It was midday and very hot. We all trooped out into the yard – about 120 angry Africans and me. They fetched a stool for me to sit on, and crouched on the ground all around me. It was to be a traditional African indaba. One by one, they stood up to say their piece. The senior African printer did the translating, but I did not need the translation to judge their mood.
It went on for two hours in the hot sun. At the end, the senior man said I had heard their case: I must decide what to do. They would accept my decision, but tradition required me to give my judgement immediately, without consulting anyone else. I gave my judgement: the offender would leave, but only when arrangements had been made for his successor; meanwhile, they must work as normal. I would personally conduct an inquiry into their wage rates, with a view to correcting anomalies, but they must accept my verdict.
I also announced that they must throw away the old oil cans out of which they drank their tea, and the company would provide them with decent mugs. We would also supply them with a bag of maize for their lunch. These primitive proposals, like something out of Victorian England, were received with great applause. This was my first and last excursion into industrial relations in Africa. How unlike – how very unlike – the life I was to find in dear old Fleet Street.
• • •
The independence celebrations in July 1963 came and went in a mood of national euphoria. Prince Philip flew over, along with many heads of state; I had a desultory conversation with a surprisingly shy Moshe Dayan; there were fireworks and football matches; everything seemed to be going perfectly. Then, suddenly, one month after independence, it all changed.
In August 1964, the bulk of the Cabinet revolted against Dr Banda because they thought he was too autocratic. They also claimed to be ashamed, as African nationalists, that Banda insisted on trading with South Africa and the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, arguing that, as a landlocked country, he had no choice and would trade with the devil if it helped to feed his people.
Banda, seeing that he had lost the confidence of his Cabinet ministers, was inclined to resign, but the Governor, Sir Glyn Jones, urged him to test his popularity by holding an emergency vote of confidence in Parliament instead. This took place – a very dramatic day in the history of Malawi – and the culmination was that he got an overwhelming vote of support.
I was present that day in the Malawi Parliament. The atmosphere was electric. Banda himself arrived early, sat rigid in his seat all day, and when his turn came to speak he turned on his enemies with such violent vituperation that they physically cowered. It was a performance of staggering personal power. He rounded on his critics one by one, summoning up every insult he had ever heard about them, clearly hitting home with many of the barbs, as the MPs roared their approval all around him. He won hands down. But the national mood was broken: the slow descent into dictatorship had begun.
Banda had sacked the rebel ministers and won a vote of confidence. But what would the ministers do next? They scattered to their home districts, and the country waited to see if they would take up arms against him. It was in this period of uncertainty that my newspaper was to play its most important role. Even Banda didn’t know what was going on. The people certainly didn’t. I asked my staff who they thought would win a civil war: Banda or the rebels? My white reporters and commercial staff all said the rebels would win: the black employees, down to the man who swept my office floor, all said Banda.
For further advice, I went to see the Governor. He played me a recording of the latest Cabinet meeting (in English because that was their only common language), from which it was clear that Banda was in fighting form and the rebels were in retreat. So I decided that the paper would support the side that was going to win – not so much out of principle as pragmatism, I have to admit.
The key man in the opposition to Banda was Henry Chipembere, the only one of the rebels with a national following. He was a powerful orator, and a highly educated man, having been to universities in South Africa and California. Banda was desperate to keep Chipembere on his side – so much so that he called me to his office one day and gave me a letter that Chipembere had sent to him only a few weeks before, in which the rebel minister had addressed Banda as ‘my father’ and professed his undying support for the leader. Banda wanted me to publish this letter as evidence of Chipembere’s loyalty. I did publish it, but I retained some doubts as to whether Banda could count on that loyalty much longer.
