer, a sort of major domo in the law and order section, conceded grudgingly that three of us could be let out, but not Nyarota, For some odd reason, he was determined to
keep the editor locked up for a little while longer. Nyarota bade us goodbye,
with a stoicism that I had come to admire since getting to know him from 1980.
All of us learnt from our experience in the police cells some sober lessons about being a journalist in Africa: the government will treat you rough, very rough, but they are not invincible. In fact, you could have it in your power to humiliate them - as the judge in our case did.
All journalists in Africa and, indeed elsewhere in the world,
must always fight for their right to exist, to expose evil, to probe the nether
regions of power, the soul - if such a thing exists - of the power-hungry,
the dictator. Of course, the journalist must always be willing to applaud
where this is called for, but they must not be praise-singers, however
beautiful the tune might sound.
In 1980, when I returned to Zimbabwe from 17 years in exile in
Zambia, I was made aware for the first time of a book by Frank Barton, The
Press in Africa.
I knew Barton, having met him in Lusaka while I worked there. In
the book, he devoted a few pages to my encounter with President Kenneth Kaunda
in 1975.
Barton's book is an incisive, well-documented account of how
the press in Africa fared under colonialism, then after independence when,
according to Barton and the facts on the ground, it fared even worse - if
that was at all possible.
Barton dedicated his book to Africa's journalists, “an
endangered species”, he called us.
I like to think that, by now Barton has to concede that, far
from being endangered, we are still alive and kicking. It might even be more
appropriate to describe as an “endangered species” Africa's dictators,
although that might be premature and some kind of unforgivable wishful
thinking.
Barton’s account of the drama did not include the denouement of this
epic (to me) encounter with one of the most powerful men in the region at the
time.
Although I was fired from my job as deputy editor-in-chief of
Times Newspapers, I was reinstated more than a year later. I never
received a letter from the President.
The story would have made a riveting read, I think. In 1977,
more than a year after I had been dismissed, three of us sat in Kaunda's
office at State House in Lusaka: myself, the chairman of Lonrho Zambia Ltd, Tom
Mtine and the president.
There were no apologies: I was being reinstated in my job, the
president said. There would be a new editor-in-chief, John Musukuma. The
previous holder of that post, Milimo Punabantu - I would discover later - had
been “reassigned”, apparently to work in the president's office. As a reward?
Back in Zimbabwe, working for the privately-owned Modus
Publications, I was among a group of editors meeting President Robert Mugabe,
before the blood between the media and the head of state was polluted by this
common virus which afflicts such relationships: credibility.
After I had been introduced, Mugabe asked me: “What did you do
to Kaunda?”
One of the most frightening episodes in my half a century of
journalism was not the assault by an enraged Zambian politician outside a bar
in downtown Lusaka in 1965:
Nor having a forefinger wagged in my face by the British foreign
minister, James Callaghan, in Kingston, Jamaica in 1975, apparently for the
anti-British stance our newspaper in Zambia had taken against the UK's lack
of action in rebel Rhodesia;
Nor, before that, being locked up in the Zanu office in Lusaka
by the late Peter Mutandwa, a burly, bearded nationalist with an explosive
temper to boot, and being threatened with a beating for publishing a story
which he claimed showed Joshua Nkomo of the rival Zapu in favourable light;
Nor being stoned on the head by bouncer, in 1960, as I fled a
Highfield, Salisbury 'cat house' in which the main attraction was a
former South African beauty queen;
Nor being declared a prohibited immigrant in Malawi in 1974. This was
after the ruling party of Hastings Kamuzu Banda suspected that I had authored
an article in The Times of Zambia the previous year, in which it was actively speculated that
Aleke Banda was his heir apparent. I had visited Malawi and
had been feted, unexpectedly, by the same Aleke Banda, a cabinet minister in
Banda's government;;
Nor being knocked down in broad daylight, in the middle of
Manica Road, Salisbury, in 1980, by a vehicle belonging to the “licensed to
kill” security outfit of the new government, the Central Intelligence
Organisation (CIO);
Nor was it a thorough beating by unidentified political thugs
outside a bar in Fort Jameson, Zambia, which left me unconscious in hospital
for three days, in 1968;
Nor the sight of the mangled heap of metal that had been the
small printing press of The Daily News in 2001 in Harare;
Nor even the receipt of a bullet in an envelope, in 2006, with
the warning “Watch Your Step”, after we had published in The Standard in
Harare a cartoon of baboons laughing their heads off after reading the pay slip
of a soldier in the Zimbabwean army.
The moment of an emotional tsunami for me occurred as I sat
before the most powerful person in Zambia, in 1971, and being virtually
accused, by him, of being a spy in the pay of the most dangerous and despised
enemy among Africans in the region at the time, Ian Douglas Smith.
