45 f
Outsided abandoned Mobutu Palace, Goma, East Congo, 2001.
“I was the producer so you have to look after the team and make sure they’re alright. The junior cameraman was con- vinced we’d be shot dead.”
What happened? “There was a three way war in the
fight for Angola. We were filming, des- perate to get some pictures for Panorama. One morning we came to a road-block on the front line. A kid by the side of the road waved us through and it was like World War II. Trenches and soldiers putting their heads above them to shoot each other. We got our film. On the way back we said thank you to the kid who’d helped us. But he had some boss men with him. The kid realised he shouldn’t have let us through so he said he’d never seen us before. The boss men said we’d clearly driven from the other side across the trenches and the people shooting each other and were obviously spies. They locked us up, me and the camera crew in a school room where Unita rebels were being tortured. We were made to clean out the loos. It was bad. Food was a jerry can of rice with one sardine in it brought round for everyone to scrabble into with their hands and eat. Every day we were told. ‘OK. Today very bad for you.’”
“Suddenly on day four or five a chap from the Foreign Office turned up. A guy on the FT who we were supposed to be having drinks with the night we were lift- ed met someone who saw it happen and they got a piece in the London papers. The man from the FO said ‘Hello, Hello,’ (in a cut glass accent) ‘I’m undercover. Not supposed to be here at all. My car’s right outside. Get in, I think we can get you out.’ So we got in and passed our own car, which was still where we’d left it and retrieved all our film from the boot. We went back to the hotel very briefly and paid our bill and the undercover Brit said. ‘You’re not supposed to leave the coun- try, but there’s a French aid flight leaving in a minute.’ He took us to the airport, we had to hide under coats in the back of his car. He drove straight down the runway to the plane full of refugees, which had suddenly developed ‘engine trouble’. He flashed his lights and it undeveloped the engine trouble, they chucked out a rope ladder, we grabbed our film and jumped on board. It was three or four hours from not knowing whether we were going to be shot dead or not to being back on our way to London.”
Those experiences and the horror he witnesses must, I say be overwhelming.
H
With Gordon Kuong, Juba, South Sudan, 2010.
e sighs. “The fact that you’ve got a job to do is very impor- tant. You’re there for a reason. To tell people what’s going on. You have to get it accurate, and be right. And you’ve got deadlines and you’ve got to make a film… You’ve got a lot of things to worry about. Report- ing on something gives you a bit of dis- tance from it. The BBC will only show a degree of the carnage, of bodies and smashed up people. It’s difficult to show how horrible it really is because the pic- tures are so nasty they won’t show them. Some of the things I’ve seen are quite extreme. You have to explain what’s really going on through words. You have to focus on the story. Rwanda was very bad indeed. A lot of it hits you afterwards.” He pauses. “Yes it does hit you after- wards, a lot of it.”
Does faith help I wonder? “Faith in what?” he asks. I was thinking of his Quak- er schooling.
“I don’t know, there’s a danger in sounding terribly pompous talking about things like that. It was a fine school. You got a sense of empathy and understanding things from other people’s points of view which is very important in writing about anybody really, seeing where they’re com- ing from and being interested in them.”
It engendered compassion? “Yes absolutely. It was very good in
that way. It’s hard to pin it down but they’re nice people. I have faith in peo- ple. I meet some amazing people in Africa. The regeneration there is extraor- dinary. Going back to places where you’ve seen horrible things happen and seeing people living there again, with extraordinary optimism… There’s an amazing spirit in Africa.”
I wonder if his love of the music, which might represent the best in people, helps in dealing with his experience of the worst.
“I’m sure it does. The more you know about the country the more it helps you understand the music. If you know about the music you know about the culture and the country in a different way than if you just know about the politics and the hor- ror. You get a different side of things. It all goes hand in hand.”
Music and politics only overtly coincid- ed a few times for Robin whilst he was on the BBC staff. A trip to see Fela Kuti at The Shrine whilst in Nigeria during the Abacha era, Bob Marley’s peace concert in
Jamaica, and once through a phone call he took at his desk. A huge fan of The Who, he was surprised to find Pete Townsend on the line asking him to write a book – When the Music’s Over: The Story of Politi- cal Pop by Robin Denselow (an excellent read). It was published in 1989 by Faber & Faber where Townsend was an associate editor. “I used to pretend to be a guitar hero like Pete, as I call him, and there he was, years later, sitting across the desk going, ‘Oi, split infinitive Robin!’”
His reporting isn’t confined to the B
world’s killing fields: he’s posted closer to home, covering lots of British things, like the Stephen Lawrence story. A brief hiatus from horror came in the shape of his funny, live rock’n’roll chat show, 8 Days A Week. It ran for two series in the late ’80s and featured guests such as George Michael and Mark Knopfler. When I men- tion it he says “I’d forgotten about it, to be honest.”
ecoming freelance recently, he finds that music and politics are coinciding more frequently. He’s covered the use of music in rais- ing the profile of the plight of
the refugees in the Western Sahara; the hugely lucrative and growing industry of the praise songs for Mexican drug barons, “which sound like ancient Mexi- can folk songs, but with really nasty lyrics.” And illegally entering Mauritania with Baaba Maal for a 1am desert con- cert. “Baaba refused to recognise any problem. It was all Fulani territory to him. It made me realise how porous the colonial borders are in Africa.” Not porous for Robin though. He had to make a mad dash back into Senegal after his explanation “I’m with the band” failed to impress the Mauritanian police putting a stop to the proceedings.
Talking about bands, does he still play his guitar and sing? He looks a bit embarrassed as if he’s not sure if he should answer. “Well sometimes. Secretly when there’s no-one around. I’ve still got my old Levin.”
He still reports for Newsnight. “Whenever the phone rings they send you off somewhere. You drop everything and you’re on a plane in two hours time. It certainly keeps you on your toes… Most people are lucky to get a job they love. To get two jobs you love is… I’ve been very spoilt indeed.”
So have we. There is only one Robin Denselow. F
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