walking into history

A WALK INTO HISTORY (WITH EYES FIRMLY CLOSED)

By CAMERON DUODU

One of the weirdest radio programmes on the air at the moment is broadcast on Saturday mornings on the BBC’s Radio4 network (which is transmitted only to UK listeners but can be found on the internet at

www.bbc.com/radio4

The programme is called Saturday Live and it almost always manages to spring a surprise on its listeners. It rolls along like any other programme, then suddenly, wham! something comes along that makes your hair stand on end.

One item that caught my ear was a laconically-related account of the June 1967 war between the Israelis and the Arabs. A British architect described how he had gone to Damascus, Syria, to discuss a hospital building project, and had no sooner arrived than the war broke out.

Damascus was soon put into blackout mode and each evening, he and a colleague had to feel their way along the walls of Damascus, sometimes crawling on the pavements in the dark, trying to find a particular restaurant where they wanted to eat dinner! And they did the same thing on their way back to their hotel!

What? Put one‘s life in danger, for a bite? What about buying some loaves of bread and corned beef and consuming it in one‘s hotel room? Or wrapping up some food at lunchtime and eating it cold later? But what do I know?

Anyway, who am I to talk? Once, on a visit to Monrovia, Liberia, I was extremely pleased to find a restaurant where they cooked the famous Ghanaian dish, fufuo, together with smoked bush meat such as antelope, and if my memory serves me right, even the topmost Ghanaian delicacy of all -- grass-cutter. Their name for fufuo was domboi.

The soups -- pepper soup or light soup, as well as palm soup (locally called palm-butter soup) and groundnut soup (ground-pea soup) were just as delicious as at home. So every single day, I sent my “chamber-maid”, a very nice young man called Mr Doe, to go with a taxi and buy lunch for me, while I stayed in my room and worked on the stories that I had been sent to Liberia to write. In those days, Liberia was a mini-United States, in terms of what its shops had to offer, and I could not believe it when I heard, a few years later, that the civil war into which it had descended, had made life unbearable for everyone.

However, my biggest coup, in terms of looking for familiar food in far-away places, occurred in Geneva, Switzerland. Cooped up for weeks covering the interminable Zimbabwe independence talks in 1976, I soon got bored with Swiss food (and became home-sick as a result) until a friend of mine from my Ghana Broadcasting days, the former news reader, James Okyne, now a diplomat based in Geneva, took me to one particular restaurant. He pointed to a dish called busecca and asked me to order it. Jimmy is a mischievous fellow and I could see from the twinkle in his eyes that some fun was on the way.

Was it going to be a large-eyed toad or what?

I waited anxiously for the dish to arrive, and it soon came. As soon as I saw it, I burst out laughing like a maniac, and James, who had an equally loud laugh, joined me. Fortunately there weren’t too many diners around, and so our embarrassment wasn’t too pronounced. The dish was -- nicely-cooked, soft tripe in a delicious soup.

Now, tripe isn’t everyone’s dish of the day, I know: the Scots have a version of it called haggis and the English people never stop laughing at them for eating it. Well, in Ghana, we love it very much. As kids, we were always given the entrails of the animals our elders caught in traps or slaughtered, to go and clean it outside the house (for obvious reasons) before the cleaned version was cut up and used to cook marvellous soup for us.

But, we weren’t satisfied with what our mother would dish out for us, and would often hide some of it on the sly, and steal back into the bush later to light a fire there, cook it and consume it. The clandestine nature of this enterprise added enormously to the enjoyment we derived from the soups -- despite the fact that we normally didn’t have any ingredients to put in the soup, other than salt and pepper. We would return home after consuming the stuff, wearing innocent faces but pleased as punch with ourselves.

Such childhood ‘japes’ had created a huge appetite in me for tripe, and I often braved the stench and went to the slaughter-house near the beach, at Korle Gonno in Accra, to buy the entrails of freshly-killed goats. And now, here, in sterilised Geneva, was a plate of tripe for me. It was excellent to the taste, too.

