Colonial Twilight
John Tidey
An excerpt from John
Tidey’s Wet Behind the Ears in Nairobi, a Memoir.
Wet Behind the Ears in
Nairobi is the second of two brief memoirs by John Tidey, each published as a
monograph. The first was Newton and his Daughters (2013)
John Tidey is a
Melbourne journalist who has worked in Africa, China and the UK. He is the
author of biographies of Creighton Burns, Sir Andrew Fairley and Charles
Hastings Barton (with Ric Barton).
WHEN I looked into his
office a man with a teddy-boy haircut glanced up from his portable, kept
typing, and grunted: ‘What do you want?’
Me: ‘I was looking for
the Editor.”
Him: “I am the f…..g Editor.
What do you want?’
What I wanted was a
job in Nairobi for the next few months. A string of expletives later John
Bierman offered me one on the sub-editors’ table of the Daily Nation. My salary would be 100 pounds a month (2,000 East African shillings). The
whole recruitment process took about 10 minutes.
It was 1962. Those
were the days when there were jobs for itinerant English-speaking journalists
in East Africa, Rhodesia (as was) and South Africa. In fact, my first attempt
to get a job in Kenya had been a miserable failure. It happened at the offices of the long-established East African Standard where I sought
an interview with the editor. His secretary appeared a few minutes later to
advise: ‘Colonel (Kenneth) Bolton sends his compliments. He said to tell you
that he doesn’t hire blow-ins, but he wishes you well.’ Later I learnt that
most of the Colonel’s editorial staff were hired from respectable provincial
dailies in the UK on four-year contracts. Fortunately, my next call had been
across town to the Daily Nation, founded in 1960 and part of a newspaper group that
included the Sunday Nation and a Kiswahili daily, Taifa Leo. It was housed in a converted
bakery and formalities, as I soon discovered, were kept to a minimum. Staffing
arrangements at the new tabloid were radically different to those at the
restrained and broadsheet East African Standard. For a start, there was
John Bierman himself. In 1962 he was 33 years old, a former Royal Marine who
had been recruited from Fleet Street (London) to launch the Daily Nation. He was not the first
choice for the job. Originally it was offered to David English who accepted it
but then withdrew and was later the legendary Editor of the Daily Mail
in London from 1971-1992.
Bierman was once
described as having “a scraggy, lived-in face” and this came with a formidable
intellect and the aforementioned smutty mouth. The team included a couple of
Australians, two “white Kenyans”, former Kenya Police Officer, a South African,
two Scots (one of them a wild man once he had fuel on board) two or three regional
newspaper sub-editors from England and a number of African and Asian reporters
and photographers. Roger East, the Australian journalist killed in East Timor,
passed through briefly. Fifty-four years on I can still see many of them in my
mind’s eye: a memorable collection of newspapermen (and one- or two-women
including Margery McCrindle) drawn to unlikely place at a historic time.
My own interest in
Kenya had been sparked in my childhood by the stories of Jack Cusack, a family
friend who regularly travelled to East and Central Africa marketing Queensland
butter. So, in June 1962, with four years’ experience as a reporter, I sailed
from Brisbane, Australia, aboard the Roma for Singapore and Bombay. To my
surprise a picture I found (2015) shows me on the wharf in a suit and tie with
a farewell party of six: my parents, my sister Jill, Aunt Minna and two friends
of my mother, Mrs McCormack and Mrs Kenyon. My departure must have been a big
deal in our family than I appreciated at the time.
Most of the passengers
were Italian migrants taking the trip home. If there was a single unattached
young woman on the Roma, I did not find her. It took about a week to get to Singapore
where we berthed for two days before leaving for Bombay. That was the last
ocean voyage I ever took. My intention had been to take the British India Steam
Navigation Company (B.I.) service from India to East Africa. But after
appalling seasickness in the Bay of Bengal and some R&R in Bombay at the
Breach Candy Club, my crossing to Nairobi via Karachi and Aden was completed
more comfortably aboard an East African Airways Comet.
In the early 1960s,
the heart of Nairobi was quite an attractive and safe place: not much
high-rise, wide avenues, jacaranda and hibiscus everywhere; and all of this on
the edge of the central highlands, high
above sea level, close to the Equator and under vast blue skies. Mine are long
lost but there are excellent postcard shots of Nairobi in the 1960s on the
internet. A few days after I arrived, an
elephant wandered into town and sat on the roof of a parked Volkswagen. In
fact, there is a large game park on the fringe of the city (Nairobi National Park and Animal Orphanage). Nairobi had been founded at the end of
the 19th century and developed around the new railway line from
Mombasa to Lake Victoria (Kenya-Uganda Railway) and a train colloquially known
as The Lunatic Express.
By 1962 the city’s
population was about 250,000. The entire population of Kenya was 8 million,
compared to 50 million-plus today. Then were there were fewer than 60,000
Europeans in the country, principally settlers, administrators, businesspeople
and they referred to the colony as “Keenya” (it was changed later to Kenya
because Keenya sounded too much like an African swearword). It used to be said,
unkindly but with some truth that Kenya was for officers, Rhodesia for other
ranks.
Gerry Loughran who
first lived in Nairobi in the early 1960s has pointed out:
Kenya’s triangular society
was rigidly stratified with a tiny white governing class at the apex, Asian
traders in the middle and a vast majority of powerless Africans at the base.
In 1962 that was all
about to change.
Kenya had been a
British Protectorate from the 1890s and a Colony since 1920. It would pass
through the bloody Mau uprising of the 1950s at the end of which Uhuru
(freedom) was in sight for the African majority. The Nation group of newspapers in the country were up and running before independence
came in 1963. They were funded by Prince Karim, the Aga Khan, leader of the
estimated 15 million Shia Ismalia Muslims around the world including a large
community in Kenya.
The group was put
together by Michael Curtis (1920-2004) a substantial newspaper figure who had
previously edited the now-defunct News Chronicle in London. Curtis, a
World War II veteran who read Law at Cambridge, provided management and
editorial leadership for the Nation group and oversaw the
introduction of the first web-offset printing press outside the United States
(as well as the first computer-generated typesetting (as opposed to the archaic
lead typesetting, albeit both types of typesetting survived side-by-side for a
while until the computers were in complete control a couple of decades later).
By this time the main
newspaper in the colony, the East African Standard, was on the
wrong side of history. It had been founded as the Standard in 1902 and
in the turbulent 1950s and early 1960s strongly resisted African Nationalism. Right up to independence in Kenya in 1963 it carried the British
coat of arms on its masthead.
After leaving Kenya
John Tidey worked on the Africa Desk of United Press International in
London before returning to Australia in 1965. In 29 years at the Age newspaper,
Melbourne, he was a reporter, news executive, bureau manager in London and
finally a member of the newspaper’s senior management group. He has written
four books and a series of monographs since leaving the Age and still
lives in Melbourne.
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