For Simon Estelita and all who have not read this story before: With a prayer, always, for your kindness!
SEATED: Victor D’Souza, Sunil Sarkar, Fr. Hannan, Albino Vaz, Musa Abbas Gulamali.
STANDING: Justino Dourado, Bosco Baptista, Jerome Diaz, Julius D’Costa, Danny Abreu,
John Joel Mogera, Tony Reggie D’Sousa, Winston Verbi, Bosco Cordeiro.
MISSING: Donald Gonsalves & Stephen Fernandes.
SEATED: Victor D’Souza, Sunil Sarkar, Fr. Hannan, Albino Vaz, Musa Abbas Gulamali.
STANDING: Justino Dourado, Bosco Baptista, Jerome Diaz, Julius D’Costa, Danny Abreu,
John Joel Mogera, Tony Reggie D’Sousa, Winston Verbi, Bosco Cordeiro.
MISSING: Donald Gonsalves & Stephen Fernandes.
1950 – 1974 Yesterday in Paradise
By Cyprian Fernandes
Balboa Press 2016. (Available at Amazon.com.)
Pages 219 with 18 pages of photographs
Price $ 17.99
Cyprian Fernandes’ 1950 – 1974 Yesterday in Paradise (Balboa Press 2016) is his story set among essays on immediate post-independence (1963) political, sports and media personalities. Reading the book, I found myself deeply involved. Perhaps it may be because I lived the era. Perhaps, because I felt the connection with his story. He was in class with me at St Teresa’s Boys School in Nairobi.
SULTAN SOMJEE: I started to write a review, and it turned out to be a conversation with a friend. I wanted to talk to Skippy, as I knew him in school, and say: “Hey, Skippy! I didn’t know you were arrested and held prisoner during one of those random scoops in Eastleigh that targeted the Mau Mau.” That was the 1950s, when there was an armed rebellion against the British in Kenya. That’s around the time when Cyprian’s memoir begins with tragic poverty in the family. The six siblings were without food and with no shelter over their heads. The mother grabbed whatever menial and manual jobs came her way in the poor Asian and Somali mixed neighbourhood of Eastleigh. The tenacious strength of a mother, Rosa Maria Fernandes, held the family together, and they survived.
1950 – 1974 Yesterday in Paradise is a memoir in part, and in part it pays tribute to some admirable politicians, sportsmen and journalists of Kenya’s immediate post-independence history. It ends around 1974 when the author had to flee his birthland because his life was in danger. The front cover can be deceptive because it has the iconic pictures of Kenya’s wildlife. Perhaps it’s that nostalgia of the paradise lost that was yesterday that the pictures reflect for the book has nothing idyllic in it. It’s a hard story of an investigative journalist to reach the truth in the newly independent African state ruled by a corrupt despot and his cronies. In the early 1960s, young Cyprian would chase the truth behind the rumours and hints that came to him about missing public funds. He would attempt to expose them and would have some miraculous escapes. All this in the midst of several assassinations of politicians who opposed Kenyatta’s misrule and the huge amassing of illegible wealth and land grab by the political elite, their families and their close circle of clansmen and friends. That was what The Truth and Reconciliation Commission would find out fifty years later and The Nation would report in 2013. That was the birth of Kenya today – third on the Corruption Index, a clique of millionaires and the majority living in abject poverty.
At thirteen, Cyprian left school because his integrity was
questioned, and he refused the punishment for stealing altar wine that he did
not. We were in the same class and I had presumed or most likely heard that
Cyprian was expelled because of disobedience. A cardinal sin in the mission
school at the time. Only Skippy had that stubbornness, courage and a mindset
that defied Father Hannon, the principal of St Teresa’s Boys, whom we thought
was formidable and feared the very sight of him. It was that willpower of the
stubborn 12-year-old who entered adult life lying that he was twenty-two. He
never gave up and went on to be one of the most admirable investigative
journalists that The Nation (1963-1974) has ever produced and
one of the most principled ones in the profession that Kenya has ever seen.
{The parish organised a month's whist drive to raise
money. Fr. Hannon would select a group of boys to provide the required labour
for the event. He would also nominate one boy to be in charge of gathering the
tables and chairs, set up the barbecue for the night that came in the form of a
very large circle of stones, creating a ring of fire.
That night, as we were putting away the furniture at the
end of the night, my great buddy (the late, wonderful Gaby) handed me a glass
of something to drink. No sooner had I lifted it to my mouth that I realised it
was altar wine and I screamed and shouted that the wine be returned to its
carafe. Once we had finished all the tasks, we all headed home pretty late.
