Cameron Duodu Under the Ne em Tre e
A theatre of the absurd
Nothing is completely settled yet in Egypt. Nor even Tunisia, which led the way. But that has not stopped the people of Bahrain, Libya, Algeria, or Iran, Syria, and Morocco from listening to their own heartbeat. Inanity in the political affairs of nations will be ended.
I
found myself, at high noon one day in early February 2011 wheeled into a surgical theatre in London for necessary repairs to my body. Sorry – I don’t believe in navel-gazing journalism, so that’s all you’re going to hear about my illness (which I
touched upon briefly in my article entitled Bring On Usain Bolt). As I lay on the operating table, a sort of “theatre of the absurd”
began to be screened in my head. My last flickering thought was: “If I don’t come out of this alive, I shall never know whether the Egyptians succeeded in getting rid of Mubarak or not!” Isn’t that odd? They say when you are about to die, your entire life flashes before your eyes. Yet I didn’t worry about my unwritten novels. I didn’t remember to regret my uncompleted plays. My beautiful poetry remained in the deep recesses of my brain. What came to the surface was the uncompleted strug- gle between a people and their dictator. I don’t need a psychiatrist to analyse my personality, do I? I am a political news junkie – it started when I used to go
to the Accra Central Library to read foreign newspapers, and continued when I was put on the foreign desk of Radio Ghana, and stood daily by a teleprinter, waiting to tear off foreign news to be incorporated into radio news bulletins. I had become an addict of foreign news, and it sometimes
bore me extremely good dividends. As editor of the Daily Graphic, I used to work very late, and would be left in the office by almost everyone, while I worked and listened to a big short-wave radio that I always carried upstairs myself. One day, around 8pm, when our paper had been completed, the radio announced that President Gamal Abdul Nasser was dead. I managed to find a sub-editor and we put the news on the front page as our big lead story, managing even to get a quote from the Egyptian ambas- sador to Ghana. The next morning, my “competitor”, Richard Horsley, editor of the Ghanaian Times, rang me and said, “Yese wo aye yen pasaa!” (“They say you have finished us completely!”). I murmured something insincere to make him feel less bad. And certainly, with all the times I had been on Radio Ghana, the BBC,
72 | April 2011 New African
Aljazeera, Radio Netherlands and Radio France International doing my nut about foreign news, it would have been cruel of providence to take me away at a time when one of the biggest stories of the 21st century was still unfolding. For indeed, to any newsperson, what had been going on in
“With the news Mubarak had stood down, Cairo erupted. The people had their wish. And I had lived to see it, by God’s grace.”
Tunisia, and later, Egypt was…out of this world. The play being enacted on my real TV screen, day after day for 18 solid days, was an impossible play, in which a million, or at any rate, hundreds of thousands of people, were filling the grounds of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, in relays. They were not moving; they were seeing off the police as well as climbing all over the armoured vehicles of the army. Like kids playing – despite blood being shed all around them, not always conveyed by the TV pictures – they weren’t going away. It was eerie. And then Mubarak came on the screen. At nearly 83 years of age, his face was unlined and not a grey hair could be seen anywhere on his pate; a tease to
those of us who have been unable to mummify our looks. He, of course, had been assisted with a generous American “aid” budget worth $1.2bn a year, for the past 30 years. A few appointments with plastic surgeons can easily be incorporated into such a vast amount of expenditure if one is the sort of person who mulcts money meant for one purpose to defray the costs of another completely different activity. What came out of Mubarak’s mouth, however, was totally
decrepit: he had always done his “duty” by Egypt, in both peace and war, he said. He would now continue to do his honourable duty by implementing “reforms” of a legal nature. And he would make sure that certain prisoners were released to bring reconciliation to the society. The people in Tahrir Square were stunned. They hissed. They chanted. The import of their message was: “Leave!” and “Go! Go! Go Mubarak!” But Mubarak ranted on; of course, he was in a TV studio and nowhere near the people. He couldn’t hear them, for Egyptian TV was not showing any pictures of the crowds that had massed in Cairo, baying for his blood. Next, I did a double-take and said to myself: “This chap
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