Kenya because that was the first country after South Africa where I worked as a journalist – a 27-year-old starting as news editor on one of the two main East African dailies. My recently-jailed wife and I were exiled from our home country, after eight years in student affairs at Wits and mainstream journalism in Johannesburg. Banned, as members of the ANC-allied Congress movement, we acquired British passports through my ancestry, and arrived with our three preschool sons in Nairobi in the very first months of Kenya’s independence, in March 1964.
I was seasoned in commitment, sharply aware, vibrating with energy, and so it went on for four and a half years, watching, recording, commenting – one of the great transitions from colonial to neo-colonial, from consensus and promise to greed and grab. And then I started prescribing, until I was effectively booted out: Mr Hall, said the chief immigration officer in July 1968, whatever new job you are offered, we are not going to renew your work permit, so you and your family must leave.
It’s where my experience began – living and working in several African countries, in UK, in the Middle East and in India, to learn that at every conjunction of events which might lead to socio-economic improvements for more people, or where well-intentioned or better leaders might come in to decide what to do to improve conditions for the local people, British and American intelligence has kicked in to make sure they don’t. They have done this by every means from media spin to murder, directly themselves, or using local allies and agents. And they never, ever, ever, let up.
Here I only want to trace and sketch events as I knew them, or directly knew of them, or read of them reliably reported, consistent with what I know for myself, to put more pieces of the overall jigsaw in place, to fill in the overall picture. It will not be a matter of proving what I say – that has been done and is easy enough to confirm usually through several reliable written sources. There will little or no attempt to pull in the reader by atmosphere or narrative, to persuade through rhetoric or convince by evidence and attribution – tempted as I may be to write in all these ways.
By mid-1964 I had been upgraded from chief reporter to news editor of the Daily Nation, owned by the Aga Khan, run at most levels at that time by expatriates or locals drawn from the European or Asian settler population. The other English language daily was The Standard, an older, more conventional broadsheet run by and for the white settler community, with the usual injection of journalists from Britain.
Those first months into the transition, everyone was agog with how independence would be handled. I went to a political rally of the ruling Kenya African National Union – Kanu, where Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, waving his flywhisk, addressed a huge crowd in a field in the African township outskirts of Nairobi. I was in an arc of white journalists and diplomats, mostly British.
At one point in his triumphant oration, amid frequent ululations from the crowd, he said in Swahili: “the colonialists sucked our blood…” To me it sounded like a standard rhetorical flourish from a nationalist leader, but those around me, as soon as they caught the drift, hastily compared notes on the exact translation. Some swore, some rushed off to telephone their editors or principals with the news of this shocking outburst. The next day Kenyatta, veteran of many years in detention in arid northern Kenya, had to retract, to say he didn’t mean it like that, he was misquoted… Those suited whites, barking their disgust before rushing off to tear Kenyatta to strips, was an image that remains with me.
Among the few whites who seemed to share my reaction that day was Richard Kisch, an Englishman who was a correspondent for the agency Associated Press. At press conferences over the following months I listened, sometimes amazed, at the bold questions he threw at cabinet ministers, and Kenyatta himself, taking them – and the British government – to task on issues like neglect in funding land reform and settling former freedom fighters.
Months later Kisch, now an established troublemaker, filed a report on the wires that Kenyatta, commenting at a rally in western Kenya on plans for an East African Federation of Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika, said he would never bow the knee to Julius Nyerere as head of such a federation. This smack in the face for Nyerere – who had delayed Tanganyika independence by a year so that the three countries could move together into federation, was a major blow to such dreams, and threatened a diplomatic row. Though Kisch had a note of Kenyatta’s exact Swahili words, and the correct translation, the Kenya premier swore blind he never said such a thing, and he demanded Kisch’s immediate deportation.
Home Affairs minister Oginga Odinga strongly objected.
Ends...
I was seasoned in commitment, sharply aware, vibrating with energy, and so it went on for four and a half years, watching, recording, commenting – one of the great transitions from colonial to neo-colonial, from consensus and promise to greed and grab. And then I started prescribing, until I was effectively booted out: Mr Hall, said the chief immigration officer in July 1968, whatever new job you are offered, we are not going to renew your work permit, so you and your family must leave.
It’s where my experience began – living and working in several African countries, in UK, in the Middle East and in India, to learn that at every conjunction of events which might lead to socio-economic improvements for more people, or where well-intentioned or better leaders might come in to decide what to do to improve conditions for the local people, British and American intelligence has kicked in to make sure they don’t. They have done this by every means from media spin to murder, directly themselves, or using local allies and agents. And they never, ever, ever, let up.
Here I only want to trace and sketch events as I knew them, or directly knew of them, or read of them reliably reported, consistent with what I know for myself, to put more pieces of the overall jigsaw in place, to fill in the overall picture. It will not be a matter of proving what I say – that has been done and is easy enough to confirm usually through several reliable written sources. There will little or no attempt to pull in the reader by atmosphere or narrative, to persuade through rhetoric or convince by evidence and attribution – tempted as I may be to write in all these ways.
By mid-1964 I had been upgraded from chief reporter to news editor of the Daily Nation, owned by the Aga Khan, run at most levels at that time by expatriates or locals drawn from the European or Asian settler population. The other English language daily was The Standard, an older, more conventional broadsheet run by and for the white settler community, with the usual injection of journalists from Britain.
Those first months into the transition, everyone was agog with how independence would be handled. I went to a political rally of the ruling Kenya African National Union – Kanu, where Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, waving his flywhisk, addressed a huge crowd in a field in the African township outskirts of Nairobi. I was in an arc of white journalists and diplomats, mostly British.
At one point in his triumphant oration, amid frequent ululations from the crowd, he said in Swahili: “the colonialists sucked our blood…” To me it sounded like a standard rhetorical flourish from a nationalist leader, but those around me, as soon as they caught the drift, hastily compared notes on the exact translation. Some swore, some rushed off to telephone their editors or principals with the news of this shocking outburst. The next day Kenyatta, veteran of many years in detention in arid northern Kenya, had to retract, to say he didn’t mean it like that, he was misquoted… Those suited whites, barking their disgust before rushing off to tear Kenyatta to strips, was an image that remains with me.
Among the few whites who seemed to share my reaction that day was Richard Kisch, an Englishman who was a correspondent for the agency Associated Press. At press conferences over the following months I listened, sometimes amazed, at the bold questions he threw at cabinet ministers, and Kenyatta himself, taking them – and the British government – to task on issues like neglect in funding land reform and settling former freedom fighters.
Months later Kisch, now an established troublemaker, filed a report on the wires that Kenyatta, commenting at a rally in western Kenya on plans for an East African Federation of Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika, said he would never bow the knee to Julius Nyerere as head of such a federation. This smack in the face for Nyerere – who had delayed Tanganyika independence by a year so that the three countries could move together into federation, was a major blow to such dreams, and threatened a diplomatic row. Though Kisch had a note of Kenyatta’s exact Swahili words, and the correct translation, the Kenya premier swore blind he never said such a thing, and he demanded Kisch’s immediate deportation.
Home Affairs minister Oginga Odinga strongly objected.
Ends...
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