Then we got word that Chipembere was to address a meeting of his followers in his home town of Fort Johnston, near Lake Nyasa, about 120 miles south of Blantyre. This raised a number of problems for me. For a start, Banda had issued some emergency laws, making it an offence (punishable by five years in jail) to publish any material ‘likely to undermine public confidence in the government’. The next problem was that Chipembere spoke in a local dialect called Yao. Fortunately, Austin M’Madi spoke this dialect, and so did another African on the staff. I sent them off, with instructions to take down every word that Chipembere spoke, then report back to me.
They returned, covered in dust, with their notebooks overflowing. I made them sit down and translate the whole thing into English for me. It was plain that Chip was throwing down the gauntlet. He had attacked Banda, as the Americans would say, on the issues, but he had held back from personal abuse. I judged that Chipembere was staking out his ground very carefully. He had not broken completely with Banda, but the gap was widening fast. I decided to publish.
As it happened, Banda himself had made a major speech that day, so I thought it would be prudent to lead the paper on that, and, knowing his vanity, I also ran a big picture of him. Under the Banda story, I ran a short factual precis of the Chipembere speech. The paper went out on the streets and we waited to see what would happen. The paper sold out almost straight away. Africans were grabbing them and folding the front page over to read the Chipembere story at the bottom, then rushing off to show their friends. It was Chipembere, not Banda, they wanted to read about, teaching me an important lesson about journalism: news is what governments don’t want people to read.
After a short while, the telephone rang in my office. The Prime Minister would see me immediately. I rang my wife and warned her that we might have to pack in a hurry. Banda was more agitated than I had ever seen him. He was angry that I had reported Chipembere’s speech, and yet he wanted to know exactly what he had said. At one point, he poked my chest in rage: ‘Keep out of my politics, white man!’ He told me not to report rebel speeches.
I tried to reason with him, pointing out that his Malawi Congress Party controlled all the other media outlets, and they did not mention the rebels. Yet everyone wanted to know what Chipembere was saying: if I did not tell them, in a straightforward, factual, unsensational way, the Africans would hear things by word of mouth, in the form of rumours that might be untrue or exaggerated. By the skin of my teeth, I won the right to carry on. But it was a close-run thing. The last words he hurled at my back as I left his office were: ‘Watch it, white man.’
I returned to my office feeling rather shaken, in time for the telephone to ring again. This time it was Chipembere. Every word of our conversation is clear in my memory.
‘Is that Bwana Times? Chipembere here.’ He was using the African word ‘bwana’, meaning ‘master’, ironically. He went on: ‘I didn’t like the report you gave of my speech today. I thought it deserved more prominence.’
‘I already gave it more prominence than was good for me,’ I replied.
‘Yes, I would expect the powers that be to bring pressure to bear on you. But I wouldn’t like you to think they’re the only people who can bring pressure to bear.’
I asked rather nervously: ‘What do you mean, Mr Chipembere?’
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t like me to lead a boycott of your paper among the Africans, or for anything to happen to your precious printing machinery.’
There followed a long pause while I swallowed hard.
‘I’m sur
e you’re above that sort of thing, Mr Chipembere.’
His turn for a long pause. Then: ‘I wouldn’t count on it, bwana editor.’
Banda’s Malawi Congress Party ran its own newspaper, the Malawi News, which was just a propaganda sheet, and its English-language pages were full of unintended mistakes. The party’s symbol was a black cockerel. One election day, to my everlasting delight, it ran a caption under a picture of the Great Leader that read: ‘Dr Banda votes for his own black cock.’
The British press had turned up in force at the prospect of a revolution in the newly independent Malawi, for Banda was a well-known figure in Britain, having worked as a GP in north London for many years. It is hard now to recall how big Africa was treated as a story in British newspapers at the time. Africa correspondents were often the best reporters on the paper. Richard Beeston of the Daily Telegraph, Colin Legum of The Observer, Peter Younghusband of the Daily Mail, John Monks of the Daily Express – they were all legendary kings of the African jungle.
