Who said journalism is ‘fun’? 

I began my journalistic career at a Christian-oriented magazine called New Nation, where I learnt pretty quickly that my idea of ‘Christianity’ was not necessarily that of all the people I saw in church on Sundays.

Once, we were visited by a well-known Missionary, who asked me what story I’d been working on.

So I boastfully narrated to him, how I’d travelled to a village in “the Northern Territories” and “unmasked” a fetish priest who had been taking people’s money and “prophesying” about their future. We entitled the story “How I Deceived The Tongo Fetish” and I was very proud of it because it was my first foray into the world of bylined, first-person narrative.

“How did you ‘deceive’ the fetish?” the missionary asked.

I told the priest that I had my eye on a girl but that she didn’t want to have anything to do with me,” I replied. “So I asked the priest what to do to win her love, and he gave me a series of rituals to practise, which (he said) would win her for me. But it was all a ruse. No such girl existed! ” 

But instead of commending me, the missionary pointed out to me that I had committed a “sin” by lying to the priest about a girl who did not exist!

What? I was puzzled. I had proved that the fetish priest was full of empty prophecies, hadn’t I? Didn’t that tell people that there was only one true religion in the world, namely, Christianity and that fetish priests were charlatans who should be avoided like the plague?

In fact, the missionary was about to go on and pry into my reasons for inventing the story about a girl who did not exist!?  The words “secret lust” passed his lips, but fortunately for me, the telephone rang at that point and I shouted into it, “I shall be there in five minutes”, made an excuse and left. 

So one couldn’t fib to expose fetishism, eh?  Great lesson about fishing for compliments from a missionary, what?

From New Nation,I went to work in the news section of the Ghana Broadcasting Service (as it was then). The work atmosphere there was as different from what was to be found at a monthly magazine as ink from milk. At the magazine, one suggested a story at the monthly editorial conference, and if it was accepted, one had about two weeks to turn it in. 

At the Ghana Broadcasting Service, every minute was its own deadline. Stories came from the teleprinter at their own rate, to be subbed immediately (with the words counted) and included in the pile of stories waiting to be broadcast in the next news bulletin. 

The news bulletin had to be quite ready at least half an hour before its broadcast time, because the news readers had to have time to rehearse the items before they read them on air. Worst of all was that if you subbed a story – be it from the printer or from a reporter – it had to be absolutely accurate.

Dates, and the names of people and places, were the most troublesome to get right. If you broadcast a wrong name or date, someone would ring up the station almost immediately to complain. And yet we hated to make corrections on the air. So sub-editors had to anticipate corrections and call people they thought would be knowledgeable about particular subjects, to check whether the station had got everything right.      

To illustrate how important it was to get things right, we one day got a telephone call on our direct line, shortly after the one o’clock news had been broadcast.

The editor on duty, who took the call, was called Ben Sackey – an experienced hack, who had been once the news editor of the Daily Graphic.

The voice on the other end of the telephone said, “Good afternoon. This is the Prime Minister.” (This was, at the time, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first Prime Minister!   

Ben Sackey thought it was a prankster, but so well-trained was he that he nevertheless asked the voice: “What can I do for you, please?”

The voice replied, “You said in your news broadcast that the place we are going to build the dam is called Konsommo. It isn’t Konsommo! It is Akosombo!” And he spelled it out: “A-K-O-S-O-M-B-O”.

Ben Sackey carefully wrote it down and thanked the voice at the other end of the telephone. As a parting shot, he said, “I don’t believe I’ve been talking to my Prime Minister!” 

The man at the other end chuckled and said, “It doesn’t matter whether you believe I am the Prime Minister or not. Just check the name and see whether you’ve got it right. Ben Sackey called the Volta River Commission and confirmed the spelling we’d been given by the voice on the phone. From then on, we instinctively checked facts with institutions, whenever we were to broadcast anything about them.  

Needless to say, this practice made us very authoritative, and when someone said, “I heard it on the radio”, everyone knew it was gospel truth. With such a background, I don’t play with my facts, and I was extremely annoyed, recently, when someone who was subbing a column of mine sent an email saying that a “factual error” had been found in my copy. 

I was doubly annoyed when I found that the sub-editor had misspelt my first name as “Cameroon”! What? Someone who couldn’t correctly spell the name of the paper’s own columnist was accusing me  of having committed a “factual error?”  

TO BE CONTINUED!

By Cameron Duodu