Some of the best days of my life were during national service. At the end of my tour of duty, which I served in Ncojane, I had to get a life. Full of dreams fuelled by post teenage testosterone, I had to find a footing.
First, I needed a job. I always fancied myself nimble with the pen. Though school compositions are a world removed from real writing. I never thought for a moment that I would suffer any embarrassment in the big league. During my time at senior school I had won a few essay titles.
I then proceeded to nail the national short story contest where I beat grown-ups, and in the course of doing so got my picture in the newspaper for the first time. I received a cheque which for a fourteen year old seemed like a small fortune. So, just like Misir, the character in VS Naipaul’s classic novel, A House for Mr Biswas, who was paid a cent a line by the Trinidad Sentinel to file stories, I thought, indeed I would become a journalist and earn a living by my pen.
I remember my mother asking me at junior school what I wanted to do for a career. I responded that I wanted to be a journalist. I suppose as someone reared on a sizeable diet of South African pulp magazines and comic books in Phikwe where I spent my formative years, the glamour of journalism held me in thrall. Popular titles like Drum, Pace and True Love were staple read at home. These publications captivated me from an early age.
True Love was my favourite because of a model called Millicent Mseleku who featured a lot in the fashion pages. Alongside her was some hot girl selling Lux bath soap. For a time I was torn between the two.
Finally I settled for the Lux girl. Men of my generation who flicked those pages will remember the palpitations induced by Marcia Turner. She was our first romantic crush. In our memories from days yonder we all remember Marcia Turner as our first girl friend. We are now in middle age, most of us married with children and facing challenges, but as we reflect on life, preparing to die, we still remember Marcia Turner because she was the girl who made us dream impossible dreams. Those magazines got me smitten with the written word. I liked Drum because of its pictorial content and anti-apartheid slant.
Pace magazine, for me was about my team Orlando Pirates and our talisman, one Jomo Sono, who was immortalized in a catchy ditty for his dribbling prowess by the singer John Moriri. Pace was also about the acerbic columnist known as High Voltage Vusi.
Frankly I had little patience for Bona magazine whose main feature was a social scene spread to which village types sent in snaps of themselves in ridiculous poses. My pick of comic books included She, the heroine in knee length boots who used to beat up the bad guys and bring order to the world. She had a male equivalent featured in another comic book, rippling with muscle and who went by the name of Samson and was a mean dispenser of justice.
At times, I would read Tessa comics, but she was white and I couldn’t quite get her. Kid Colt, all resplendent in shimmering white cowboy gear, and a white dude himself, was the fastest gun in the west, roaming the badlands. There was a series for Apache, the Indian warrior and his battles with interlopers bent on seizing his ancestral lands.
Delightful as they were, the comics were an aside and somewhat infantile. My main consumption was black magazines. Hence my desire to be a writer. Years later I would momentarily shift my career ambitions and want to be a fighter pilot because I assumed all the boys flying Strikemaster jets got the nice girls. While awaiting a response from the BDF, I one day strolled into the Francistown office of a paper called Newslink Africa.
I told Sekgophi Tshite, affably known as Captain Flint, like the character from Treasure Island, that I wanted to write for his paper. A wannabe bon vivant, as editor he wanted to know my genre of interest. Never having written for a grown up newspaper but eager to see my by-line in lights I confidently fired back that I could write anything he asked me to. Right on the spot I was assigned to cover a football match that weekend; hardly the stuff of celebrity journalism to which I aspired.
My first by-line gave me an incredible high. When in ’91 I arrived in the big city for varsity I was established in the Newslink Africa newsroom. Mentored by pros like Douglas Tsiako, Eddie Kulhmann, Nicholas Sebolao, juniors in the mould of Grace Mosinyi, now with Barclays Bank, Kopano Rammekwa now with SABC Television, Rutang Moses, now a big shot in the diamond industry and me, the baby of the lot, were allowed to live out our fantasies of being journalists. There was also the man from Nigeria, Ernie Okeke, whom Douglas cheekily called Okonkwo as in the tragic hero of Things Fall Apart. Of the generation that nurtured me at Botswana’s first colour paper, none still write. Some have departed to the raucous press club in the sky. Ostracized, others had to find work in South Africa when our beloved paper was exposed as a front for South African apartheid intelligence.
But they paid well, those Boers, and even as a retained freelancer who came in twice a week from the lecture hall, my then flame, together with my posse of mates could not complain about not being pampered and feted. On a thousand bucks per month back then, the good times were killing me. I earned much more than the one cent a line Misir got from the Trinidad Sentinel. It was too good to last though.
