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The Guardian's Richard Gott in Tanzania

Richard Gott in Tanzania

Richard Gott

A clarification from Tony Hall

Richard was and is a struggler, heroic at times, a great journalist and a fine Guardian foreign editor. True, he did stir it for us (already squabbling) leftist expat hacks on Tanzania's national newspaper during the ujamaa period, making it easier for some of us, including him, to be fired, and we were furious.

But he wasn't the immediate trigger. And he didn't seem to care much as he had the Guardian in London to go back to from his fun-filled sabbatical in East Africa as a foreign editor. Unlike us, he was no longer trying to take Nyerere's socialist experiment seriously anyway. Often the upper class dilettante in style, he had started stirring up the local reactionary-minded journalists against the leftists -- just as always, with Cuba, and lately with the Latin American progressive awakening as a whole -- he denigrates the 'whites' and validates only blacks and browns as capable of being genuinely revolutionary in third world contexts. He would never understand, let alone agree with, the historical force of the comment from one black Jamaican revolutionary who heatedly said to us at a party in Dar once: 'Black Power - it can be up the arsehole of imperialism!'

But he did pen some clever party tricks in that lively year or two in Dar-es-Salaam. On a royal visit by Princess Anne, he managed to slip in a caption under her portrait in the paper: 'British playgirl Anne' -- causing great upset in the British High Commission.
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He would never understand, let alone agree with, the historical force of the comment from one black Jamaican revolutionary who heatedly said to us at a party in Dar once: 'Black Power - it can be up the arsehole of imperialism!'
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He coined a wonderful anagram for the North Korean president: 'Milky Snug, beloved leader of 40 million Korean people'. And he wrote a piece in 1971 on the anniversary of the Paris Commune, in which, giggling naughtily, he described Karl Marx as sitting on his backside and pronouncing 'from the safety of his Hampstead home'.

This however, was the same Richard Gott who was helpful to former comrades, who made a forcefully progressive foreign editor when he returned to The Guardian, and years later fell on his sword and resigned, rather than embarrass The Guardian, after the appalling Dominic Lawson had 'revealed' in a Spectator article, that the Soviet Union had paid Richard's plane ticket for a visit to Moscow -- as if it wasn't always a norm for American, Brit, French and other agencies, in some form or another, to fly journalists for occasional assignments in their countries.

Tony Hall (10 / 2007)

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