Trevor Grundy
Trevor Grundy in the newsroom of The Standard in Dar es Salaam in
1969.
My time at The Nation in Nairobi was short, from June 1972 to February 1973.
How did I get there?
I left England in April 1966 after working for the Egyptian Government-owned
Middle East News Agency (MENA) for two and a half years, first as a tea-maker
and then as a telex operator for my Egyptian boss who trained me as a reporter
appointing me towards the end of my time with that little known in UK agency as
his House of Commons correspondent.
I went to Africa because I was on the run from the Mosley
Movement, having been brought up by parents who were fascist fanatics. Our
war-damaged Victorian house behind Marylebone Station was known to Britain’s
Special Branch as Oswald Mosley’s North London headquarters.
Life in Zambia was wonderful. Because of my fascist
childhood, I was pleased when people mistook me for a left-winger or (even
better still) a communist.
I was probably the worst sub-editor Richard Hall, Editor-in-Chief
of the Times of Zambia ever recruited having never worked on a
newspaper in my life. I survived but only just. Instead of firing me, he sent
me off to Livingstone where I edited the smallest least profitable or
influential weekly in the world, The Livingstone Mail.
In August 1968, I flew with a teenage wife, Lori, who I married in
Ndola, to Dar es Salaam after signing a two-year contract in London with The
Standard newspaper, then owned by Lonrho.
Our son, Adam, was born in Dar es Salaam in 1969. It was one of
the happiest times of my life.
A new world, fresh thoughts, new people, different ways of seeing
the world – and above all, a million miles away from Oswald Mosley.
But where rainbows end, don’t go looking for pots of gold.
In December 1969, President Julius Nyerere Nationalized the English media and appointed himself editor-in-chief
of The Standard and its sister Sunday paper.
The Managing Editor was the ANC activist and South African
Communist Party sympathiser, Frene Ginwala.
All the best journalists left at the end of their contracts. For a
variety of reasons, I renewed and was there until Nyerere decided to place all
key position in the hands of black Tanzanians.
Frene Ginwala and her recruits from London were drop-kicked out of
Tanzania.
Her attempt to give two tiny papers in Africa a Marxist /Leninist
voice was a total failure and it didn’t take long after her departure for the
new editor to turn them into sponges and mouthpieces for the ruling political
party, TANU.
In Nairobi, I was offered two jobs – one with the East
African Standard edited by Kenneth Bolton. The other as Features Editor
at The Nation, edited by Joe Rodrigues and owned by the Aga Khan who lived in
France.
I found it hard to settle in (“capitalist”) Kenya after such a
long time being indoctrinated in (“socialist”) Tanzania.
How easy it is to re-train fanatics. One set of extreme beliefs in
exchange for another.
I remember prattling on to Kenyan whites about Franz Fanon, Che
Guevara and Chairman Mao.
But at The Nation, I met several people I really respected as writers, including my
former Chief Sub-Editor John Gardner,
Barbara Kimenye, Fibi Munene, Jim Glencross, Joe Khadi and a man who I have
stayed in contact with over the decades, Cyprian Fernandes.
The man we all liked so much and called “Skip” tells the story of
why he and I left The Nation very well. I will not repeat his understanding about what
happened in George Githii’s office one day after I decided to publish Skip’s
excellent analysis of the political scene in Canada.
But I will add the following:
In August 1972, Idi Amin’s appalling campaign against Asians in
Uganda started. He gave them 90 days to get out.
Amin was adored by so many black Kenyans and not only blacks. I
remember Barbara Kimenye telling me, after she met the Ugandan dictator, what a
wonderful man he was with “such long artistic fingers.”
I wanted to say – artistic fingers when not around the necks of
terrified Asians but I didn’t.
Then maybe she was pulling my “socialist” leg.
What I really needed in those days was for someone to pull both my
legs out of the San Chique.
During a visit to Nairobi by the Aga Khan’s right-hand man,
Michael Curtis, I asked for an interview and told him that there was no money
for the features department so the paper relied on agencies from outside Africa
to tell readers what was going on inside Africa.