Younghusband and Monks maintained a fierce rivalry that kept us all amused. There was an occasion when Younghusband filed a story from the Congo that went something like this: ‘I am writing this while sheltering behind a car as bullets whistle overhead.’ Monks received a telegram from his office the next day, demanding: ‘Younghusband shot at. Why not you?’
I remember being in a bar in Salisbury when Monks came in looking anxious and asked if anybody had seen Younghusband lately. Tongue in cheek, we said we had last seen him heading for the airport. Shocked that his rival might have a headstart on him, Monks raced off in pursuit. Actually, none of us knew where Younghusband was; in fact, he ambled into the bar a bit later on – and asked where Monks was. We said he had gone to the airport. Peter shot after him.
In Malawi, the correspondents all made a beeline for my little office to pick my brains as to what was going on. Their favourite eating place was Ku Chawe Inn on Zomba plateau above the capital, where Monks would set up a powerful camera on a stand in case any disturbances took place down below. One day we were accompanied on the mountain by Tom Stacey of the Sunday Times, an Etonian toff who was later sacked by the paper for making up an interview with the jailed Sultan of Kashmir. He was also an intrepid explorer, a novelist and a publisher. When I became editor of The Observer, we met at his club, White’s, for a jolly lunch.
We all had our own cars and Stacey proposed a bet as to who would be first down the mountain. There was really only a single track, except at one of the many hairpin bends, where it was just possible to overtake. As we took off from the car park, all having partaken of drink, Stacey shot into the lead, with me behind. I knew the road best and thought I might catch him. But it soon struck me, after a few skirmishes at the corners, that he would rather die than lose the race and, on the whole, I didn’t feel the same way… So he claimed the prize – and we all lived to drink another day.
• • •
British news desks had no real idea where the countries of Africa were, or how you could travel from one to another. As a result, while sitting in my office in Blantyre, I would receive requests for stories on the other side of the continent that could only be reached at that time by two days of air travel. Once, I remember, the Daily Mail said there had been reports of trouble in Nigeria: ‘Please file 600 words by six o’clock.’
Reluctant to give up on any possible source of income, I rang my friend in the British High Commission, Ronnie Bloom, who was really MI6, though we kept up a pretence that he was just a diplomat. He checked with his colleagues in Lagos and sent me details of the situation in Nigeria, which I passed on, over my byline and date-lined Lagos, to an unsuspecting Daily Mail.
I had all these payments made into an account in London, from which, when I returned to England three years later, I was able to buy my first family home, a four-bedroomed house in Kew Gardens with a garden front and back and a lovely may tree at the front. I bought it for £6,000 in 1966 and sold it two years later for £7,500, thinking I had made a killing. It must now be worth £2 million.
• • •
When my wife and I arrived in Nyasaland, we had been put up in an apartment while we looked for a permanent home. We turned up just as the previous occupants, a young couple, were leaving. ‘Good luck on 7 July,’ the young man said slyly. ‘Why’s that?’ I asked. ‘Because that’s the day after Malawi becomes independent and that’s when you’ll probably have your throats cut.’ A woman less resilient than my wife would have taken fright at this typical expatriate horror story.
I soon met a rather eccentric doctor called Mowschenson, of vague European descent, who drove a beautiful vintage Rolls-Royce. He told me I should rent the house of ‘Sanders of the River’, the nickname for a Colonel Sanders, a long-time resident of Nyasaland who had recently died. Mowschenson said his widow was about to leave for the Cape in South Africa and was desperate to rent out the property before she left.
My wife and I went round and were overwhelmed by the house and garden in its sixty-eight acres of mostly wooded land. When Mrs Sanders said the rent would be only £40 a month, I must have stared with my mouth open, because she evidently misunderstood my reaction and promptly reduced the rent to £30 a month. We took it.
