At least reporters got a response
By the sort of contradiction that modern technology often inflicts upon us, the personal computer most “print” journalist use to transmit their copy is, essentially, impersonal.
They simply send a story through the international ether. Sometimes its receipt is acknowledged, sometimes not.
The post office cable, the old-fashioned telex message, was an umbilical cord. It even has its own idiom.
Cable-ese we called it. Because the cost of press telegrams was calculated by the word, and that cost obviously ballooned with distance, prefixes were used. Un- meant no or not; pro- for or to; et, and; ex-, from; and con-, with. Soonest meant as soon as possible.
It was a shorthand that sms experts might consider looking at today.
This genre of language produced one classic story of the Reuters man dispatched by his London office to Zanzibar after the 1964 revolution. A week passed with no word from him. The foreign editor sent a cable: “Why unnews?” he demanded.
Not much was happening on the spice island after a spate of killings and arrests, so the reporter sent a message back. “Unnews, good news,” it said.
The response from the foreign editor came the same afternoon. Short and sharp. “Unnews, unjob,” he cabled.
A threat like that would have sent most journalists to their typewriters to dash off the first “situationer” piece that came to mind. This correspondent, however, was made of sterner stuff. “That makes you forty-love,” he replied.
The need to keep down cabling costs led to some wonderful invention. Another Fleet Street friend spent three weeks in Addis Ababa during a similar lull in news. Eventually, he sent the foreign editor a two-word cable: “Nunc dimittis.” Which translated, as choirboys past and present know, means “Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace . . .”
Quick as a flash, the foreign editor replied with another biblical reference: “Matthew 24.6.”
My friend reached for the hotel Gideon’s, looked up the reference, then rang for bar service. Matthew 24.6 held no comfort for a restless soul.
It read: “But the time is not yet.”
Often, service messages could take on a certain ambiguity. More so if the receiving party chose to read them that way.
Eric Robins, a veteran Time correspondent, was declared a prohibited immigrant in the former Rhodesia after Ian Smith’s UDI. He and I were staying at the same hotel in Lusaka when he received the notification. Earlier, Eric had written a profile of Sir Roy Welensky for the magazine. Welensky was the first and last premier of the doomed Central African Federation, a former professional boxer and a florid personality.
At three o’clock in the morning Zambia time, hours before publication of his piece, Robins was dragged from his bed by a porter monitoring the hotel telex machine.
It was a message from his New York office. “How old Welensky?” it said.
Eric was infuriated. He knew Roy Welensky’s date of birth had to be in a hundred files in the Time library and that the person editing his article could easily have looked it up.
So he sent this message back: “Old Welensky fine,” it said. “How you?”
From One man’s Africa
High Noon in torrid Luanda
November in Luanda is a knock-down and drag-out month for heat. Which, like Bermuda’s sandflies and Daytona Beach’s mosquitoes, is not a fact you will see bandied about in travel guides.
By eleven o’clock, even the black Angolans – whom one would expect to be reasonably immune to the situation – are scurrying off to find some respite among the palm groves.
They dart from one pool of shade to the next, criss-crossing streets and alleys as they go, like a terrorised crowd fleeing before some hidden sniper.
One o’clock is the meridian. Now the siesta is fully into its stride, the pavements downtown deserted.
Except for me, trudging along on a pair of fried eggs. Intermittently massaging a neck gone stiff to no avail, from turning to look out for taxis.
And a solitary policeman. Grey of face and uniform, he keeps measured pace on the other side of the street, plainly suspicious of the stranger who chooses to venture out in this sauna weather.
With sidelong glances, we watch each other through the haze that rises from the tarmac. Clomp. Clomp. The sound of our feet is an infraction upon the gentle snoring of the city.
I think this could make a good movie scenario. Then remember that it did. ‘High Noon’, of course. Gary Cooper, the late Princess Grace, and the most convincing bunch of renegades that ever appeared on celluloid.
The vision of Deadwood Gulch (or was it Dodge) grows as we turn a corner, still faultlessly in step, and head towards the old town hall. It’s the heat, naturally, and the silence, the shuttered buildings and the minute hand up in the clock tower, moving fatefully onward.
In my mind, it becomes a game. The cop, gun strapped low, can be Cooper. A little darker and rounder, perhaps, but pure granite underneath.
