Why Zain Verjee loves Makmende

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.

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."