He shut me up and told me to get on with my job and not complain.
He also told me there would be no more critical features in the
paper about Idi Amin until all the Aga Khan’s Ismaili followers were out of
Uganda and settled in other parts of the world, mostly Canada.
Then came Skip’s article followed by first my departure from the
paper, then his.
I went to London where my second son, Matthew, was born in 1973
and worked for Jim Bailey’s Drum during Britain’s three- day
week.
Bailey said in Nairobi that I’d travel the continent as a roving
features writer.
I ended up in a cold, damp, miserable Victorian office over a post
office in Fleet Street editing semi-literate copy from West Africa by
candlelight because of the three-day week that year while Bailey waltzed around
London telling his upper-class friends that Drum was so successful
because he had, in his words, “removed the hand of whitey.”
To make matters worse, I was appointed the magazine’s Aunt Dolly
and had to interview cover girls, a lot of them were hookers from Soho posing
as innocent young fresh-faced African girls for the cover of Drum.
In February 1974, I flew away again, back to Zambia where I’d
married in 1967 and where I sadly divorced in 1976.
For two years, I was Business Editor of the Times of
Zambia and correspondent for the BBCs Focus on Africa programme edited
by Israel Wamala and the Financial Times.
But all that’s another story.
In 1976 I worked in South Africa for The Star and Financial
Mail and in September 1977 crossed Kipling’s great grey-green greasy
Limpopo River to cover the end of the war there for first the Rhodesian news
agency IANA and then Time magazine.
I had married a fellow journalist, Jane, in March 1978 and we
planned to return to Europe soon after Rhodesia turned into Zimbabwe in April
1980.
But things changed and we stayed on.
I finally left Robert Mugabe’s ill-fated country in October
1996, re-basing first in Scotland for three years, then London and finally in
Kent, England’s garden county.
I wrote a book about my fascist childhood in 1998 and
enjoyed what Andy Warhol said we’d all have one day – fifteen minutes of fame.
It was my story about being brought up as a child and then teenage
Mosley fanatic.
A week after my 17th birthday, I spoke at Trafalgar Square and
fully supported Mosley's policy which he labelled Europe a Nation / Africa the Empire.
After the war, Mosley stopped his campaign against Jews and switched
to attacking the British Government for allowing tens of thousands of people
from the Caribbean to enter Britain.
My book told the story about how Oswald Mosley used race hate as a
way of furthering his cause while protecting himself and his family, thanks to
well -paid clever lawyers.
His working-class followers - people like my own parents and
almost everyone I grew up with - were thrown to the wolves and had to somehow
start all over again while Mosley and his wife lived in The Temple of Glory
outside Paris.
At the end of their lives, both Oswald and Diana Mosley said
that they were never anti-Semites.
It was their followers who hated Jews.
A strange reversal of the Führerprinzip.
When it was published, my book was praised by most British critics
and reviewers with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan
Williams, suggesting it should be widely read by young people to help prevent a
return to the race hate of the 1930s and the years after World War Two.
The famous British columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said in an
article headlined “Racism and the truth about the Ugandan Asians" (The
Independent August 5, 2002) that in 1972 some of the old people in the
country where she was born were unable to talk about the humiliation they went
through.
She quoted Paul Theroux who was in Uganda in 1967 and who wrote –
“I believe the Asians to be the most-lied about race in Africa; the reactions
of most Africans and Europeans in East Africa to the Asian presence are
flagrantly racist.”
She paid me a warm compliment while promoting me to a position I
never held -” Trevor Grundy, the white editor of the Kenyan newspaper The
Nation, was also well known for his
support of Asians in the face of some hideous black and white prejudices.”
I don’t recall doing much to help Asians or Africans. Both did a
lot to help me.
But I do recall a famous song by the Beach Boys that makes me
think of the roller coaster years I had in Africa; a song called God
only knows what I’d be without you.
Grundy’s bestseller took the UK by storm
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