Me? I’m Tonto, Festus or Pancho. Some such sidekick. Not quite a Cooper but the next best thing. A veteran of shoot-outs and bar brawls.
Striding out to our next showdown, I smile conspiratorially across at my partner. He responds with a frown. Deadwood Gulch fades into reality.
My hotel still being a long way off, I start whistling to lighten the load. The policeman’s frown darkens so I stop. Maybe it’s a jailable offence to whistle during the siesta.
At once, an alarm bell begins to ring somewhere ahead of us.
Cooper, that was, acts commendably in character. The large gun is palmed, quick as a flash. He turns towards me but is persuaded by my idiot expression that I can have nothing to do with this new development.
Together we move towards the sound. The source turns out to be a jeweller’s shop, which fact causes us to exchange meaningful glances.
Peering through the glass frontage, we see the alarm on an inside wall. Its little hammer is beating in agitation. There is no other sign of movement.
The policeman and I confer by way of jumbled sign-language. The front door, we agree – after furious pulling and pushing at the knob – is impenetrable.
But running down both sides of the shop are service lanes. My companion signals that I should tackle one while he investigates the other.
Stumbling past dustbins, I find a small window near the back of the building. It is open but stoutly burglar-proofed.
I chin myself up on the ledge, long enough to gain an impression of a dark room, full of packing cases and broken timepieces. Also to glimpse an indefinable shape – possibly someone’s cap – edging forward above the level of a work-bench.
I drop down, charged with adrenalin, and sprint back to the street, clearing the dustbins like a steeple-chaser.
Taking the bend at full speed, I run straight into the chest of a grey uniform, which clutches me eagerly. Surprised, I stare into the face and, suddenly, the heat of the day gives way to a clammy chill.
It is not my policeman!
Stuttered explanations fall on foreign ears. I point wildly at the interior of the shop and the new cop grunts knowingly. Though he is shorter than my friend, his grip is ferocious.
I consider the circumstantial evidence. A burgled shop, a stranger in obvious flight from the scene. My fingerprints on the windowsill.
Of course, everything will be sweet when Cooper shows up. If he shows up. What if he had taken off after the real burglar? Never to be encountered again? Or not by me, at any rate.
But even as I stand there, with the policeman’s arm around my throat, Cooper emerges from the other lane.
He is carrying a large ginger cat. He drops it as he takes in the scene, stands poised for a moment, then moves to the attack.
A barrage of slaps to the other policeman’s neck secures my immediate release. The invective that accompanies this threatens to curl the paving stones.
The second cop retreats, spectacularly abashed. My friend takes my arm. And together, Cooper and Festus (or Tonto or Pancho) go forward in search of new pursuits.
A cold beer, I feel, would be an adventure in itself.
From One Man’s Africa
Encounters with an Icon
Nearly 26 years separated my first and second encounter with Nelson Mandela.
The first time, the African Nationalist Congress leader was in the dock in Pretoria facing a strong chance of being executed for treason. He had already spent a year in jail for incitement and for leaving the country illegally. I was a young reporter in the Press gallery, taking notes.
The second time was when Mandela was on an excursion into Africa after his release in 1990. In Lusaka, Zambia, a BBC colleague told him there was someone in the media party who had covered his treason trial.
Mandela sought me out and we chatted. I told him we in fact had other links. We had been born within 50 miles of each other. After that, he called me “my fellow Transkeian”.
For a while I felt special. Then I realised Madiba was exercising one of his greatest talents: His innate ability to relate to people, to make them feel at ease.
He had done it with his prison warders. In the future, he would do it with the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, and with dyed-in-the-wool rightwingers.
Much more than that, he would do it with a nation.
These are extracts from my reports on those rather different occasions:
Sunday Chronicle, June 14, 1964
FRIDAY, 7.30 a.m. The clock in the Pretoria Raadsaal strikes the half-hour, sparking a domestic crisis in Church Square’s pigeon colony. Outside the locked door of the grey-stone Palace of Justice, a handful of journalists and lawyers’ clerks page through their morning newspapers.
A No 2 bus circles leisurely on its way to Brooklyn.
7.55: The crowd around the palace entrance has grown to the size of a rush-hour bus queue. Among the newcomers is a bearded university student who claims to have heard on the best authority that at least two of the eight men will get the death penalty.
As the doors swing open, a young white woman says, “I hope they hang the lot.”
