When I was your age I was chasing stories, not pussy!’
In time the Vietnam vet was posted to Istanbul. His replacement was a woman who had previously been a Roman Catholic nun. She kept me on but asked me to work together with a stringer nicknamed ‘Grumbling Bones’. A silver-bearded ex-Reuters correspondent, Grumbling Bones never spoke of his past. There was also a photographer who sometimes worked for Time. Jo Louw was a South African from Kimberley. He had started out in the sixties photographing the jazz scene in Soweto, then escaped apartheid to arrive in America at the time of the civil rights movement. Years later he had washed up in Nairobi. Jo didn’t make a lot of money and I asked him how he lived. ‘My wife has a chicken farm,’ he said with a twinkle in his sad eyes. One day over beers we were talking about our favourite news pictures of history and I brought up the photo of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. In the picture, an aide kneels over the dying man on a motel balcony while others point to from where the shot was fired. It’s no masterpiece, but I said whoever took it was in the right place at the right time. ‘That’s my picture,’ Jo said. ‘You’re bullshitting me,’ I said. No, he went on, he was standing next to King that day in Memphis, Tennessee, 4 April 1968. And here we were, I thought in awe, having a beer in Kenya two decades later.
I used to get roaring drunk with Grumbling Bones, who was an aficionado of Spanish culture and also an Irish republican. When well oiled he held forth about rizo negro, went on to bullfighting and finished the evening by singing Irish freedom songs. Late one night he said to me, ‘What the fuck are you wasting time for on a magazine like this? Go and do something that’s fun, full of passion, don’t piss your life away on a weekly fucking magazine.’
The Bunker was in a ghastly concrete tower that rose above the exhaust and slum-fire smog of downtown Nairobi. The lift didn’t have a thirteenth floor so the one I exited claimed to be the fourteenth. Up on the wall next to the door hung a plaque of the agency’s ticker-tape logo and a portrait of the founder, the Baron Julius Reuter. The Bunker became my base for the better part of my twenties. Entering for the first time I observed a scene of bedlam. Two women sat in front of big typewriters, humming hymns, reciting the Gospels with loud amens.
Passing deeper into the room, I found reporters with their feet up on desks, swearing and groaning over the din of chattering machines. Curtains of green text on screens shimmered in the gloom. A stench of chemicals and greasy food hung in the air. A large black-and-white photo of a policeman whipping a crowd of children hung on the wall. A man sat in the corner twiddling the knob on a big radio, monitoring broadcasts in African vernaculars.
A photographer shambled out of his darkroom. His name was Hos Maina and he had a fearful bruise on his forehead, slurred his speech and fumbled as he handled his camera or tried to roll a print onto the barrel transmitter. He looked like a drunkard. ‘Car crash,’ I was later told. ‘Brain damage.’ I advanced on through to the far corner of the office to a glass cubicle. Inside, a big map of the region hung on the wall. It was an expanse of green and sandy yellow, most of it quite empty. The pink lines of frontiers were arbitrarily straight, drawn by men from all over Europe who had met a century before to carve up the continent with pencils and rulers. On the desk was a photo of a woman and two girls and also a cartoon of the type sold in kiosks in the city’s slums. In grotesque detail, the drawing depicted what was described in the caption:
IF A DOG BITES A MAN, THATS NOT NEWS
BUT IF A MAN BITES A DOG THATS NEWS
Behind the desk, with his feet up on it, was a man shouting into a telephone. He was handsome and swarthy, with a shaggy black haircut in the style of a seventies footballer, large sensuous lips and great arms and shoulders that he kept shrugging in crab-like gestures. His name was Jonathan.
He was the Welsh son of a wartime Spitfire hero and economics professor, George Clayton. After the London School of Economics, he started out on a local paper writing about cats stuck up trees and when he finally secured his post at Reuters nothing had ever made him so happy.
Jonathan was an excellent journalist and my mentor in the trade. I first met him at a Nairobi nightclub called Lips. Three sheets to the wind, he had his arms out wide and seemed to be buying the entire bar a beer. I asked for his card. A few days later we met at the Delamere Terrace. It was at the end of the dry season, when jacarandas scatter their purple blossoms along University Way. ‘Drinking in excess doesn’t make you sexier,’ said a notice above the bar. ‘Or richer,’ I read, ‘or more sophisticated.’ Friday-night drinkers milled around: Kenya Cowboys, businessmen, hacks, whores and tourists in pith helmets. ‘Just drunk,’ the notice concluded.
‘But look laddy, the story in this place…’ Jonathan said to me, squinting cross-eyed over a bottle of Tusker. He shrugged and made curious circular gestures with his hands. ‘…Africa!’ he roared. ‘It’s wide open for a beach bum like you. You’re young! You’re hungry!’
He stopped, looked around in surprise. Almost as if he was pinning a medal to my chest, then and there, he awarded me a string.
‘Dream job, my lad. What you want to do is get out there, to where there’s nothing but warm beer and smelly pussy, and bring us back some real stories.’
He painted my destiny for me. What he wanted was to have me cover the huge zones on the African map that were under rebel control. There was no way of doing it except to be there for long periods. Remote and pulverized by war, these areas were almost entirely cut off from the outside world, and lacked twentieth-century gizmos like phones or telexes. To travel in to those places was to enter a topsy-turvy universe, where the warriors, who could be Maoists by day or naked aboriginals who followed witch doctors and prophets by night, were armed to the teeth with Cold War weaponry.
‘See, I can’t lose a staffer on full pay for more than a few days. Out of the question, unreasonable. I need all the help I’ve got in the office…All hands on deck…No, no, no,’ Jonathan tutted. He pointed at me like Lord Kitchener.
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