Peace in Africa has made journalism less exciting

Patrick Kariuki had been pointed out to me some years ago and I learnt he was an important journalist working with Reuters.

Although we lived in the same neighbourhood, we were never introduced to one another until some weeks ago when we shared the bar counter at a watering hole that is gaining some popularity where we reside.

At the mention of my name, the glass of beer in his hand paused on its journey from counter to his lips and he eyed me keenly before speaking again.

“I have wanted to meet you for many years,” he declared. Fearing that he was one of the many unintended victims of my poison-tipped pen who litter the landscape, I cautiously asked why.

He had, he explained, desired to meet me since the day in 1996 when Brian Tetley was laid to rest at Lang’ata cemetery and, in connivance with renowned photojournalist Duncan Willets, we sneaked into the coffin two bottles of White Cap beer to see him on his way to the Big Bar upstairs.

This piece of information opened the flood gates to memories about “the good old days,” and it turned out that we shared many common friends and our lives have been touched by great journalists of yesteryear. Indeed, Brian played a key role in launching Patrick’s career as an international photojournalist and later video journalist when he spotted his talent and introduced him to the peerless ‘Mo’ Amin.

Those were the days, in the early 1980s, when Nairobi hosted international journalists with an affinity for danger, and served as a launching pad for assignments to cover coups and wars that were the daily fare of news coming from Africa.

Talking to Patrick and his friends, many of whom are involved in the business of news gathering, one detects a sense of nostalgia for what to them must be halcyon days when whichever direction one travelled from Nairobi, there was something dangerously exciting happening.

The reminisces almost turned into a contest of who escaped death the most times either when, in the case of Patrick, a plane carrying foreign journalists was almost shot out of the sky as it approached Bujumbura a day after Burundian President Habiryamana was killed when his plane was shot down as it approached the same airport.

Or when a light aircraft he was in lost its two engines shortly after take-off from Wilson Airport. Not to be beaten in the danger stakes, his brother, a fellow photojournalist, regaled us with the story of how their plane crash-landed in the bush in Southern Sudan and they came under hostile fire from SPLA fighters who had mistaken them for the enemy’s agents.

For Patrick, however, the story-telling took a sombre turn when he recalled another brush with death that never happened because he missed a flight.

On July 12, 1993 the world was horrified when four young journalists were killed in Mogadishu.

He was scheduled to be on the fateful flight that took Hos Maina, Anthony Macharia, Daniel Eldon and Hansi Klaus to a Somalia that had been plunged into civil strife following the ouster of Mohamed Siad Barre.

Of the four, I had personally known Hos with whom I had worked briefly in the ‘80s. He had made a name for himself as a gifted and courageous young photojournalist.

During the August 1982 coup attempt by members of the Kenya Air Force, Hos provided the only photographic record of that tragic event as Nairobi city centre was a no-go zone for lesser journalists.

Patrick took the death of young Anthony particularly hard, a protégé he had introduced to the business of news gathering.

I did not have the heart to ask if Patrick still considers journalism as exciting today as it was in the old days, now that peace seems to be reigning all over Africa.