Next day was a minor heaven, the start of the school holidays. We went biking,
fish, fruiting and this and that with the Pangani Chini gang.
When the next term started, we all returned fresh and
sort of jubilant. Minutes before class started one of the teachers told me that
Fr Hannan wanted to see me in his office. As I headed there, I was convinced he
was going to congratulate me for a great job I had done in setting up the whist
drive. Instead, all hell broke loose. He accused me of robbing his wine. I
replied that I might have stolen his wine (which I did not) but to rob I would
have had to use force which I did not. “Who are you to debate the use of the
English language with a man whose knowledge is like an ocean compared with
yours which is less than a drop.
With that he got up, twirled his famous leather strap and
screamed: “Drop your pants!” I said NO, my father never asked me to drop my
pants! “Band down”. NO I will not.” With
that chased me as I ran around the sofa in room. The sofa had obviously
received a heavy hammering in the passed. And it received even more because
Hannan just could not get at me and he collapsed in his chare and screamed: ‘Get
Out!.
I went back to class, but I did not tell my classmates
anything about the rock around the sofa incident. Half-time came and we all
headed for our games of marbles, football or whatever else took our fancy. I
never actually played anything because I was called to Hannan’s office. When I
got there, I found my mother sitting in a chair, several veils draped around
her head and she had a rosary in her hand and was praying quietly. In a few
minutes Hannan and I began our race around the sofa. Again, he did not lay
finger on me but slumped in his chair.
I screamed: I did not steal your wine and I am leaving
school today.
He screamed back: “No you are not” and he raised the cain
again. This time my mother got up and pleaded with him (in Swahili because she
did not know any English): “Father if Cyprian says he is leaving school, he
will do exactly do that.”
Hannan appeared to have calmed down a bit: “I will give
you one week to get a job. If you don’t, you will come back to school. No one
is going employ a 12-year-old.”
What he did not know was that during the holidays, I had
met an Englishman at one of my favourite fishing spots. I had watched him for
30 minutes and he had not caught not even a tadpole. So I tried to give him one
of my lures and he tried his best in his worst Swahili to shoo me off. I asked
him to come with and showed him my catch hidden in the reeds.
“Try this lure,” I told him. He accepted gratefully.” But
he was not catching anything until I told him my secret. “ Cast it into the
little waterfall and all the water to take it past the reeds.” The next minute
he was in a great frenzy, screaming for this and that. I told him not to panic
and gentle bring the catch on a tiny just yards away. No sooner than he had
landed the huge bass, he was screaming at me to bring out whatever was in his
pocket. I did. I brought a roll of one hundred shilling notes. “It is yours,”
he said. “Keep it.” But that is too much money, I said and he suggested that
took whatever I needed. When I got home that day I gave my mother a lot of
money. Before he left the fishing he gave me his card and told me if I ever
needed any help I should come and see him at the National and Grindlays Bank.
Back to school. The next day, before school began, I went
to Kajani’s shop, bought one Clipper cigarette and when I reached the school
gate, I lit the cigarette and walked through the school. At end that little
path, Hannan and I crossed paths, each nodding as we went our separate ways.
I caught the bus to the city and went to my fisherman
banker, who gave me a job working the accounting machines with a whole bevvy of
white girls.
Reading on, I would exclaim, “Wow! What audacity!”
Cyprian had the nerve to report on the hypocrisy and corruption of the
politicians at the time of the rise of African nationalism when the politicians
were so full of hot-headed arrogance. The President and his cabinet bloated
with newly acquired power pampered by US and European praise, and lavished with
favours to keep the communists at bay from their corporate investments and army
bases. At the time of ‘one party democracy’ there was a clamp down on the freedom
of expression that the young nation was just beginning to voice. Later, within
a short time we saw how the writers, artists, journalists and generally the
intellectuals were detained or had to flee into exile. It was the time when a
culture of fear and silence developed as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o put it. At
one point Cyprian was even discussed in the parliament and was nearly deported
as was the rule then when Asian Africans disagreed with the politicians. He
writes that it was Njoroge Mungai, one of the core GEMA stalwarts in its
making, who defended him. Every politician had Cyprian Fernandes’ name on his
lips, perhaps with a hidden hope of using the young Asian reporter at Kenya’s
most read newspaper against his opponent. But Cyprian would not be corrupted by
any of the big fish. At times he was called ‘an imperialist stooge’ on his face
by the high the ranking politicians. This was ironic for they were, in fact,
the real stooges of the western imperialism. His interrogation by the Minister
of Information, Zachary Onyoka, is revealing (Chapter 10 Interrogation). One
day, he was called to the MP’s office together with Jim Glencross, The
Sunday Nation editor, and threatened with: “I can have you killed in
five minutes! ... you pundas, don’t you know that I have the power to cancel
Fernandes’ citizenship and deport him to Britain?” This episode epitomizes not
only the behaviour of ministers working for a dictatorship but also the threat
that the Asian Africans constantly lived under and curtailing of the freedom of
the media.
