A brilliant, poignant review by an eye-witness to contemporary African
History. But also (probably out of neccesity to keep it small) an
incomplete one. I'd pay top dollar for Mr Duodu's thoughts on what went
wrong with the post-colonial Africa. How come so much promise ended in so
much pain.

Madiba Saidy
Vancouver, Canada.

> BBC WORLD SERVICE
> MY CENTURY
>
> CAMERON DUODU gives an account of his life as an
> African journalist
> witnessing some of the greatest events in Africa
> this century:
>
> MY CENTURY by CAMERON DUODU
>
> When I started my journalistic career as a cub
> reporter on the Christian
> magazine, New Nation, in the then British colony of
> the Gold Coast, in
> September 1956, little did I know that my career was
> going to enable me to
> be an eye-witness to some of the most
> earth-shattering moments on the
> African continent in this century, and to meet some
> of the leading actors in
> the politics of the 20th century.. Less than six
> months after I had left my
> village, Asiakwa, where there was neither
> electricity nor pipe-borne water,
> to live in Accra, I was sitting in an
> air-conditioned bus, with the best of
> Fleet Street, covering the celebrations that marked
> Ghana's emergence as the
> first British colony south of the Sahara to attain
> its independence. Foreign
> correspondents whose stories I had been reading from
> such hot spots as
> Hungary and Suez, became flesh and blood to whom I
> could chat: Rene McColl
> of the Daily Express, for instance, or the BBC's
> Lionel Fleming.
>
> We were all bussed to the Polo Club in Accra, for
> that midnight speech by
> Ghana's first Prime Minister, Dr Kwame Nkrumah. As
> Nkrumah got up to speak,
> I was so close that I heard him tell one of his
> Ministers, Krobo Edusei,
> that his speech in Parliament had made him hoarse
> and that Krobo Edusei
> should shout the opening slogans for him. Edusei
> needed no prompting.
> "CHOOOOOOOBOI!" he shouted. And the loudest
> CHOOOOOOBOI! I have ever heard
> in my life was the response -- from the throats of
> about half a million
> people.
>
> Nkrumah told us "The independence of Ghana is
> meaningless unless it is
> linked up with the total liberation of the whole
> African continent." And he
> set to work to try and achieve this. In 1958 he
> called two conferences: the
> Conference of Independent African States and the
> All-African People's
> Conference. By this time I was working for the news
> division of the Ghana
> Broadcasting System, and I was able to see face to
> face, famous leaders like
> Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt; Emperor Haile Selassie
> of Ethiopia; and William
> Tubman of Liberia.
>
> I was present at the All-African People's Conference
> when the charismatic
> Tom Mboya of Kenya, made his prophetic demand: quote
> "The imperialists
> carved up Africa for themselves in the SCRAMBLE for
> Africa in 1884. Well, we
> are telling them today that the time has come for
> them to SCRAM out of
> Africa!" And "Scram out of Africa" the imperialists
> did.
>
> By this time, Ghana was playing a leading role in
> international affairs and
> invitations were coming to us fast and thick to
> visit foreign countries. In
> 1958, I was invited to the Soviet Union and China.
> On my way, I stopped over
> in Cairo and saw the pyramids and the treasures in
> Cairo Museum, for the
> first time. In Russia, I met the most famous Soviet
> leader after Joseph
> Stalin, the then First Secretary of the Soviet
> Communist Party, Mr Nikita
> Khrushchev. I remember Mr Khrushchev as a very
> jovial man, who looked at a
> group of us African writers surrounding him and
> said, "Me, Papa Khrushchev!"
> We all laughed. I was able to recognise his peasant
> origins at first hand -
> his small, round eyes had bits of smut under them.
>
> In China, too, I met the famous Prime Minister, Mr
> Chou -En-Lai. He told us
> that the Chinese thought in thousands of years, not
> in a few decades or
> centuries. He thought that if the world was
> destroyed by thermo-nuclear war,
> China would be the only country to survive -- a few
> thousand of its huge
