Cameron Duodu
Because of the vicissitudes of journalistic life, I have lost many of my press cuttings and other memorabilia collected, during my seven decades of writing for the media.
But I was reading through my messages on WhatsApp the other day when I saw that a friend of mine, Mr Kofi Adu Labi, (who has published over TEN books!) had posted an item he said someone had given to him at a church get-together at Frafra (a suburb of Accra?).
It was an item from Drum Magazine, published in January 1962. It was still readable and the large picture that illustrated it clearly showed recognizable figures.
I was amazed! For there in the picture, bending irreverently and staring at the medals on his chest was YOURS TRULY! The central figure was no less a person than probably the most powerful man on earth at the time, the Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Nikita Khrushchev!
I joined the Ghana Broadcasting System (as it was then) in 1957 as a News Reporter, but creative writing was my forte. So I joined the Ghana Association of Writers, led by two very intelligent and personable ladies – Efua Sutherland and Cecile McHardy.
Unknown to me, my efforts had pleased them, and when the fledgling Ministry of Foreign Affairs was asked to send some Ghanaian writers to a Conference of the Afro-Asian Writers Association that was about to take place in Tashkent, USSR, in September-October 1958, they elected me to be one of the delegates to accompany the Secretary, Cecile McHardy. The other delegate was Efua Sutherland.
I experienced an unusual political coincidence in Cairo, our transit stop. I put on my kente and took a walk to a park near my hotel. I was amazed to find people coming up to crowd around me from everywhere to feel the texture of the kente. Did I enjoy being fussed over like that? You bet I did!
The rub was that when I returned to my Hotel, I found that – I couldn’t gain entrance to it! Its entrance had been blocked off because a man called Ferhat Abbas was being installed as prime minister of the Algerian Provisional Government in exile!
It was thrilling to see part of the glorious Algerian struggle for independence against France with my own eyes. Hutbitv was a bit galling to realize that had I not stood out, wearing my kente, I might not have been allowed back into the hotel where all my belongings were! More learning on the job: cultural identity was useful, right?
On the plane to Cairo from Moscow, we stopped in Rome for a while, and at a newsagent, I saw huge headlines reporting that Boris Pasternak, a Russian writer, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I, of course, knew nothing about the furor Pasternak had caused with the publication of his novel, Dr Zhivago, in the West, and when I got to Moscow, I thought I'd get a world scoop by obtaining an exclusive interview with Pasternak.
So I pestered my hosts at the Soviet Writers’ Union to arrange an interview for me with Pasternak! I didn't know, of course, that they regarded Pasternak as a sellout and renegade, who was being used by the West to wage a propaganda war against the Soviet Union.
The interview didn’t happen, but it was when I left the Soviet Union that I discovered the dirty mud of politics that I had unintentionally stepped into!
One day, the Russians (I thought) made up for my Pasternak disappointment by announcing that they were taking us to a reception in the Kremlin, the headquarters of the Soviet Government. So out came my kente again, though the temperature was around freezing point.
I wore a pullover beneath the cloth and also wrapped a scarf tightly around my neck. Ghanaians would have laughed at me for overdressing “like a corpse”. But the cold made me care less about that!
We were in the Kremlin reception hall sipping our drinks and eating little biscuits when the whole place suddenly fell silent. Next, everyone broke
into applause. The Soviet leader, Mr Nikita Khrushchev, had made an entrance.
At that time, “Mr. K” (as he was known to the world press) was perhaps the most newsworthy and vivacious politician on the international scene.
Since his sensational (but secret) denunciation of Josef Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the world press had been eating out of his hand. Would he go the whole hog and “liberalize” political activity in the USSR? One could hardly tune in to a foreign news broadcast without hearing Mr K’s name.
As I made my way towards the circle that had formed around him, a member of Khrushchev’s staff who had a good sense of what was picturesque, propelled kente-clad me gently towards Mr K. This was simultaneously being done to other African delegates as well, and very soon, Mr K was surrounded almost entirely by a group of African delegates.
Among the Africans were the Senegalese writer and film-maker, Sembene Ousman and two Angolan poets, Mario de Andrade and Viriato da Cruz,
I was so close to Mr K that I coyly bent down to admire the Order of Lenin on his chest, as a TASS Soviet News Agency photographer flashed his camera bulb.
That picture of me bending over Mr. K surrounded by African writers was widely circulated. It even made it to the back page of The Times [of London], which, at that time, was one of the most respected newspapers in England.
The director of the Ghana Information Services Department, the late Jimmy Moxon, generously saved a copy of the paper for me and called me to his office when I returned to Ghana and generously called me to his office to give it to me when I got back to Ghana.
Mr. K told the African writers who surrounded him that he could see in us the youthful vigor and strength that existed in the whole of Africa and that it convinced him that Africa would rise to play an important role in world affairs. He pledged Soviet support for Africa’s independence.
This was very nice to hear from a powerful world leader like Mr K, and I cabled it to Radio Ghana, which broadcast parts of it in a news bulletin. They didn’t mention my name, and only attributed the story to “a Radio Ghana Correspondent”.
Nevertheless, I was pleased as punch when I came back, as my work-mates allowed me to enjoy bragging rights and dubbed me the first “Foreign Correspondent” of Radio Ghana! Quoting Mr K directly in a Radio Ghana news bulletin? Yeah—that was the young me! I regarded it as my first “major scoop”.
){kind=link}