“Grandpa, what sort of future are you people going to leave for us?”
A former employer of mine, Jim Bailey, proprietor of DRUM (Ghana edition), the magazine I was privileged to edit from 1960 to 1965, once told me, “When we hold ourselves up to our children, let it be as a warning, not as an example.”
Now, I was used to Bailey’s often eccentric witticisms. He had collected them from Christ Church College, Oxford University; various versions of the “Officers’ Mess” of the UK’s Royal Air Force (during the Second World War and after the war), the plush boardrooms of several enormously rich South African companies whose shares had been bequeathed to him by his father, a financier called Sir Abe Bailey.
Drum was started in 1951 as “African Drum” by Jim Bailey and a former South African test cricketer and author called Bob Crisp. But after a few months, Jim Bailey took it over completely.
He then invited to South Africa a fellow Oxonian, Anthony Sampson (later to achieve fame in Britain as the author of such best-selling books as The Anatomy of Britain Today) to become the paper’s editor.
Under Anthony Sampson, Drum achieved a huge circulation among the educated section of the African population of South Africa, who has hitherto been largely ignored by the white press of apartheid South Africa. Bailey was inspired by the success of South African Drum to branch out into other African countries. He established editions in Central and East Africa, as well as Nigeria and Ghana.
All the editions thrived and Bailey loved to travel to all parts of Africa, using as his excuse the need to ensure that those in charge of the local editions were not blowing his money away without producing good copy.
He, of course, used his travels to sample the thinking – and (particularly) the wit – of Africans (especially, what they thought their contribution should be to the then raging decolonisation) process in Africa. How would they act after taking political power from his fellow whites?
Bailey loved a good argument, and encouraged even people like myself and his Nigerian editor, Nelson Ottah, (as if we needed encouragement!) to say “Go to hell” to him, while taking his shilling. All he expected of us was to produce, each month, such scintillating stories as would send our fellow countrymen running into the streets, chasing after boy vendors yelling “African Drum!….African Drum!”
(If you are interested, Google: Cameron Duodu + Jim Bailey) you will come across some stories that will make you laugh all day.)
Bailey’s background made him the source of a polyglot store of political and social fables, most of which he made up himself.
I mean who would be having a cold beer with you in Accra, Lagos or Harare, and out of the blue, bowl you a bouncer like: “Do you know that Ebony Magazine (a black publication in the US) sent two black Americans to Africa to drive Drum out, and they thought it would be an easy task, because they were black like the Africans, whereas Drum was owned by white people? Well, they nearly got eaten in a country (that is a neighbour of yours!) and where corpulence of the American sort was greatly admired!” And Bailey would throw his head back and roar with a laughter not unlike the howling of a jackal. If people turned to find out where that noise was coming from, it didn’t stop him!
So I wasn’t too surprised when he made his quip about people holding themselves up as an example to their children. But I did wonder: had he held himself up to his children and come to regret doing that? If so, how had that happened? Or had he followed his own father’s footsteps only to become a cropper? Unfortunately, he always had “a plane to catch” and one hardly ever had a chance to explore his life by questioning him in any depth. He sadly passed in 2000.
The reason why I have raised the issue of people holding themselves up to their offspring is that to me, it isn’t so much about my children that I dread as some of my grandchildren. The other day, one of them told me that as he was searching for information on YouTube about how to build a rocket engine that could fly into space, he accidentally came across pictures on the screen, showing a “river in Ghana that had a chocolate-coloured surface”.
TO BE CONTINUED
BY CAMERON DUODU
