Bill Saidi Was a Renaissance Man

Bill Saidi was a proud and free spirit. He maintained a bare-knuckle approach to journalism, paid occasionally for standing in the way of power but became a presence wherever he turned.

The black-and-white columnist mugshot with a Stalinist moustache arched above a stubborn smile had its day from Zimpapers to Modus Publications, ANZ and AMH.

His stylish op-eds occupied real estate across the main stables as he pompously hopped from newsroom to newsroom like a journalism equivalent of Moses Chunga.

Saidi had lost his formative vibe, having givem 60 years of his life to the fourth estate, but he was still writing at the time of his death in January 2017.

He died in his footsteps.

Yet, even as he was widely loved, hated and respected as a journalist in Zimbabwe, his literary strivings quietly sailed beneath the radar. His multiple identities seem to have denied him a place among the country’s literary notables.

Born in Zimbabwe of Malawian stock, Saidi became a name in Zambia. In 2017, with regional integration and diversity topical in politics and culture, this would have been a proud resume.

But it did not always turn out that way. He bitterly recalls in his memoir being ineligible for a Rhodesian passport, blacklisted from Malawi and kicked out of Zambia.

“Why doesn’t the person who wrote this article go back to his country?” he remembers President Kenneth Kaunda ejecting him out of Zambia in A Sort of Life in Journalism. “Bill Saidi is not a Zimbabwean writer,” he quotes a literature great in an H-Metro article.

And so the author of The Hanging, Return of the Innocent, Day of the Baboons, Gwebede’s Wars, The Old Bricks Lives and The Brothers of Chatima Road managed his dubious identity as a Zimbabwean journalist and a Zambian writer.

It was north of the Zambezi that Saidi led writers’ groups. He visited few countries to talk books with a Zambian passport. His name as an artist is said to be bigger across the border than it is here.

As we begin to question colonial maps and talk about visa-free Pan-African passports, all three countries, once married into the Queen’s wobbly Federation, can easily claim this gifted and pompous writer as their own.

I have not read any of the “Zambian” and will only catch up now thanks to a dusty row at the Waterfalls Library. The first Saidi book I read was his last, A Sort of Life in Journalism, published by Misa-Zimbabwe in 2011.

In this book, Saidi gleans one riveting anecdote after another from more than five decades in the trenches. The colour is not in literary embellishments but in the wealth of experience.

The elder looks back at his career from African Daily News to The Standard. The opening chapters revolve around his experience in Zambia where he served at the highest level, with the blessing and, later, the disaffection of President Kaunda.

War was on in the sub-region. Newly independent Zambia’s support for the liberation movements earned it the hostility of white racist governments in Rhodesia, South Africa and Portugal.

Kaunda was willing to pay the cost of brotherhood, before the eventual fallout with Zanu, but this strained his country economically. State actors from the white south carried on overt operations in Zambia.

After Kwame Nkrumah’s revolutionary dictatorship primer, Kaunda thought of multi-party democracy as a second war front he could dispense with and bend down to micro-manage the press in consensus with corporates like Tiny Rowland’s Lonrho.

Saidi characteristically managed to make himself a smoke in Kaunda’s nostrils with his insistent claim to freedom, more so because the latter would not countenance rebellion from the citizen of a country he was helping.

By the end of their comradeship, he had somehow also managed to make himself unwelcome in the country of his ancestors, Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi.

He suspects that he first earned Kaunda’s dislike when he brought to the new president’s high table a woman who did her hours at a nightclub. Now, Kaunda had a missionary upbringing.

Besides, the president was already unimpressed with Saidi’s failure to write about humanism (the philosophy Kaunda wears on a t-shirt and preaches from a bicycle in history books). One lucky pardon from the president, after Saidi had managed to get himself fired from an important editorship, was punctuated with the singular instruction: “Write about humanism!”

Saidi’s lavender grammar was also courted by the Zimbabwean nationalists leading the war effort from Zambia. Zapu and Zanu alternately accused him of being partial to the other movement.

