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Joy in Medialand over one life saved

Thursday, April 16, 2009

HIGH DRAMA REPORTED from far distant horizons will sometimes highlight just how insular a country's media can be.

There was understandable fascination bordering on hysteria among America's journalists and its bloggers with the MV Maersk Alabama's capture by pirates … its crew's canny resistance … the taking of its Vermont-based captain Richard Phillips as hostage in a covered lifeboat … his attempted escape and recapture … the US Navy's steaming onto the scene … the protracted negotiations with the pirates - and the final climactic zig and zag of the story when three of them were killed by Navy Seal snipers just as they appeared ready to kill the captain.

 

Way down in US reporters' and commentators' priorities were the 280-plus hostages of many other nationalities – from French to Russians to Filipinos - being held by pirates of the Horn of Africa's lawless high seas, where piracy has been rampant for at least 10 years now. It seemed far more important in the many "backgrounders" that were so zealously researched by American writers that the rescue ship, US Naval destroyer Bainbridge should be named for an New Jersey-born hero who cut a romantic dash against nineteenth-century north African pirates in the exotically named Barbary Wars.

 

Even in the heightened press awareness that has followed the Maersk Alabama drama, coverage continues to emphasize fresh attacks on American targets more than on any others (one of the quieter examples of the tabloid treatment, pictured above).

 

I describe as "understandable" this hardly surprising American focus on American lives at risk. But it has still raised a familiar sense of disquiet in me that goes right back to a formative story in my own reporting past.

 

By 1973 I'd already become an enthusiast for the compelling story of Southern Africa's battling liberation movements. Then the white supremacist regime led by Ian Smith in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) suddenly arrested my great friend and journalistic guide Peter Niesewand. I was back at my London TV network's home-base when this happened (I'd been banned by Smith's security men from working in Rhodesia) and like many in the British media I threw myself whole-heartedly into the business of highlighting Peter's plight.

 

We all recorded many heart-tugging interviews over 73 days with Peter's heavily pregnant wife Nonie Niesewand across crackling phonelines to Salisbury (now Harare), and we helped to escalate the international pressure on "prime minister" Smith to release his captive, whose only offense had been to be truthfully practicing his profession (Peter was in fact charged with revealing “official secrets” and military intelligence).

 

I became perturbed, though, at the lack of attention being paid to the hundreds, probably more than two thousand black Zimbabweans whom Smith was holding without trial or charge, sine die - many of them in concentration camp conditions at "detention centers" like Gonakudzingwa, whose tin-roofed huts out in the country’s eastern expanse of dry bushland functioned more like ovens than cells.

 

This led to one of the harder TV interviews I've ever had to conduct.

 

Nonie graciously and bravely (but of course with extremely mixed feelings - her own husband was, after all, her paramount concern) talked to me affectingly about "all the others we shouldn't forget". The broadcast she helped me produce ended with a stark roller-graphic which scrolled down a list of all the names we could find and authenticate (no easy job) for the Smith regime's African detainees. It took a full four minutes to unroll ... a then unheard-of stretch of silence on commercial television.

 

When Peter was finally released, I joined the hordes of British reporters sent to intercept him at Lisbon airport (the colonial government of Portugal, with possessions still in Africa, was one of Smith's few friends in the world). In his dazed state after 10 weeks in solitary confinement, Peter barely recognized me amid the melee. But later in Britain we often combined our efforts in charting the struggle for freedom in his old home-country, as he took up a new life in south London with Nonie and - as it turned out - two rambunctious sons.

 

One of the saddest losses to journalism, and by then also novel-writing, came in 1983 when Peter died of cancer at the horribly early age of 38.

 

He'd been happy, he told me back in this early London days, to learn that along with his own name there had appeared those of so many leading liberation fighters including Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole. Also on the list was another, somewhat shadowy figure who eventually spent eleven years in Salisbury’s main prison - Robert Mugabe, of whom the world would unhappily learn much more much later.

 

But that's another sad story.

  

 

** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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