James explained that the restaurant mainly served Italian dishes and that busecca had its origins from the Milan region of Italy. Needless to say, that restaurant became my home away from home, in Geneva. As soon as the waiters saw my face, they went to the kitchen and ordered busecca -- before they came back to ask me what I wanted to go with it. I usually had rice or potatoes or both.

These days, worries about cholesterol have limited my quest for tasty food -- well, food tasty to me. But when I first came to live in London, I sought and obtained almost everything I used to eat in Ghana -- from Brixton market, Tooting market and Peckham market. North London and East London are also full of shops that cater for those in search of West African delicacies.

But back to Saturday Live. Another contributor to the programme I am talking about related the story of how she went out of her office in Saville Row, London, one lunchtime, to buy sandwiches for her workmates. Outside, she heard loud music coming from the rooftop of a nearby building!

The edifice housed “Apple Records,” the business offices of the Beatles. The Beatles were recording an album live, up there on the roof. Naturally, the street filled up with delighted spectators.

Two policemen who got to the scene, as the crowd thickened and blocked the road, also came on to the programme to relate how they went up to the roof to look for the person in charge, and were directed to the road manager of the Beatles. He told them “the boys” had been recording an album and would finish soon. He said they only had one more track to do, Get Back (sic).

Soon, the Beatles finished it and descended down. Another track they had recorded that day up on the rooftop was Don’t Let Me Down. Imagine just going out to buy sandwiches at lunchtime and hearing a hit number like that beaming down towards you, played live from the rooftop above you, by --The Beatles! It made me remember Accra’s “afternoon jumps, where C K Mann, the Ramblers and others first played many of the songs that turned into bestselling Cds.

I was pondering over coincidences when the thought struck me: “Wait a minute! You’ve walked into a few coincidences of your own, haven’t you?”

Yes -- indeed I have. The first occurred in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1958. It was during my first trip outside Ghana and it happened as I was on my way to Moscow, from where I was to fly to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to attend an Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference. I left Accra by Air Liban, and we were to spend a night in Beirut and fly on to Cairo the next day, en route to Moscow.

The Middle East, as ever, was in turmoil. There had been a coup in Iraq, which had sent ripples throughout the region, and afraid that there would be an insurrection in the Lebanon too, President Camille Chamoun asked the United States for assistance. President Eisenhower sent in the US Marines. Well, nothing changes, does it?

Now, there were groups of fighters in the Lebanon who didn’t like the idea of an American invasion one bit (who does?), and snipers hid in every nook and corner, taking pot shots at vehicles that they thought were transporting “Yanks”. But Air Liban’s officials ignored this and drove us by bus to a hotel right in the centre of Beirut. “They are all Lebanese patriots and won’t shoot at an Air Liban bus”, they said confidently. What about the crossfire? It appeared as if that hadn’t entered their heads. I knew about such things, and I was as scared as hell.

It was of the worst nights I had ever spent anywhere on earth. Throughout the night, we heard the sound of gunfire. I had never heard military weapons fired in anger before. All the gunfire I’d ever heard was the relatively quiet discharge of hunting guns. The rapid machine-gun fire, kah-kah-kah-kah, frightened the daylights out of me, as did the loud bang of what I thought were rifles but could have been bazookas.

Worse, I was put in a room together with a Palestinian, who began to make repugnant advances to me! He only stopped his nonsense when I threatened to go and ask the hotel manager to give me a different room. When we embarked the next day for Cairo, I was as happy as a lark.

In Cairo too, I had a coincidence of sorts. After resting for a bit, I put on my kente and took a stroll towards a park near my hotel. People came to me from everywhere to feel the texture of the kente and express their admiration. I didn’t, of course, understand a word of Arabic, except that I heard one particular word, qwe--iis, [okay] so often that it stuck in my mind. At the park, a beautiful Arab girl stayed by me and began to teach me Arabic. I was enchanted by her because she wore a revealing blouse and you know…!

