Edward Said has remarked of VS Naipaul, this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, that while Naipaul is considered ‘an important witness to the disintegration and hypocrisy of the Third World, in the post-colonial world he’s a marked man as a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him”. If this is true then George Aligiah, former BBC Africa correspondent and author of A Passage to Africa, is Naipaul’s philosophical counterpoint.
A Passage to Africa (Little, Brown) is the story of Aligiah’s relationship with the continent. It began in 1961 at the age of five when his Tamil family migrated from Ceylon to freshly independent Ghana to start a new life. Many Tamils found employment as replacement civil servants for the outgoing colonials under Kwame Nkrumah and this childhood memoir part of the book is colourful and fascinating, recalling all the wonder of a migrant child who finds himself in the heady optimistic milieu of the first African country to ostensibly throw off its shackles.
But Aligiah’s boyhood was interrupted by another African first, a military coup, and he was sent to boarding school in England. As an adult Aligiah joined the BBC and travelled extensively in Africa, being based in Johannesburg between 1994 and 1998.
The style of the book is conversational and candid. There is something unBritish about Aligiah’s work, an intermittent, uncontrived slipping of the mask. Perhaps because of his spread roots he never descends into the ‘spiritually wounded” category of writing popular among other African émigrés now entrenched in the British media world. There is none of the arch bluster and showy contrition that mars similarly positioned writers like Rhodesian-born Peter Godwin.
The chapters about working for the BBC offer a racy glimpse into this high-adrenaline lifestyle — a world where ‘snappers” (photographers) compete against reporters doing ‘stand-ups”, where the race is always on to get the pictures and the story ahead of the others.
Aligiah finds himself in Liberia interviewing child generals, in Somalia desperate for a rescue plane, in Zaire being regaled with a theatrical tank show staged by a wobbly Mobutu Sese Seko. The revelations of the journalist’s stratagems, the uneasy codependence of the press and the aid agencies, the reality of the bribing and cajoling and schmoozing to get access to information, and the sheer fatiguing routine of feeding the press machine are gripping.
Aligiah is optimistic about Africa. Despite everything he’s seen, he still believes that Africa has a fair shot at getting it right, on her own terms. He says of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni ‘self-reliance became his guiding principal”. Of Nelson Mandela ‘he represented moral certainty and personal dignity”. To white South Africans peering out from the bars of their ‘suburban siege architecture” and taking umbrage at societal transformation he points out that they have entirely escaped the kind of coercion he has seen first-hand elsewhere.
Aligiah recently returned to South Africa for a few days to promote the book. I ask him how he became involved in his particular brand of journalism. ‘In the first place it was my history,” he says. ‘I watched my family being hounded out of the land of their birth. My work now is the result of all the things that I picked up along the way.”
Does the BBC see him as having a more personally involved take on events here than British-born correspondents? ‘They didn’t send me here because of that. Lots of people write about Africa. But I do have the ability to write as an insider. I can never ignore the fact that I know this continent in a different way from the others.
‘People always want to put you in a box. There’s an obsession with working out where you come from, what country you are a citizen of. I’m interested in diversity. The whole point of multiculturalism is not to ghettoise. In London we live in Hackney because we wanted our children to grow up among many cultures.’
He recounts how Mandela told a group of international reporters: ‘You are privileged people. You can observe from near but judge from afar.” But for Aligiah this kind of disassociation was never possible. He cannot aspire to notions of objectivity. ‘It’s a con because there is no middle ground between victim and perpetrator. Mine is a journalism of advocacy. It’s a more difficult form of journalism when you try to distinguish right and wrong.”
In the book Aligiah details the most striking example of this ambivalence. In the camps at Goma in Zaire in 1994 he meets and employs a Hutu ‘translator”, a local person on whose assistance much of the journalists’ effectiveness depends. A close relationship develops between the two men.
Returning to Kigali a year later Aligiah finds the translator in prison, accused of genocide. Convinced of his innocence, Aligiah tries to intervene. But the elderly distraught witness who recounts how the translator offered his own Tutsi wife to the militia, is equally convincing. Questioned about this now, he frowns: ‘I still don’t know the truth. The whole experience made me realise that certainty is a very frail thing.”
Given his wide experience of covering independence transitions in other African nations, I ask him how he thinks we are doing. ‘South Africa faced two tasks — consolidating first as a country and then consolidating economically. This has not yet been achieved. You have to be self-reliant. The whole of Africa needs to perceive this. There is growing impatience with Africa. Donors don’t want to keep dishing out money. In the Cold War Africa mattered because it was part of the jigsaw. But now if it was off the map, economically no one would notice. There is outside interest to invest in Africa but no one is going to break their necks to invest if there is no stability.”
One of his final exhortations in the book is that ‘Africa’s time will come again”. I ask him whether he will ever come back and base himself on the continent permanently. He reflects thoughtfully before shaking his head. ‘I doubt that will happen.”
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