Bill Saidi died in his footsteps
I cannot think of a journalist whose work I have followed more faithfully than Saidi. I kept and read and reread cuttings of his Sunday Opinion column and, even as an infant, staggered approvingly through his Last Word column.
BILL Saidi was a proud and free spirit. He maintained a bare-knuckle approach to journalism, paid occasionally for questioning power, but became a presence wherever he turned. The grayscale mugshot of an elderly scribe with a Stalinsque moustache arched above a stubborn smile had its day from Zimpapers to Modus Publications, ANZ and AMH.
His stylish columns occupied real estate across mainline stables as he pompously hopped from newsroom to newsroom.
Saidi had ceded his formative potency to age, having devoted 60 years of his life to journalism, but he was still writing at the time of his death in January this year. He died in his footsteps.
Yet, even as he was widely admired, hated and respected as a journalist in Zimbabwe, his literary strivings quietly sailed beneath the radar. His multiple identities seem to have denied him a place among the country’s literary notables.
Born in Zimbabwe, of Malawian stock, Saidi became a name in Zambia. In 2017, with regional integration and diversity topical in politics and culture, this would have been a proud resume.
But it did not exactly turn out that way at several points in his career. He bitterly recalls in his memoirs being ineligible for a Rhodesian passport, blacklisted from Malawi and kicked out of Zambia.
“Why doesn’t the person who wrote this go back to his country?” he remembers President Kenneth Kaunda ejecting him out of Zambia.
“Bill Saidi is not a Zimbabwean writer,” he remembers Shimmer Chinodya keeping a cool remove.
As such, the author of “The Hanging”, “Return of the Innocent”, “Day of the Baboons”, “Gwebede’s Wars”, “The Old Bricks Lives” and “The Brothers of Chatima Road” managed this dubious identity as a Zimbabwean journalist and a Zambian writer.
He first found literary renown and led writers’ groups and toured countries as a Zambian citizen.
His reception as a creative writer is said to be wider in Zambia than it is back home.
As we begin to question colonial maps and talk Pan-African visa-free passports, all three countries, once wedged together by Britain’s unbalanced Federation project, can easily claim this eloquent and pompous writer as their own.
I missed these titles and will only catch up now, thanks to a dusty stack at the local library.
The first Saidi book I read was his last, “A Sort of Life in Zimbabwe”, published by Misa-Zimbabwe in 2011.
Saidi puts out an omnibus of riveting anecdotes gleaned from six decades in the journalistic trenches. The colour is not in literary embellishments, but in the wealth of experience.
The elder scribe looks back on his career from the African Daily News to The Standard. The opening chapters revolve around his experience in Zambia where he served at the highest level, with the present and later the disaffection of President Kaunda.
War was raging in the sub-region. Newly independent Zambia’s support for the liberation movements earned it the hostility of white racist governments in Rhodesia, South Africa and Portugal.
Kaunda was willing to pay the cost of fraternity, but this strained his country economically and State actors from the white south carried out overt operations in Zambia.
After Kwame Nkrumah’s example, Kaunda thought of multi-party democracy as a second front he could dispense with and bend down to micro-manage the press in consensus with corporates like Tiny Rowland’s Lonrho.
Saidi characteristically managed to make himself a smoke in Kaunda’s nostrils with his insistent autonomy, more so because the latter would not countenance rebellion from the citizen of a country he was helping.
By the final fallout, he had managed to make himself an anathema from the land of his ancestors, Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi. He suspects that he first earned Kaunda’s disliking when he brought to his high table a woman who worked in a nightclub.
Kaunda had a missionary upbringing and despaired at Saidi’s failure to “write about Humanism” in the newspapers. Saidi’s eloquence was also elicited by nationalists who alternately accused him of being partial to the other movement.
His taste for misadventure started when he was a rookie reporter for African Parade back home in Zimbabwe. At one point, he was making headway with an undercover assignment at a Mbare nightclub which featured Miss South Africa as one of its fairer attractions.
