Random Musings (1)
Hazards of Writing a Column
“Bolles was an American journalist in the state of Arizona. He was on to something big against the Mafiosi. The mafia put a price on his head, ordered his death … a bomb was planted under his car … he was blown to hell.”
I am taking a poetic licence to sound off. If the sound offends you, please don’t read this column. This paper offers a number of genteel sounds. As you know, I have been on holiday, and at the end of it feel in a mood to express my thoughts in the random fashion they strike me. Call the thoughts a fool’s tale, if you will, but I consider them the musings of a columnist in a no-nonsense mood. In fact, much of the babbling which has been appearing in the newspapers on the Nigerian press makes better the grade of tales told by fools. Take a look at a guy who calls himself Tex Alabi in his weekly column in the Sunday Herald. Tales have it that the column is the veil of old Remi Ilori whose contribution to the death of the Morning Post cannot now let him slow his face next to his column. He can’t even own up to his identity. Oh, he will say he prefers a pseudonym. This fellow ha s made it a habit to hide his false by-line from where he has done nothing but cast aspersions on other journalists. This is all this fellow does for a living as presidential aide for information – write trash against other journalists and take take the taxes paid by these journalists as due compensation for a job “well” done.
On Sunday, July 24, in the Herald, old man Ilori was full of ire against some journalists, clearly those of the Concord Group, for living decently. It is a wonder that a newspaper will allow such trash on a weekly basis. That, however, is the business of the Herald. Here’s warning Ilori, however, that if je persists in his idiocy, he is going to get hit without gloves. Ilori’s babbling is not the reason for my musing. Other articles more vile than his articles have appeared and to answer them will disallow in this column for ever the chance to discuss loftier matters. The abuses appear weekly in a number of other papaers. I consider much of the babbling healthy, babbling in the sense that the issues, or non-issues really, raised in most of them – stuff like Benzy journalists and Oduduwa Press and so on – don’t do credit to the evident achievement of sections of the Nigerian press. But I have found that the emptier the noise, the merrier the sound. Some one said somewhere that for as long as people keep babbling, they will not remember the bullet. I don’t subscribe to the nonsense about the pen being mightier than the bullet. I kow that the conventional wisdom calls it the sword. That is not really applicable in this day and age when people don’t have the gladiatorial patience to swing the sword. It is either the bullet or the bomb. And if you want to argue it, consider the fate of Bolles.
Bolles was an American journalist in the state of Arizona. He was on to something big against the mafilsi. The mafia didn’t like his dogged digging. He was warned, but did not desist in his reporting. His pen, as it were, was mightier than his breeches. The mafia put a orice on his head, ordered his death. Not realizing that a bomb had been plated under his car, he started it and, before he could hear the boom, he was blown to hell. That’s what his pen did to him, which was proved not to be mightier than the mafia’s bomb. And if you want to disprove that elementary thesis, try stopping a bullet with your chest, and see if you live to tell the tale. Against this background, you will see why a man can get angry at the pseudo-intellectuals who find the business. I am not talking of war correspondents who die at war fronts, as happened recently to two American journalists who were killed by landmines in South America. They, of course have become footnotes to the intractable intra and international crises in that part of the world. What I am talking about is the sort of danfer in which some journalists considered cantankerous, people like Bolles, could meet with “accidents.”
Oh, some of these pseudo-intellectuals, armchair analysits of journalism who can’t distinguish between a news report and a comment, will get up and say that this guy called Dele Giwa has begun to take himself too seriously. That was the sort of talk bandied about following my detention. Some people actually suffered the recklessness of saying then that Ray Ekpu and I reduced the detention to a fool’s tale. The objected to the description of the privations we suffered, arguing so illogically that prison conditions as a social issue was left untreated. That sort of talk leaves me exasperated. Without resorting to writing lectures, one has no other way to address such observations. What the fellows were talking against was obviously not the contents of those accounts, as much as the styles of the writers. Does one need to instruct them that nobody could have read Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment if all they did was to write essays about the times they discussed. Why couldn’t these fellows understand that newspaper writing and, indeed, other forms of writing don’t necessarily have to follow the composition approach, in which a piece of literature must follow a prescribed outline in terms of contents and form? What else should a piece of literature contain more than the story of what happened, leaving the reader to draw his conclusion. Anyway, that’s by the way.
These musings were sparked by a letter by a fellow from Abuja who described himself as a young and an avid reader of the columns in the Sunday Concord. The letter was sitting on my desk when I returned from vacation, and the contents of the letter threw me into a deeply reflective mood. I wish I could locate the letter now. However, the young man complained about what he described as the growing difficulties of understanding the language of my recent columns, especially the first three instalments of “A Clarion Call to Arms.” He wrote that he and his friends had to find Michael West, that being the name of the author of the simple dictionary used in primary and, perhaps, secondary schools. He didn’t say that the words were difficult, and I think that he alluded to the use of the dictionary to drive home his argument that I was getting a little didactic. His criticism must concern the expressions in the series in question. And of course I was shaken by his observations, which I considered reasoned. That sort of criticism could not be dismissed with a wave of the hand. Newspaper writing is not done for a group with more grey matters than the generally of the public. That’s why I was bothered, for I don’t subscribe to elitist writing in that the best literature that which most readers can understand so that they can give informed criticism of the issues or matters discussed.
It was in the process of considering the gentleman’s observations that these random musings, thoughts about journalists and those who abuse them, occurred to me. I realized in the course of the musing that the hazards of writing a column do not end with the physical danger in which the columnist is placed but in the effort to write clearly and pointedly such that all forms of readers will get the message. It is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the endeavour. When you are thinking of such reasoned criticism as offered by the writer from Abuja you must of course contemplate those who denigrate other writers, especially when such people are not known to have contributed in any constructive manner to the informed debate about the direction of this maligned country.
©Sunday Concord, July 31, 1983
(Pp.226-229)