Saidi was just a teenager in the African Parade newsroom when misadventures started to catch up with him. On an inspired news day, he sniffed his way into a Mbare shebeen where none other than Miss South Africa was one of the diversions.

It ended badly for him. His cover was blown and he breezed out of sight that instant but not before a stone had hit the back of his head. That was many years before bad guys whom one is not allowed to go naming attempted to run over him with a car, or so he suspects.

Saidi has a way of jumbling up these events, perhaps his aversion of the so-called narrative fallacy. Remarkably he always remembers the answer to “Where was I?”

An exception is the Tadyanemhandu story which Saidi mentions without much detail. The Daily News article about a political beheading is now a textbook example of fake news.

Saidi’s nominees for the journalistic and political hall of fame are people who favorably interacted with him. He gloats over Richard Nixon and Kaunda’s political misfortunes apparently because they denied him crucial interviews which would have taken higher up the stars.

Back home, Saidi credits himself with scandalising the returning comrades with his notorious Zambian record: “After independence in 1980, I had met Joshua Nkomo at an official reception in Harare. Shaking my hand with his right hand, Nkomo had wagged his left forefinger at me: ‘Wena, Saidi, wena!’”

“For me, one sign that I had achieved ‘balance’ in my relationship with the two parties (pre-1987) was my first meeting with Simon Muzenda after independence. It was again at an official government reception. Wagging his forefinger at me too, he to said: ‘Iwe, Saidi, iwe!’” One can only hope (one can only hope) Saidi is not going low-key on the Soul of the Nation here!

When Saidi was finding his feet in the newsroom during the mid-century ferment, a senior colleague told him he would be lost if he did not hear the story of the struggle from elder statesman Charles Mzingeli.

In those twilight years of the Federation, Mzingeli, a pioneering trade unionist, was ceding the turf to the more radical business of liberation politics, but his part is indispensable in mapping the origins of democracy.

Saidi later lamented to Nathan Shamhuyarira and Lawrence Vambe, his editors at African Daily News, that not enough had been written to canonise this democratic patriarch for posterity.

Saidi’s own record as a grand pioneer of Zimbabwean journalism is well documented. His narcissistic temptations never failed readers a weekly outpour of personal details. What may be profitably learnt of him is readily available.

“For a man who was not a scholar of particularly outstanding erudition Saidi’s wordplay was truly remarkable. He was a veritable wordsmith, a linguistic giant whose outstanding skill could have been exploited in refining the writing skills of young journalists.

“Sadly, this did not happen and Zimbabwe’s journalism remained the poorer for this gross oversight,” veteran journalist Geoff Nyarota eulogises his peer in The Nation of Malawi. Today’s journalists sometimes take exception protest armchair bashing but there is, there is also beauty across the generation gap.

Saidi feverishly espouses democracy and press freedom. He spars with the late president Robert Mugabe when he argues that there is nothing wrong with foreigners bankrolling the media, to which the then head of state queries: “But they would want to control everything, wouldn’t they?”

The scribe does not seem to worry much about the paymaster’s notes to the piper, not least because he himself seemed unmanageable. On his part, Mugabe seems to take his divine rights at the state newspapers for granted.

I cannot think of a journalist whose work I have followed more faithfully than Saidi. I kept and read and reread cuttings of his Sunday Opinion column and, even as an infant, staggered approvingly through his Last Word column.

Few weeks into my journalism freshmanship at Nust, I went to Newsday offices, then at Forestry Commission, bought about changani bag of Standard newspapers and scissored all of Saidi’s words into a neat file. A taxi had to stop short of entering my UBA cottage as I could not have carried the said loot. The modest output of successively spiked opinions I had penned by sem-break owed Saidi their lavender grammar (shy emoji) and pompous way of proceeding.

Saidi, who joined the newsroom at 19 and died at 79, is one of the most successful graduates of “the university of hard knocks,” a reminder that life ultimately happens outside the classroom.

He was buried in Kitwe, Zambia, but in Zimbabwe Saidi lives on as a challenge of what is journalistically possible.

Originally published in The Herald