I still remember some of the words she taught me: izzayak (the popular version of “how are you doing?” and the formal version, “kif haluka”, as well as the reply to them -- qwe--iis and Al’ham D’ulilah -- to this day. If I’d had more time in Cairo, I assure you I would have had myself an Egyptian bride, and all thanks to kente. And at that time, the beautiful special kente called Fathia fata Nkrumah had not even been invented. Or had it?

After my ‘romantic’ outing, I returned to my hotel to find that -- I couldn’t gain entrance to it! The place had been blocked off by the police, and was filled with reporters and political activists. They were witnessing the installation of Mr Ferhat Abbas as Prime Minister of the Algerian Provisional Government in exile. It was only my kente that gained me entrance to the hotel. Kente-clad as I was, I was immediately whisked off to Ferhat Abass and asked to congratulate him, as the camera bulbs popped.

On the plane to Moscow from Cairo, we stopped in Rome for a while, and I saw in the airport newsagents, British newspapers with headlines announcing that the Russian writer, Boris Pasternak, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I, of course, knew nothing about the trouble Pasternak was having with the publication, in the West, of his novel, Dr Zhivago, and I must have annoyed my hosts of the Soviet Writers’ Union a great deal by pestering them to arrange an interview with Pasternak for me! I wanted to be the first person outside Russia to interview Boris Pasternak -- you know? Man, what is a journalist without fame?

Ha, my Russian hosts always said politely, “Ok, we have passed on your request.” My guide, a nice, young writer on Izvestia called Oleg Vasiliev, bore the brunt of my prodding, and if he did pass my requests on, he must have annoyed the big guns at the Soviet Writers’ Union a great deal.

Of course, the interview, predictably, never happened. In fact, Pasternak had probably been arrested even as I was requesting to be taken to him; he was imprisoned for a long time and made to denounce the Nobel Prize as a propaganda gambit against the USSR. He died a broken man several years after the publication of Dr Zhivago.

One day, the Russians said they were taking us to a reception in the Kremlin. For a young journalist who had heard so much about the Kremlin from news reports, this was most exciting. So out came my kente, though the temperature and the wind felt like it was below freezing point. I wore a pullover beneath the cloth and also wrapped a scarf tightly around my neck.

We were in the Kremlin reception hall sipping our drinks when the whole place fell silent all of a sudden. Everyone then broke into applause. The Soviet leader, Mr Nikita Khrushchev, had made his entrance. At that time, “Mr K”, as he was known to the world press, was perhaps the most famous man in the world, following his denunciation of Josef Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and his ruthless crushing of the Hungarian revolt against communism in 1956.

You could hardly tune in to a foreign news broadcast in those days without hearing the name of Khrushchev. In 1956, he and his Number Two, Nikolai Bulganin, had visited Britain on a visit marked by sensation, following the death of a British secret agent, a frogman called Commander Lionel Crabb (also known as ‘Buster Crabb’) who dived beneath the ship that brought the two Russian leaders to Britain, He was presumably sent by British intelligence to study the ship’s build and armoury, and paid for it with his life.

As I made my way towards the circle Mr K was in, someone, I presumed a KGB man, kindly propelled me forward towards Mr K. I noticed that this was being done quietly to other African delegates as well, and very soon, Mr K was surrounded almost entirely by a group of African delegates, including the Senegalese writer and film-maker, Sembene Ousman, two Angolan writers, Mario de Andrade and Viriato da Cruz, and a black Brazilian artist called Tiberio Wilson. I bent down to admire the Order of Lenin on Mr K’s chest as a photograph was taken. The picture made it to the back page of the London Times and when I returned to Ghana, the Director of Ghana Information Services, the late Jimmy Moxon, generously gave me a copy of the paper. Fame had begun to pursue me.