It was probably the first time in my life that I became aware of
the absolutely limitless influence of the journalist, particularly in Africa. I
began to appreciate why more journalists were killed in Africa, on average and
proportionately, than anywhere else in the world.
Even the mildest criticism of a leader was likely to prickle
their egos, or to force them to decide that your low opinion of them made you,
inevitably, an “enemy of the people”, that majority being represented by
them, as the leaders.
Perhaps I had read too many spy novels, including almost all the
James Bond adventures. In 1964, on my very first visit to the United Kingdom,
the author, Ian Fleming, gave me a book of his short stories “The Spy Who
Loved Me” in place of a one-on-one, face-to-face dialogue on writing, not
spy novels, but just writing.. His secretary, an old woman who looked nothing
like Moneypeny or any of the Bond girls in the novels and films, warned me it was a
”naughty book”. After reading it, I decided I had read naughtier works. Back in Lusaka 37 years ago, I sat in President Kenneth Kaunda's study in State House, with my fevered imagination conjuring up a scene of pure melodrama: myself, reduced to skin and bones, having been starved
for weeks, being strung up by the neck in some dark, dank, dingy cell: the
customary comeuppance for spies.
With me on the defence bench was Tom Mtine, a distinguished Zambian entrepreneur, the chairman of Lonrho Zambia Ltd, which owned Times
Newspapers Limited. I worked on their two newspapers, The Times and The Sunday Times of Zambia, as assistant editor.
Also on our side was Mike Pierson, the deputy editor, whose distinguished career in Africa saw him ending up in South Africa, then in Cardiff, Wales.
The president had his team, including his special assistant, a
man called Mark Chona, younger brother of one of Kaunda's closest allies,
Mainza Chona, once Vice-President of the republic.
The presidential roasting I received was over an article I had
written for a regular weekly column, The Sunday Times Special. All I had done,
honestly, was to rehash what was generally known on the grapevine: Kaunda's
hush-hush plan to turn the country into a one-party state “ through a
well-orchestrated referendum.
It had nothing to do with the struggle in Zimbabwe, in which
Kaunda was heavily embroiled. He had offered both Zanu and Zapu facilities from
which to prosecute the liberation war. Kaunda knew, as most other people did,
that, in spite of my surname, I was born and bred in the country right next to his across the Zambezi river, and that, like him, my father was from what was once called Nyasaland.
His question, bristling with appropriate, unmistakable and
almost regal indignation was: “Are you a spy for Ian Smith?”
Unfortunately, along with my article, in this same issue of the
paper, was a rather naughty editorial comparing Kaunda's ham-fisted
policies with those of an African dictator recently overthrown in West Africa.
The editorial, concluded, sagely, that if he did not mend his
despotic ways, Kaunda himself might end up the same way.
Fortunately for him, Kaunda's political demise took another,
rather mundane form: he was beaten fair and square in an election, after 27
years of uninterrupted, unbridled, virtually one-party rule in Zambia. By then,
in 1991, I had returned to my country of birth, Zimbabwe. When I was born in
1937, the country was known as Southern Rhodesia, a self-governing British
colony, which I left, for the first time in my life, in 1963 to continue my
interrupted career in journalism and writing in general, which I have done for
the last 50 years, with what some people might call “mild to warm” success.
It was established, eventually, that I was born in 1937, on 8
May. My mother insisted on this when my step-grandfather, a man from Nyasaland
who had married my grandmother after she had given birth to two daughters, one
of them my mother, with her first husband, gave the year of birth as 1936. She
disputed this with rather disarming logic. She pointed out that she had carried
on her back the second child born to my grandmother with this man, in 1936,
while she was pregnant with me. There was no way that could have happened after
I was born.
Her father, my maternal grandfather, was a Zezuru man named
Mushure, who had a wanderlust which forced him to leave the country to pursue
his dream of fame and fortune in, inevitably, the then Union of South Africa.
As far as I know, he never returned to Southern Rhodesia, although my mother
has told me they heard intermittent rumours of him being cited in this or that
town, a sort of Scarlet Pimpernel in technicolour.
My mother was very young when I was born. One example of her age
relates to her account of my birth. She says she was at the river when I was
born. This was at St David's mission, in what was then called Marandellas
district, where the oldest of my maternal grandmother's two brothers, Paul
Ching'ozha, was an Anglican preacher.
I have often wondered about my choice of a career: I was illegitimate and my mother, although she denies it to this day, probably thought of drowning me at birth. Isn't this
the stuff of which novelists and journalists are made?
Kaunda would not have appreciated just how deeply the accusation
of my being a spy for Smith had wounded me.