> population would remain alive and they would plant
> trees over thousands of
> years and become a viable population again! I went
> to a banquet in Peking
> where we were served a lavish 37 dishes! With rice
> wine also in abundance, I
> practically fell asleep at the table!
>
>  But independence for Africa wasn't all a bed of
> roses. In 1960, the Congo's
> independence was accompanied by a revolt of the
> military, ending in total
> chaos. By this time, I had become editor of the
> Ghana edition of the
> Pan-African magazine, "Drum" and I went to the Congo
> to report on the United
> Nations peace-keeping operation there. Next, I went
> to Kenya, to interview
> the most famous man on the continent at the time,
> Jomo Kenyatta, who had
> moved from prison, where he had been sent, as the
> leader of the Mau Mau
> rebellion, to become Kenya's leader. I next visited
> the Central African
> Federation, to interview the Prime Minister of the
> Federation, Sir Roy
> Welensky. We had a fierce argument over racism, and
> President Nkrumah' s top
> civil servant, Mr Michael Dei-Annang, who read the
> interview, called me to
> say  it was like trying to "draw water out of a
> stone." I also travelled to
> Blantyre, Malawi, to meet Dr Hastings Banda, another
> man who had moved from
> a colonial prison straight to high office.
>
> I've met a great number of other shakers and makers:
> including Malcom X,
> Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon, Robert Mugabe, Sam
> Nujoma, Amilcar Cabral,
> Sekou Toure, Mobutu Seseseko, Ibrahim Babangida,
> Moshood Abiola, Olusegun
> Obasanjo. But my crowning moment was when I went to
> South Africa in May 1994
> to witness the transfer of power from the white
> minority government to
> President Nelson Mandela's government.
>
> South Africa has always been special to me: I had
> first encountered the
> South African problem while writing radio news for
> the Ghana Broadcasting
> System, and I had always resented the fact that
> while we Blackmen in Ghana
> had been allowed to manage - or mismanage - our own
> affairs, the black
> majority in South Africa were kept like slaves in
> their own country by the
> white minority regime. I was the one who told the
> Ghanaian radio audience
> about the shootings in Sharpeville and Langa in
> March 1960. Throughout the
> years, I kept writing radio commentaries about the
> racist situation in South
> African. I was even sacked as Editor of Ghana's
> leading newspaper, the Daily
> Graphic, because I used the paper to attack Ghana's
> Prime Minister of the
> time, Dr Kofi Busia, for seeking to establish
> "dialogue" with the apartheid
> regime of South Africa.
>
> But although I believed strongly in the cause of the
> Black people of South
> Africa, never in all my dreams had I expected to be
> able actually ever to
> stand on the soil of South Africa. And then the
> prize came: I was not only
> present, but only a few feet away from the podium,
> when Nelson Mandela,
> surrounded by the white bosses of South Africa's
> armed forces, swore the
> oath and took over the reins of government from the
> white ruler, F.W. De
> Klerk! YES!
>
> I wept openly when Nkosi Sikelele Africa was sung,
> and I wept again,
> unashamedly, as I saw the South African Air Force,
> which had been built up
> to carry nuclear weapons to attack countries like
> mine, "the enemy to the
> north," fly past our heads - in salute to almost
> every ruler on the African
> continent, all gathered in the Union Buildings in
> Pretoria to witness the
> historic event! I had met Mr Mandela shortly after
> his release from prison,
> and I was to have a historic interview with him,
> over the hanging of the
> Nigerian writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, in 1995, in which he
> departed from the
> African diplomatic norm and described Abacha as a
> "barbaric" ruler who had
> carried out a "kangaroo trial". He even told me,
> "Abacha is sitting on a
> bomb and I am going to explode it from underneath
> him."
>
> Yes -- mine has been quite a century.

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