There are some illuminating details about Pio Gama Pinto’s
life in the book. How he worked underground supplying arms to the Mau Mau,
perhaps in cohort with the Indian High Commissioner Apa Pant whose residence in
Muthaiga was raided by the British police and investigators in spite of the
diplomatic immunity of the ambassadors. Pio had a brilliant mind of a
strategist and he helped to lay plans for the movement. One critical question
that the author asks that has been left unsolved and no doubt he was pursuing
as a journalist: Who was supporting the Mau Mau? Where were they getting
financial and material help from? He suspected some Indians in Kenya and the
Indian government but he could not verify this. I read in a recent article by
Sharad Rao, Chairman of the Kenya Judges and Magistrates
Vetting Board, how Ghandian pacifist Ambu Bhai Patel and his wife Lila
Ben sent medical supplies to the Mau Mau. Once Ambu Bhai told me how he and his
wife hid the urban guerrillas in the water tanks at their home in Eastleigh.
Were they coming to get the funds and supplies? He would not tell me. These
stories can only be verified now by children of the Indian businessmen and
others, especially in the Central Province so we can learn about the intricate
network of supply lines from Nairobi to Mt Kenya and the Aberdares. This
remains a mystery till today.
1950 – 1974 Yesterday in Paradise brilliantly
re-creates the tense atmosphere of the post-independence years in terms of both
the vibrancy of nationalism and the looting spree, both of which led to the
making of an instant Kenyan bourgeoisie. If one lived through it one would feel
it throbbing in Cyprian’s words. However, what we used to hear on the evening
news on the just arrived TV in our living rooms that often centred on
anti-Asian, anti-Somali or Shifta, and anti-communist harangues was different
from what was discussed at The Nation offices on Victoria
Street. At least by a handful of calibre journalists. The book fills in
personal details about the life of Pio Gama Pinto and Joe Rodrigues, the
controversial editor of The Nation that even their spouses,
and I would say the major half of the staff at The Nation, did not
know or care about. As colleagues do on Friday evenings, Cyprian chatted over
beer with the two at Lobster Pot on Victoria Street that was ten minutes’ walk
away from The Nation. Cyprian’s writing draws empathy and
friendship close to admiration for the two patriots of Kenya not because they
were Goans like he is, but because as journalists they sought the truth and had
their hearts on their professions and for the country. That meant they found
themselves working against the growing misrule, corruption and injustice not to
mention the attempted control of the media by Kenyatta’s government. The writer
obviously carried the same values and professionalism.
The author pays compliments to Joseph Murumbi the
onetime Vice President of Kenya with ‘socialist leanings’. He does the same to
Njioroge Mungai, the powerful Minister of Defence and a close ally of Kenyatta
and his Kiambu group. They were so close to him that he could walk into their
offices. He regrets Joseph Murumbi and Noroje Mungai stepping down from
politics as loss to Kenya, and for Kenyans not appreciating what they stood
for, what they had achieved and what more they could have achieved had they continued
to serve the nation. The two parliamentarians were obviously aware of the
assassinations, the massive land grabbing, corruption and greed of the Kenyatta
family, his cronies and the brutality of the police state in the making.
However, they did not stand up against it or join the opposition as other brave
KANU politician did on principle.
There are insights that Cyprian gives about The
Nation in 1960s and early 1970s. It was the newspaper that began
around the independence time with the birth of the country
itself. It was the newspaper that was formative in guiding the mind
of the nation as it came to hold its own reins. In the youthful and vivacious
media house, there were small but telling incidents of racism, corruption and
harassment of junior staff – once Cyprian had to write a report 25 times, ‘a
punishment’ that he has not forgotten. In the end his original first draft was
published. The criticisms of some personalities are politely rendered that goes
with the tone of the book and then quickly passed over to positive aspects of
the same personalities. For example, he writes that Gerard Loughran in Birth
of a Nation: The Story of a Newspaper in Kenya forgot to mention ‘all
the small people who made The Nation what it was.’ Then, in
the next paragraph he compliments ‘Gerry’s brilliance as a journalist in
writing the book’.
