Black Africa’s best newspaperman lives among the Surrey hills of suburban London and commutes to the city every day. He says he will never go back to editing the biggest newspaper in Africa’s biggest state.
Though he had been in the office of the Daily Times until past midnight seeing Black Africa’s biggest daily to bed, Peter Enahoro was up at dawn on the morning of 29 July, 1966. These early hours, before the heat and humidity and the dust and the noise of Lagos began to jangle the nerves, were the best time for writing his books and he always tried to get a few hundred words down before going back to the office.
The withdrawal of the Mirror Group and the Thomson Organisation from West Africa left the newspapers of Nigeria and Ghana in the hands of African journalists and African managers. But even before the last Britishers had left, control of the press had been taken over by the politicians, civilian or military.
French-speaking Africa is as different from English-speaking Africa as France is from Britain. Independence has had practically no effect in bridging this gulf.
They used to call West Africa’s humid coastal colonies The White Man’s Grave, and there was some truth in the description. But across the other side of the Continent, East Africa was the White Man’s seventh heaven.
Even though Britain’s three former possessions in East Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, have as independent states gone their very different ways, they are still to a large extent one entity, ‘East Africa’. This oneness will probably disappear if the East African Community which controls many of the three nations’ public services breaks up.
So often in Africa, it is the men with the guns who change the course of history. In Portuguese Africa, there was an ironic twist to this pattern. Though in both Moçambique and Angola there were plenty of Black men with guns trying to rewrite history, it was White soldiers thousands of miles away in Lisbon who on the morning of 25 April 1974 were to set in train events which not only ended four hundred years of Portugal’s African Empire but were to bring the threat of an international confrontation to White Africa.
Two things prevent South Africa from being a total police state: the judiciary, which though obliged to administer laws made by racial fanatics, generally does so fairly and often humanely, and the press, which though also bound by the ruthless philosophy of apartheid, still has more freedom than newspapers in any other part of the Continent.
On paper the odds against John Spicer making any mark—even surviving—in Swaziland were poor. Here was a White man from a White racist state moving into a key position in a Black state which had just achieved independence.
If a large measure of the blame for the historical restraints of the press in Black Africa is to be laid at the door of the colonising powers—then handed over by them and further refined by the independent governments of Africa—then it should follow that the two states which avoided rule from Europe would have developed healthier newspaper industries.
Africa is the most multi-lingual area of the world if population is measured against languages. Nobody knows how many languages there are. A fairly small area of Cameroon, for example, contains more than one hundred languages, almost all of them unwritten. There are plenty of other similar examples. It is remarkable that history did not impose language patterns on Africa more specifically than it did.
There are as many definitions of freedom inside Africa—of the press and everything else—as there are out of it. It is just that in Africa they talk about it a lot more.