8.30: Winnie Mandela, dressed all in black, enters the packed courtroom. Behind her is an aged relative whom the papers have identified as Nelson Mandela’s mother from the Transkei. A blanketed woman in the third row moves on to the floor to make room for them.
Across the room, an orderly yawns noisily.
9.45: Twelve plain-clothes warders take up their positions behind the dock. With the defence is Cry, the Beloved Country author, Alan Paton, who is to give evidence in mitigation.
The stage is set and the doors are barred. A late-comer brings the news that the court precincts have been cordoned off by a force of police. The man on my right observes, “They’re taking no chances.”
10.00. Mr Justice Quartus de Wet takes his seat and the countdown of more than eleven months is about to end.
Headed by Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, the accused file into the dock. They wave cheerily to their relatives and Sisulu blows a kiss to his wife.
The eight men seem composed and in unnaturally high spirits. There is the usual surprise to find they are all dressed in well-cut lounge suits, not prison garb. All are clean-shaven.
10.30: Unexpectedly, a game of thrust and parry has developed between Alan Paton and Percy Yutar, head of the prosecution team. It is a battle between a man of words and a man of letters and it becomes obvious where the advantage lies.
Yutar, predatory veteran of the art of cross-examination, goes on the attack with all the devices of his experience – and the witness who came to plead for clemency for others soon finds that he is on the defensive himself. The prosecutor has produced a dossier with an account of the Liberal Party leader’s movements and public statements over the past four years.
Cross-examination ends abruptly and Alan Paton, red-faced and angry, returns to his seat. Mr Justice De Wet decides it is time for tea.
11.30: The accused file back into the dock but this time their smiles are tight and their gestures lack assurance. Dennis Goldberg is white-faced and even the others seem pale under their dark skins.
Defence lawyer Harry Hanson’s final address is short and deliberate. It reflects Mandela’s statement from the dock earlier this week that it is the Government that should be on trial here.
When he sits down, the judge nods and the eight men stand. Kathrada scratches nervously at his ear. Mandela clenches and unclenches his fists.
It is all over so suddenly that most of the public are not aware sentence has been passed. But jubilation spreads quickly to the black section of the gallery as Kathrada turns around and mouths the word, “Life”.
Mrs Bernstein says, “Thank God.”
Waving and smiling, Nelson Mandela and his co-accused disappear down the stairway to the cells. The man on my right says, ‘They’ll only serve 15 years.”
1.45: The Black Maria carrying the prisoners has left for Pretoria Central and the crowds have dispersed. Two riot policemen walk away from the scene, their job over. One says, “They should have hanged the bastards.”
Church Square returns to its lunch-time routine. A No 2 bus circles on its way to Brooklyn.
And 26 years later:
The Argus Africa News Service, April 15, 1990
Nelson Mandela has moved into the warm embrace of Africa with his first trip beyond the frontiers of South Africa in 27 years.
The biggest crowd ever seen in Zambia came together in Lusaka to welcome the man Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda said was “as much our leader as you are the leader of the African National Congress”.
Earlier, successive groups of ANC members – most of whom were not born when their icon went to jail – toyi-toyied before the crowd of Zambians and chanted slogans.
From there, Mandela travelled to Harare, Zimbabwe, where more than 50 000 people packed a stadium with a normal capacity of 35 000 to acclaim their reverence and wonder at his presence.
Later, the man who confessed on leaving Victor Verster Prison, that one of his greatest yearnings during his long years in jail was to be able to hug a small child, had a chance to embrace more than 30 small children.
They were the sons and daughters of ANC members in exile in Harare. Aged from about two to twelve, they came on stage at the University of Zimbabwe where Mandela received an honorary doctorate in law.
Before he did, the children indulged in an unrehearsed bout of toyi-toying that had the audience of academics and diplomats on their feet.
Nelson Mandela stooped and hugged every child. He discarded a formal speech and said: “Every day I am here, I enjoy the feeling that I am a human being.
Then his eyes flooded with tears, and he turned to look through a far window at the soft hills beyond the campus.
A wing and a prayer
LUANDA – Perhaps because of their maritime background, the Portuguese display a healthy cynicism about airlines and flying.
Many still maintain the acronym of their national carrier, TAP, stands for Take Another Plane.
And in the old Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, expatriates from the mainland used to say the name of the internal service, DETA, was equally cautionary. It warned travellers: Don’t Expect To Arrive.