Newslink Africa was exposed by Mmegi newspaper and the collapse left us traumatized. On the other side of town, the news was met with unbridled glee by the rival print fraternity. Besides the intelligence aspect of which I doubt any local staffer was privy to, jealousy and envy played a large part in the sorry manner in which Newslink Africa journalists were subsequently treated. Some of our colleagues could not contain their relish that we were now bums thrown out in the street.
They had been resentful all along because our paper printed in colour and compared to many of them who wore battered shoes, faded clothing and ate at government functions, our pay wages on the other hand brought us tears of joy. We had fallen and many a celebratory jig on our graves was had by all. I would continue eating in the student mess, sleeping on campus and going thirsty at the pub like all other students who had no jobs. But no newspaper was willing to give a job to the neediest journalists who were out of work, with families and bills to take care off.
It was sad. Many were run out of town. That was then.
Now we celebrate Charlie; whose bones were interred in Jo’burg a fortnight ago. Ream upon ream of newsprint has been lavished in tribute. He was a man who gave so much joy every time we turned a page to feast on one of his masterpieces.
I never knew Charlie personally, but as an aspiring journo, imagining my name in lights, penning award winning pieces, he was an icon in his role as editor of the Botswana Guardian, which I read at boarding school, and the man who might just give me a job to fulfill my dreams the day I threw off my uniform. The Charlie connection is poignant because as a black South African writer, he was the personification of all those magazines which I had been reading as a kid and who knows, working under him, he may have regaled me with stories of having met Millicent and Marcia in flesh.
What more he even had a column Selhrac Elagom during his Guardian tenure. Charlie’s stay in Botswana was relatively short-lived, about a year or so, and by ‘87 before I completed school he was gone. All this was before I walked into Captain Flint’s office. For the past two weeks, in which many good words have been said in his memory, I seldom recall during my entire love affair with South African black journalism, anyone being eulogized as much as Charlie. Not even the crusty grandees from the Drum generation, Doc Bikitsha and Obed Musi who were themselves quite wicked in the humour stakes. Not even High Voltage Vusi of Pace fame who shocked us by killing himself all those years ago received so much acclaim in death.
All those who have written about Charlie remember him as a raconteur and joker. My abiding recollection of Charlie’s offering appeared in his Flipside column in The Sowetan. Whenever I shoot the breeze with my mates, I never tire of narrating to them one of his best pieces I ever read. When I sent my mate a message informing him of the bereavement, he wanted to know who Charlie was. I was aghast; who does not know Charlie?
Lord help all Africans who don’t read.
This particular entry is my party piece whenever we go camping in Khutse; where on a Saturday afternoon of male bonding, devouring the innards of a freshly slaughtered goat, we also enjoy the devil’s waters far from the city’s madding crowd.
Charlie was lamenting the culture of excessive drinking in the townships of his youth. In his inimitable prose he told the story of how he went to school with one boy who was fond of the sauce. Such was the levels of indulgence that one day the headmaster summoned the boy’s father, equally fond of booze, for a chat. Dutifully, dad ambled to school for the summit, and true to form, he arrived well oiled.
The boy was called into the office, with both father and son in dizzyingly high spirits. Instead of the father administering a thrashing as was expected of any responsible parent, right in front of the school head, he scolded his son for drinking on an empty stomach and how on previous occasions he had advised him to eat something before drinking. The headmaster was flummoxed. Father and son were clearly beyond redemption. That was Charlie; his was a brand of humour that had its setting in the real world. Like all good humourists, Charlie was a keen observer of people and their idiosyncrasies and what he saw he put to paper so that we could all have some fun.
For those who enjoyed black journalism of the old school, we have been left bereft by Charlie’s passing. Irreverent as ever, someone known to him says he once wryly observed that the capital of all Tswana speakers should be J’oburg because there are more of them in that city than in the entire territory of Botswana. That was Charlie with an offbeat take on all matters.
In the award winning documentary, When We Were Kings, the writer, Norman Mailer, describes the legendary boxer and joker, Mohammed Ali, as ‘strange, curious, gregarious, engaging and sometimes cruel’. As I write this, for the umpteenth time, I am watching that documentary set to some sizzling funk sounds of James Brown. Am thinking to myself, next to Ali, has there been a joker as ‘curious, gregarious and engaging’ as Charlie!
