‘We like naked things…’
I had been at the ABC all night. In the morning, still drunk in some ways and intoxicated in others, I entered The National Inquisitor offices and made my way to Alison’s office and closed the door behind me. Alison was the epitome of nondescript — one of the thousands of British women one bustles by in the streets of London, dressed in blue jeans tucked into kneehigh brown leather boots, a white sweater with a neckline low enough to reveal her blue bra straps, shoulder-length blonde/ brunette/red hair disciplined by a ponytail, phone in hand and so on.
Alison used to work for a major British paper covering Africa (her title was Africa correspondent) before falling from grace. She, along with others, were caught red-handed bribing war victims for their stories. It was unfair; this was not brown-envelope journalism where a journalist gets paid by a politician. These were hungry, traumatised refugees who were telling the truth for a little bit of bread. I had done it too — a bodyguard who lives in a slum but has a story about his boss, an exploited secretary and so on. Ironically, a British tabloid broke the scandal. The owner had immediately headhunted her — entrapment perhaps? Maybe, maybe not. The point of it all was that she was not averse to a good story every now and then, but it had to conform to the tabloid genre. With slowing print tabloid sales in Britain, her boss had quickly seen what others had yet to see. The internet had yet to make its way into every home in Africa, and politics and sex and gossip about politics and sex are the only truly universal things in life. So Alison was dispatched to Kenya to start the Inquisitor. Word quickly spread that there was a tabloid looking for journalists to cover the wealthy sewers of Nairobi.
I had just returned from Boston, written a few pieces on spec for the national papers, but that was not the reporting I wanted to do. I had access to the wealthy and powerful. I was covering their public faces, but I knew what they did behind closed doors — from being drug and weapons mules to exchanging suitcases of public money during weddings and parties. I knew about the old men with sexual fetishes involving young girls living in penthouses they rented for them, and the men who raped their maids, impregnating them and then sending them packing. With Fuck You money and Fuck You power, they did whatever they fancied. With my mother in the government, I had a dinner seat at the table of all things sordid in Nairobi. So I went, or rather ran, to Alison. All I had to do was tell her that my mother was a former chief of justice and I had a journalism degree from Boston University. She hired me on the spot.
Alison and I occasionally slept together; a late night in the office working on a story and we would need a break. She did not ask me where I had been or why I had not called. I also did not ask her. Maximum freedom was our credo. The only thing that would matter was whether I had found a good story in the night. So I explained everything to Alison in one long drunken gush.
‘This all sounds good — for New African Magazine or Chimurenga or The Atlantic. But here we do hard, useful gossip: corruption, sex and drugs, spoilt political kids getting high on stolen cash — you know that,’ she said, opening the blinds.
Like my mother and the dictator, I thought to myself and wondered when that story would come out. Or, more precisely, when she would discreetly assign it to one of the other journalists. I did not think she was mercenary; we lived in a world where the story came first.
And the Tizita was the story I had to write. There was no way I was going to convey to her here, this early in the morning, drunk and with no sleep, what the Tizita meant, but I had to try. And I had to try it in tabloid lingua franca.
‘Alison, this is going to be one hell of a story. Think about it. You remember shortly before Idi Amin invaded Tanzania? Nyerere challenged him to a boxing match to settle it like men. The Tizita competition—’
‘Just how fucked up are you?’ she interjected with a laugh. ‘Nyerere was like four feet tall, old and scrawny, and Idi Amin Dada was, well, his name tells it all. It was the other way around — Idi Amin wanted to box Nyerere.’
‘It’s the principle that counts, not the principals,’ I said, feeling witty. ‘Imagine if all the world’s problems were settled through music — you want my oil, sing better than me; you want my whatever…. At least there would be no war,’ I said. ‘And where there is music, there is sex and drugs, and a story,’ I added when she said nothing in reply.
‘Go home. Sleep. Sober up. And then give me a good reason.’ She helped me to my feet and pushed me to the door.
I held on to the doorknob.
‘I might have something else,’ I half yelled, thinking I needed something that would speak to her English sensibilities, a vague sense of colonial guilt. Well, sometimes it’s just the way to get things done with her.
‘You don’t care because it’s African music. If I was talking about British musicians duking it out, you would care,’ I said.
She laughed out loud. ‘Get serious or get the fuck out,’ she answered.
‘OK. I have heard something, something that our readers should know about — it’s like I have listened to a naked heart beating — I want to share that beat. We like naked things at The National Inquisitor; this is as naked as it gets. Shit, if it gets me the story, I will dig up some dirt on our stars, but this story has to be told,’ I said.
‘Tell me more about this naked heart of yours,’ she said.
‘Alison, you think you know me, but you don’t. There was this story I once read by Alice Walker, about Elvis singing Big Mama Thornton’s songs — you know, You ain’t nothing but a groundhog—’
‘Hound dog, you mean?’ she interrupted, trying not to laugh.
‘The point is that the greyhound song ended up becoming very popular, selling millions of records,’ I went on. ‘The Big MT gets nothing for it, but eventually, Elvis is so tortured by the singing of music he does not understand that he seeks her out. Of course, she does not tell him the secrets to her music. So, a tortured Elvis gets into drugs and eventually dies on his throne. Or some variation of the story — but you get the point. I have been moved by something — I don’t want to skim on its surface; I need to feel it. And why not share that story with our readers? And you will get some amazing stories, stories that would otherwise remain buried in the sweat and the blood and the money of an illegal boxing club. Shit, Alison, isn’t this what The National Inquisitor is all about?’ I said, knowing I sounded more desperate than convincing.
‘Why don’t we start with last night? Write that first. If it sells, you can have your story,’ she said, giving me an opening.