At the beginning of my adventure into the world of journalism, I
almost believed my mission was to take an active part in the struggle against
colonialism. The African Daily News, on which I cut my journalistic teeth in
1957, in Salisbury, was unabashedly a campaigner for the political, economic
and social amelioration of the African people. It cannot be ignored in any
political and social history of Zimbabwe, although there have been attempts to
do just that by people who seem to believe the struggle itself started with
Zanu in 1974.
For me, even before an introduction to George Nyandoro, James
Chikerema and Paul Mushonga, there was Josiah Maluleke and Kufakunesu Mhizha,
two trade unionists who sought to familiarise me with the workers' struggle
for decency. I also met Charles Mzingeli, who constantly mangled the English
language so thoroughly there was a standing joke in the newsroom of him
pronouncing furiously that “some certainly people” were selling out to the
whites.
Years after independence, in my search to establish why there
was never any extensive mention of Mzinageli as a leading light of the
struggle, I asked my old editor, Nathan Shamuyarira, if Mzingeli was really
such a nonentity. He said, quite passionately, No. Mzingeli had lit the light
which had guided younger men like Nyandoro and Chikerema, when he led his
Reformed Industrial and Commercial Union (RICU). I spent hours being virtually
lectured by Mzingeli on how the African worker was being abused by the white
employer and why he needed to rise up and campaign for improved pay and
conditions.
Even years later, after I had established a lasting friendship
with Doris Lessing of The Grass Is Singing fame, she sent me a copy of her
autobiography, Under My Skin, in which she devotes space to her acquaintance
with Mzingeli, at a meeting of the Communist Party in Salisbury. For some
reason, Mzingeli was not sold on communism, into which Lessing and her comrades
tried to recruit him. If he had been converted, the struggle might have taken a
different, perhaps radical twist, with Tovarisch Mzingeli a confirmed
Marxist-Leninist, before even Mugabe had heard of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. .
My first journalism mentor was Albert Dumbutshena, the chief
reporter of The African Daily News, a man who made no apologies for his
bibulous propensities. I shall always remember one of the most memorable
questions he asked me, after we had arrived on his company motorcycle at a bar
at Matapi hostels in Harare township. “Mfana, unePondo here?” Young man, do
you have a pound?
Over the beer which I bought, he regaled me with fascinating
stories of his adventures in journalism. I was enthralled and before long I was
trying to emulate him, down to his love for the booze, which he said made him
seek out the truth without fear.
Dumbutshena invariably wrote the lead story for the paper, pounding away on his ancient Remington typewriter as if coaxing it to pick out
the appropriate nouns and rejecting the adjectives which might clutter up his
sentences.
Dumbutshena wrote well and was so reliable a reporter I believe
they tolerated his occasional bouts of incapacity through alcohol because when
he was sober, he always came through.
My mistake was not to allow for the difference in age and
experience between us. He was edging towards 40 and I was just 20. He had
blazed a trail, although quite often the alcohol overwhelmed him. My chance to
shine came when he took leave for a rather long period and I was appointed to
assume his mantle and use the motorcycle as well. Dumbutshena had taught me
many things, among them accuracy and speed, doggedness, and the cultivation of
reliable sources and during his absence I tried to put into practice everything
he had taught me. I too now wrote the lead story, as this was during the
elections in 1958, when Garfield Todd's liberal policies were being
challenged by the United Federal Party of Edgar Whitehead. I covered most of
Todd's meetings all over Salisbury, meeting him many times too.. Only once
was I assigned to cover a meeting of the Dominion Party, the forerunner of the
Rhodesian Front party in Hatfield. I think I also covered the UFP, but my main
assignment was Todd's United Rhodesia Party.
I learnt much of our politics at the time. The UFP won and
Whitehead became the new prime minister. A year later, there was upheaval in
Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia and there were states of
emergency in all three countries of the federation.
I learnt lessons during the emergency: all the nationalists,
including Nkomo, Nyandoro, Chikerema and many others were locked up and the
prospects of their release seemed, at first, remote. The accusations against
them were that they were trying to overthrow the white governments. As
journalists on The African Daily News, this incensed us and we quite openly
supported the nationalist struggle. Once in a while the paper
editorially railed against the more extremist conduct of the leaders.
Meanwhile, most nationalists flocked to the newspaper offices in
Sinoia Street, for tidbits on the political goings-on and some times to persuade
us to print their views, however extreme. I was once appointed acting editor of
The Bwalo la Nyasaland. Kamuzu Banda, whose campaign against the federation
pulsated with what amounted. to maniacal zeal was locked up in Southern
Rhodesia for his pains. An editorial I wrote at this time called on the
government to release him as he was fighting a good cause” - or words to that
effect.
The managing director called me to the office and scolded me for daring to support “this agitator”. It was the harbinger of more such admonitions from publishers, ev en after independence.
