By Will Henley
By the time I meet Zain Verjee at CNN’s offices in London, about 10.30 am British summertime, the Kenyan star of international TV news has already been awake for eight hours. The impeccably dressed co-anchor of CNN Today and World News has been cooling breaking the day’s top stories to millions of pyjama-clad, cereal-crunching viewers all morning long.
Zain Verjee, CNN’s State Department correspondent, gives the keynote at a past gala. |
Over tea, Verjee is abuzz with tales of Makmende, a recent phenomenon in Kenya. She has been punching out Twitter messages on the subject for the past 24 hours.
Makmende, Kenya’s answer to action hero Chuck Norris or Blaxploitation movie legend John Shaft, is a fictional character, a kind of macho throwback to the 1970s adopted by Kenyan pop group Just-a-Band.
Hardcore of fans
In the few weeks, the band’s spoof music video, in which the lead singer takes on the tough-guy persona of Makmende, has gone ‘totally viral’, explains Verjee, spreading like wildfire across the Internet. A fanpage the band set up has attracted more than 35,000 followers. Someone has already bought makmende.com. Verjee is the latest among their hardcore of fans.
"Makmende knows tomorrow’s news today," she typed on her Twitter feed the other day, following the vein of satirical factoids which play on the character’s supposed virility, masculinity and sophistication.
"This morning I wrote ‘Makmende can fix breaking news’. And someone else tweets back: ‘Makmende gets his Vitamin C by chewing an Orange sim-card’."
"I got my co-anchor, Don Riddell, into it today. He’s like, ‘what are you writing on Twitter, what the hell is this Makmende?’ Then I explained to him and he started tweeting it."
What started as a bit of fun from a three-piece in Nairobi soon became an international phenomenon. "In the span of one day I got maybe 300 followers from Kenya all re-tweeting what I said," she says, in amazement.
For Verjee, joining in with the Makmende craze is not merely fun, it is an opportunity, using social media, to reconnect with her homeland. "I have a lot of followers," she admits, "but this has been a little eye opening for me today. "I communicated to more people – personally."
At 36, Verjee is regarded as something of a star in broadcast journalism. Her career has seen her interview the likes of Bill Clinton, Benazir Bhutto and ex-Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. Her reports have taken her from the demilitarized zone in Korea and the trial of Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic to the Hajj pilgrimage and the war in Iraq.
In spite of her notable successes, Verjee explains that in actual fact she stumbled into journalism.
"Oh, my Gosh, it was never in my wildest dreams," she says, dismissing the idea that her route into the media had been in any way planned.
"I actually intended to pursue a career path working in the development field. I was much more focused academically on that – typically on women, gender and the environment."
A volunteer
While researching for her thesis in Nairobi, Verjee found herself filling in at Capital FM, one of the first private radio stations to open in Nairobi following a relaxation of Kenya’s broadcast regulation.
"I volunteered there by reading the traffic update and then I filled in on the love show at night," she chuckles.
"It was called Love Lines and it was just sort of playing romantic music, reading people’s love letters and dispensing of advice that I was ill positioned to give.
"But it was fun and it was new for Kenya at the time because it was the first non state-controlled radio station, even if it was just music. We had freedom of speech. So I ended up not going back to finish my degree, staying in Kenya and pursuing radio," she says.
Raised in the affluent Parklands suburb of Kenya’s capital, Verjee has links to three Commonwealth countries – four if you count the UK, where she now lives and works. Her parents are of Indian heritage and she also holds citizenship in Canada, where she moved in her late teens to study English.
But where is her heart? "It is Kenya," she says, nearly cutting me off. "Culturally, ethnically, I have been brought up in Indian culture, but I have never lived in India. Canada – I studied in Canada for seven years, but I haven’t been there since I graduated – I don’t really have close ties. I consider myself very much Kenyan."
Tongue-twisting names
Since she was young, Verjee’s father has run a meat and fish distribution business. Her mother works as a scientist researching on animal diseases. Demonstrating her powers of recall, Verjee volunteers with impressive precision the scientific name of the sleeping sickness in cattle in which her mother specialises: "Trypanosomiasis." It’s quite a mouthful, but she rattles it off with the skill of a reporter used to pronouncing the most tongue-twisting of foreign names.
Following her stint at Capital FM, Verjee was snapped up by KTN, who recognised her potential on the airwaves. She spent time anchoring the station’s prime-time news and presenting documentaries before she got her big break on the international news scene.
Much as she has several cultural backgrounds, Verjee considers herself very much Kenyan. Photo: Will Henly |
Joining CNN, she was soon posted to the United States’ State Department and became a fixture reporting world news and politics.
Like all great interviewers, Verjee is not afraid of asking impertinent questions.
"Does it bother you... that the US is so loathed?" she once asked a flustered looking Condoleezza Rice, then Secretary of State. But neither has she been impervious to the odd gaffe. One apparently innocuous story about airline snacks quickly became an Internet sensation after Verjee mispronounced the word ‘peanuts’.
Like a well-trodden war reporter, Verjee has been no stranger to danger either. Covering the January 2008 Kenyan elections for CNN, she famously found herself caught in a fracas between protestors and government forces. A volatile situation quickly turned even more ugly as Verjee herself was hit by a tear gas canister as she filmed a piece to camera.
"Yes... I was terrified. I thought I’d been shot. I didn’t compute that it was tear gas," she recalls.
Verjee is philosophical about the effect on herself of covering those violent elections.
Posted to Nairobi – her neck of the woods – she thought she would be secure, she explains. But in the heat of the moment, she admits she was terrified.
Volatile situation
"It was ironic," says Verjee, "It was at home in an environment where I have always felt the safest. The ensuing election violence brought not only bitterness to Kenya, but also a dilemma for Verjee as she struggled to retain her professional impartiality.
"It’s very hard to be disengaged with a country you love and have grown up in when the streets you’ve walked in and the holiday spots you go to are up in flames."
As a follower of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam, faith clearly has an influence on Verjee’s outlook, even if she retains a certain distance from it in her daily routine.
"I’m not an active practiser, but, spiritually and psychologically, I would say it does play a part," she says.
Verjee’s wish list
So, will she ever return to Kenya?
"People have been asking me that lately. I think right now, no, because I’m in a pretty good position in London. I’m getting lots of new opportunities – more experience."
Then what more, exactly, does she want to achieve as a globe-trotting broadcaster? What news event, which has not yet happened, does Verjee want to get the ultimate ‘exclusive’ on?
"The discovery of the lost continent of Atlantis, maybe?" she answers whimsically.
"If we are ever visited by extra terrestrial life, I’d like that first interview!"
As to the people she still wants to interview, Verjee’s wish-list is long and packed with the standard as well as some surprising figures – from the realistic to the fantastical.
"I’d like to interview Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar. I’d like to interview Kim Yong-il of North Korea." Then, after a pause, it comes to her. She smiles.
"Makmende. That’s the other person I’d like to interview."