Mr K told us that he could see in us, the vitality and youthfulness of Africa, and that he was sure Africa would rise up to play an important role in world affairs. Like every opportunistic journalist, I took the opportunity to quiz Mr K. Translated by a formidable little woman called Oksana Krugerskaya, who impressed me a great deal by using Krushchev’s first name, “Nikita”, to address him, I asked the Soviet leader whether there would ever be disarmament in the world?

“Nyet!” said Mr K. “The Western capitalist world is too envious of the resources of the USSR to allow us to live in peace. They will always try to capture our resources for themselves and that is why we must be strong enough to defend ourselves.”

I was chilled to the bone by that answer. So the Cold War would last my lifetime? It was a terrible thing to tell an idealistic young man, but Mr K, as everyone knew, was a blunt man who called it like it was. At that time, Russia was a closed country to Ghana, which had only gained its independence the year before, and my report to Radio Ghana of my interview with Mr Khrushchev caused a minor sensation -- behind my back.

From Russia, I was invited to China by the Chinese delegate to the Tashkent conference, a poet by the name of Yang-Shuo. I spent three weeks in China, having an idyllic time. One day, I attended a banquet at which about a score of different, extremely delicious dishes, were served. Twenty dishes! I ask you!

On another day, while we were strolling in a park at Wuhan, a city on the Yangtse river, we were suddenly surrounded by a group of Young Pioneers, red scarves gleaming around their necks, who sang to us with the most angelic voices, a beautiful song which so moved me that I can still sing it (after a fashion!) It was called yeesuchii-hao or something that sounded like that. I was told by our interpreter that it meant “socialism is good”.

In Beijing, I met the Chinese Premier, Mr Chou en-Lai, in the company of a few other African writers. Again, I took advantage of my profession to quiz him, while my companions looked on shyly. Did China regret being isolated from the world, having lost its seat at the United Nations to Taiwan as it had?

Mr Chou-en-Lai said: “In China, we don’t think in terms of today or tomorrow or even decades. We think in terms of thousands of years.” In other words, China’s isolated position would not be permanent. He went on to say something that at the time, I considered bizarre to the point of being almost barmy: “China is the only country in the world that can survive a nuclear war,” he said. “We have (then) a population of 650 million. Even if we lose half of that in a nuclear war, there would be over 300 million people left. They would all be required to plant trees. And in a thousand years, China would be a country with high agricultural production, which would be exported to the other countries where the populations have survived.”

Again, I was chilled to the bone. These Cold War leaders, I realised, had been hardened beyond measure by the hostility of the West towards their communist way of life.

Incidentally, it was the far-seeing nature of Chou-en-Lai that enabled him to swallow his pride and invite Henry Kissinger secretly to go to Peking for talks, following which President Richard Nixon himself made his famous trip to China in 1972. Those two trips changed the world’s geopolitical situation, and paved the way for the full re-entry of China into the comity of nations. And, as we can see today, China’s patient diplomacy and willingness to change, has, after the mad years of the “Cultural Revolution”, yielded results no-one could have foreseen. The China of today, is a major, if not the major, economic player in the world. It waited until it could get Hong-Kong back -- without war. Taiwan could well be next. No-one now laughs when the Chinese slogan of the late 1950’s: “The US imperialists and their running dogs are paper tigers” is recalled.

But a sad fact often ruins my recollections of my visit to China: my friend, the poet Yang-Shuo, is reported to have committed suicide during the terrible years of the Cultural Revolution (of 1966-78). If that is true, it is a terrible tragedy, for Mr Yang-Shuo spent his life making friends for China, having, for many years, been the Chinese representative on the Afro-Asian People‘s Solidarity Organisation in Cairo.

It was this organisation that organised the writers’ conference in Tashkent which I attended as one of Ghana’s delegates. (The others were Mrs Efua Sutherland, Miss Cecile McHardy and Mr John Elliott (who was later to become Ghana’s first Ambassador to the USSR.) Without the friendliness shown to me by Mr Yang-Shuo, I would never have gone to China. If they disgraced him during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese owe him total rehabilitation -- in my view.