What slogan, one wonders, would they apply to the present-day TAAG (Transportes Aereos de Angola) line in this other independent province?
Terror And Anguish Guaranteed? Transports Arabs And Goats? Either would be apt.
Travelling TAAG is like being on a mid-quality indigenous bus in almost any part of the continent, with the essential difference that the trauma is all taking place at 30 000 feet.
The impression that this may not be your ordinary everyday shuttle begins with a small maul at Luanda Airport at six in the morning – a crush of humanity, of people violently intent on being somewhere else.
To say the aircraft eventually becomes packed would be a laughable understatement. Every seat is taken, three-quarters of them twice over. The additional numbers consist of children, lap-held. Some are sucklings, noisily having breakfast. Most of the rest could qualify as the oldest babies in the world.
Such congestion makes it difficult to slap at the mosquitoes and flies that screen anxious first-timers from the demonstration of how they would be expected to conduct themselves should the aircraft end up in the drink.
A subjective appraisal of conditions suggests that prospect may not be too far distant.
Outside on the apron, a hefty queue of passengers snakes its way to another TAAG 737. Following it is a tractor and trailer bearing that flight’s luggage.
A man in overalls is riding shotgun on the trailer. It hits a rut in the tarmac and several suitcases and parcels fall off. This amuses the trailer attendant to the extent that he tosses a few more over the tailgate for good measure. He continues to chortle as he arrives and helps load the hold.
After the plane to Malanje takes off, five cases and two parcels remain scattered on the apron.
While the cabin doors of our aircraft are about to close, two white men clamour up the stairs. “We’re with the commander,” they say. Immediately, two seats are cleared in the front row and the congestion ebbs back to compensate.
Coffee, tea or milk? A ridiculous prospect on Flight 016. Although there are five hostesses aboard, adding madly to the overload, no trolley would be able to negotiate the aisle.
TAAG captains seem to have a width of discretion on public safety. The man who flies us to Lubango takes the direct route, right over the war zone. And he does not bother with the tight-circle descent, the internationally accepted way of keeping missiles out of posteriors.
We eventually return to Luanda by a deviation further out to sea, taking in distant aspects of Benguela and Lobito. That pilot should go far; the other, the further the better.
Lubango airport is like a scene from MASH, abuzz with helicopters, hospital planes and MIG-21s and 23s. The MIGs are enthralling with their low sweeps and parachute-assisted landings. We have a fair opportunity to appreciate them. The plane from Luanda is an hour late.
But its lateness is less surprising to the government officials who have delivered us to the airport than the fact that it has arrived at all. Apparently every day at Lubango airport contains an element of lottery.
Just ahead in the queue is our commander himself. At the foot of the stairway he is stopped by a private in the Fapla army, who says he may not proceed until the aircraft is searched.
“But I’m the captain!” says the captain.
“Maybe you’re the captain in the air,’ says the soldier, ‘but I’m the captain on the ground.”
TAAG advertises 15 regular flights out of Luanda. Insofar as it is within my power to decide, the airline will be at least one passenger short on every such occasion.
From “One Man’s Africa”
Extract from O…
Extract from One Man’s Africa:
The Dark Continent is at once a misnomer and an awful truism. The sun never shines as brightly as it does in Africa. Unfortunately, the brightest sunshine cases the darkest shadows and the miseries that lie in Africa’s umbra are the most abject in the world.
African Americans used to say of their lot (and perhaps they still do) that what white Americans wanted, they themselves had precious little of; but what white Americans didn’t want, Afro-Americans had in great quantity.
So it is with Africa and the West: Africans grow skeletal because the West squanders the world’s resources whereas those things the West avoids – like poverty and disease – Africa possesses in abundance.
And yet, not for nothing has this continent been confirmed as the cradle of all humankind. Not for nothing do we now know that the first people on earth were Africans, and that other races developed from them.
Not for nothing do African’s misplaced citizens – the Afro-Americans and West Indians – hanker to return to fund their roots. And not those people alone.
Everyone of whatever race, nation or creed who comes to Africa feels a magnetism that cannot be ignored or explained. Because it is primeval.
Because Africa is like a mother calling her children home.
Old, addled and poor she may be, but the pull of the umbilicus is still there. Irresistibly.”
Extract from One Man’s Africa.
John Ryan 