Cyprian Fernandes was probably the first one to see the
Tanzanian soldiers digging trenches at the Uganda border in preparation for an
invasion of Uganda. He was the first journalist to witness the massacres that
had just begun in Uganda and photograph bodies floating in the rivers that came
to represent Idi Amin’s regime. He took risks all single handed while the
international media journalist would not step there without a backing of a
battery of support. He was leap frogged to Idi Amin’s presence and
made to sit before him. He listened to ‘his lies’ for two and a half hours! The
dictator wanted his story as the saviour of Uganda to be reported in The
Nation. When Cyprian, having narrowly escaped, filed the breaking news
report that he had already arranged to be on the front page, his boss Boaz
Omori, unfortunately tore the negatives destroying the evidence that he had
collected risking his life. There is a clear indication of Kenya’s hand in the
overthrow of Milton Obote and planting of Idi Amin with the aid of the British
and US. It also speaks about the government’s interference with the
media. It’s such firsthand witness accounts of an investigative journalist that
makes 1954-1974 Yesterday in Paradise a valuable
read and record of history.
1954-1974 Yesterday in Paradise is
material for an intriguing movie based on the life of an investigative Kenyan
journalist at The Nation, the newspaper that wrenched the
tightly held power of journalism from the hands of the Europeans and put it
into the hands of Asians and Africans. In fact, in the process, The
Nation developed the Kenyan brand of journalism while learning to
manipulate and negotiate with the state’s meddling of the news and getting
through what needs to be said to the wanainchi sooner or later. It’s
that story of a sixteen year boy who lied to get the job at The Nation saying
he was twenty two. The boy that John Bierman, ‘the fearless founding editor
of The Nation called, “the biggest conman I have ever seen”
and gave him the job. Perhaps, the editor-in-chief knew that the conman had the
mettle to make the journalist Kenya needed at that crucial period of the birth
of the nation and The Nation newspapers would be ‘no one’s
mouthpiece’.
Cyprian touches on a whole lot of photographers and
journalists at the Nation – Phillip Ochieng he admired for his intellect and
speed in finishing The Times and Daily Mail crosswords;
Michael Perry the proof reader ‘who changed my life’; Hilary Ng’weno who was
‘the best journalist at the time without doubt’, and many others with whom he
had beers or simply chatted in the corridors.
He pays tribute to Goan Olympians, and briefly mentions the
Goan civil society working for the welfare of the poor, the church and
education. It’s contributions have been enormous but little known. Perhaps,
that may be because the institutions that they created or helped to strengthen
and expand bear the names of saints and come under the Church. Thus there are
no visible signs or memories of this important part of the East African Goan
history. An exception to this is perhaps, the Dr Ribeiro Goan School in Nairobi
that bears both the founder’s and community’s name. The loss of
their community’s name attached to these organizations means the loss of the
names of individuals who contributed and maintained the institutions that today
serve the poor especially the students like at St Teresa’s. In all, it’s loss
of ethnic Goan citizen role models and what they had achieved over almost two
hundred years in the segregated, racialized and caste ridden Asian society of
East Africa working in general as office wage earners. The status they were
proud of, and what Cyprian hints at, the Empire’s pet children and Christians
looking down over other Asians.
Had Rufina Fernandes, Cyprian’s wife to whom the book is
dedicated, not pleaded with him to leave the country when it was intimated to
her that he had ‘a bullet to his name’, I doubt Skippy would have left Kenya.
He was on hot pursuit of stories and truth about the growing corruption,
killings and political misdeeds of the government that he felt his professional
duty to tell. His good and powerful politician friends did not come to help
him. Perhaps, they no longer found use for the reporter to fund their own
popularity in the eyes of the public or use him in their inter-ethnic power
games.
Sultan Somjee.
Sultan Somjee was the Head of Ethnography, National Museums
of Kenya 1994-2000 and is the Founder Community Peace Museums of Kenya. Author
of the very successful and brilliant Bead Bai.
Skip: Alex Figueredo was the only victim who went public and sought redress from the Pope and the Catholic Church and got nothing other a few words. Sad, very sad!
After that, I did see an ailing Father Hannan twice. On both occasions, he asked our mutual friend Martin Rego to convince me to see him. The first time I met him, he invited me to a feast of Kenyan beers. I just had a few sips and made my escape, but not before he went down on his knees and apologised. The next time was when he was on his deathbed. Before that, he met with a group of ex-St Teresa's Boys School and told them that he was suffering from a peculiar disease. He did not spell it out.
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