His cover was blown and he breezed out of sight, but not before a stone had hit the back of his head. Saidi has a way of jumbling up these events, perhaps in his aversion of the narrative fallacy, but remarkably he always remembers where he started.
An exception that proves the rule is the Tadyanemhandu story which Saidi mentions without elaboration.
This was an article in which The Daily News alleged a fictional politically motivated beheading.
Saidi’s nominees for the journalistic and political Hall of Fame are people who favourably interacted with him.
He gloats over Richard Nixon and Kaunda’s political misfortunes apparently because they denied him crucial interviews which would have taken his name to the stars.
Back home, post-1980, Saidi credits himself with exciting leaders’ apprehension with his notorious Zambian record:
“After independence in 1980, I had met Joshua Nkomo at an official reception in Harare. Shaking my hand with his right hand, Nkomo had wagged his left forefinger at me: ‘Wena, Saidi, Wena!’”
“For me, one sign that I had achieved ‘ balance’ in my relationship with the two parties (pre-1987) was my first meeting with Simon Muzenda after independence. It was again at an official Government reception. Wagging his forefinger at me too, he too said: ‘Iwe Saidi iwe!”
Hopefully, the elder scribe is not targeting a low blow at a national icon.
When Saidi was finding his feet in the newsroom during the mid-century political awakening, a colleague told him he would be lost if he did not hear the story of the struggle from elder statesman Charles Mzingeli.
In those twilight years of the Federation, Mzingeli, a pioneering trade unionist, was ceding the turf to the more radical business of liberation politics, but his part was indispensable in mapping the origins of democracy.
He later lamented to Nathan Shamhuyarira and Lawrence Vambe, his editors at The African Daily News, that not enough had been written to canonise the democratic patriarch for posterity.
Saidi’s own record as a grand patriarch of Zimbabwean journalism is well documented. His narcissistic tendency never failed readers a weekly drizzle of personal details. What may be profitably learnt of him is readily available.
“For a man who was not a scholar of particularly outstanding erudition, Saidi’s word play was truly remarkable.
He was a veritable wordsmith, a linguistic giant whose outstanding skill could have been exploited in refining the writing skills of young journalists.
“Sadly, this did not happen and Zimbabwe’s journalism remained the poorer for this gross oversight,” veteran jour- nalist Geoff Nyarota eulogises his peer in The (Malawi) Nation.
Today’s journalists may want to protest armchair bashing by veterans tangled in linotypal drudgery, but the preponderance of NGO-speak and untested ear candy in the press may be a case for looking to the rock from which they were hewn.
I am not sure about Nyarota’s assessment of his contemporary’s erudition. “A Sort of Life in Journalism”, not so much about Saidi’s ideas as it is about his experiences, falls short as a guide.
Inas faras the ideas inform the experiences, Saidi feverishly espouses democracy and press freedom.
The simplicity of his convictions does not hint lack of erudition. Truth is old but not outdated, and banal but not cheap. Sometimes the best way to pursue and affirm it is not eloquence but experience.
He appears on the weaker side of an exchange with President Robert Mugabe when he argues that there is nothing wrong with foreigners bankrolling the media, to which the Head of State retorts: “But they would want to control everything.”
Saidi does not elaborate his idea, but seems erroneously blind to the piper’s paymaster backstage.
I cannot think of a journalist whose work I have followed more faithfully than Saidi. I kept and read and reread cuttings of his Sunday Opinion column and, even as an infant, staggered approvingly through his Last Word column.
Few weeks into my journalism freshmanship at the National University of Science and Technology, I went to NewsDay offices, then at Forestry Commission, bought around 40kg of old Standard newspapers and extracted the Saidi logs into a neat file.
The modest output of successively spiked opinions I had penned by sembreak owed him their elegant diction and pompous way of proceeding.
Saidi was buried in Kitwe, Zambia, but in Zimbabwe he lives on as a challenge of what is possible.
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