The house was built on the South African rondavel principle, with a square dining room at the centre and other rooms, including a living room, two bedrooms, study and kitchen, all filling out a circle in segments around it. Three servants came with the house – a cook, a gardener and a watchman to protect the trees from marauders. For a young couple brought up in working-class Coventry, it was a dream. There were two cottages in the grounds, which we did up and rented out (for £30 a month each) to an Israeli doctor and to the Reuters man, Jack Gillon, a Scot who turned up with a leggy, ‘debbie’ sort of girl in a large hat who, Gillon said, he had brought from a party in Chelsea.
There was a squash court in the garden with a bamboo top that let in the rain. I allowed a local club to use it and played there myself. My main partner was the Israeli ambassador, Gideon Shohat, a former air force colonel who mysteriously shot himself on a beach in Tel Aviv after returning home. He was an admirable man who had become a good friend.
I also played with Gillon. One day, while we were in mid-point, a snake fell into the court from the bamboo roof. I quickly picked it up on my racket, opened the door and threw it out, then stood ready to go on with the game. I found my opponent in a state of shock, white-faced, with his back to the wall of the court. When he saw what I had done with the snake, he said: ‘You could do that to people!’
• • •
Malawi’s short-lived civil war brought one piece of excitement my way, when Donald Wise, a well-known foreign correspondent of the Daily Mirror and a delightful companion, asked me to drive him into rebelheld territory. It was getting dark by the time we arrived at a village in the bush where a makeshift roadblock had been set up. We were ordered to wind down the car’s front windows. Africans on both sides stuck guns at our heads, shining a torch into our faces. When they saw we were white men, they roared with laughter and passed us each a bottle of Coca Cola and we laughed too. At that age, we thought we were immortal.
• • •
Early in 1966, I received an invitation out of the blue to visit the Ivory Coast, all expenses paid. I leapt at the opportunity to see parts of Africa I had never seen before. At Nairobi airport, I teamed up with Richard Hall, who was on the same trip. He was editing a paper in Zambia, as I was doing in Malawi. We travelled on together through Addis Ababa, Khartoum and Accra, stopping off briefly on our way to Abidjan, crossing Africa from east to west. According to Dick’s account of the trip in his book: ‘We hit it off at once. Donald proved good company, quick and knowing, with a humour that was rather conspiratorial, making you feel you were sharing in his cache of light-hearted secrets.’
I have a letter I wrote to my parents about the trip. Even after fifty years the youthful excitement we felt at this great adventure comes th
rough strongly. We missed our connection to Abidjan from Accra and had to suffer hours of bureaucratic bullying because we had no visa for Ghana. Eventually we were sent to a tenth-rate hotel with a carpet of cockroaches under the bed and African dance music that seemed to go on all night.
Getting out of Ghana was even harder than getting in, though we were keen to escape such a run-down and unwelcoming place, with banners everywhere reading ‘GET OUT WHITES’. The pompous official who had harangued us for not having a visa on entry the night before had failed to stamp our passports, so we were now accused of entering Ghana illegally – and for journalists, a hated species, that was no joke; a German journalist had recently been jailed for forty years for entering the country without a visa.
Abidjan was completely different: very French, which was the country’s official language, with little bistros next to the skyscrapers and people drinking coffee or beer under sun umbrellas in the pavement cafés. We were treated regally in a super-plush hotel with free meals and wine, driven around in a Mercedes, and entertained every night until the early hours. Dick and I, plus a couple of journalists from Tanzania and Uganda who were on the trip, managed to escape the official entertainment one night to visit a frisky nightclub called La Boule Noire in Trecheville, the city’s red-light district. Oddly, I don’t seem to have reported this excursion to my parents.
When the Ivory Coast visit ended, Dick and I decided not to go straight home, but to move along the coast to Lagos, which had recently been the scene of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conference. We stayed with a friend of Dick’s, the Zambian High Commissioner to Nigeria, a man of the cloth called Isaac Munpansha. Like everyone in Lagos, we were woken in the middle of the night when the hum of the air conditioning suddenly stopped. The lights weren’t working either, the power station having been taken over in a military coup which had resulted in the death of the country’s main leaders.
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