Father sowed, Wits waters....

Just so you understand where I am coming from, I am a journalist, whose father was a journalist, and killed for being a journalist.

Father always loudly proclaimed that none of his children would be journalists. Journalists were “poor people whose riches could change the world but not buy them the good things therein.” Yet, Father would diligently go to work daily and come back with stories that he recounted to us, unwittingly sowing the seeds that found me at Wits—and help me make sense of this life-changiing experience.

For someone who didn't want a journalist for a child, he spent too much time dwelling on the subject; encouraging me at six year of age to spot mistakes in newspapers and give a recap of the news if he came home late.

His particular fixation was about “two young men in South Africa” who were giving the apartheid government a tough time using their paper called the Weekly Mail. These young men were not only handsome, Father said with glee, they were also the first to use computers! I was old enough to recall why that was wonderous to Father; the papers in Nigeria were still manually assembled, the typewriters still very much a feature.

Years later, my work as a journalist would find me suddenly at Wits, in a department headed by Anton Harber, one of the handsome journalists father went on about. I discovered Anton was no longer young of course. Now a professor, his “handsomeness” could safely be said to be relative to whoever was looking. But he still had the same curly hair which housed all the magic powers he frequently employed to escape from the clutches of apartheid policemen. I know the part about the hair is true because Father said so.

Growing up, all our homes were littered with pages of newspapers, a habit that has found its way into my tiny room at International House. There was Time, there were the local dailies, and random pages, some of which had the word “Drum” written on it. These in particular were really old, and anytime I asked Father where the rest of this magazine was, he would get visibly angry and curse the one great move the family had made from the Niger-Delta to Lagos, in search of economic fortune. The distance had somehow ensured the fragile pages never made it home in one piece.
It took coming to Wits to see why Father was greatly attached to those particular pages.

Professor Harber takes this course where we are given tons of reading and encouraged to debate on them weekly to help us make sense of the theories, histories and trends that shape global journalism as we know it today. I thought it sucked at first...until I opened the pages. It was through this class I discovered that Drum Magazine was a cultural icon that created the earliest cracks in the stronghold of apartheid the way only journalism could. Further personal research showed why Father was always close to tears at the sight of a weathered Drum page; Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka said in 1988 that the “average Nigerian reader” of the mid-1950s “was weaned on Drum”.
It wasn't all about South Africa. I have read short stories by Cyprian Ekwensi in Drum, published in 1953, the year of Father's birth. A 1958 feature on the Egungun festival has a black and white picture of a child masquerade holding a tapering cane and flanked by six other naked children staring in awe. There is also the 1964 epic, “The Mystery of the Bodiless Head” a story situated in Ibadan on what was likely the beginnings of ritual killings.

Had it not been for Wits, I would have quickly thought Father was merely being too sentimental or senile in his 40s, or something.
As though that wasn't enough, last week Tuesday, I met the other handsome young man who founded the Weekly Mail with Professor Harber; Irwin Manoim.
Mr. Manoim was also not young. He had no hair at all, but thankfully, none of that had anything to do with his world-class skills as a journalist and newspaper designer. His class in newspaper design left me wishing I could call up Father to show off and gloat.

Instead, I made do with taking a picture with Mr. Manoim so my kids don't call me an old fart when I in turn start blabbing about journalists and journalism.

Father sowed the seeds. And Wits Journalism waters it adequately. Thank you, Wits.

**IMAGE BY www.sahistory.co.za

*Agbroko is the 2010 Niall Fitzgerald scholar doing her Honours degree in Journalism and Media Studies at the University of the Witswatersrand (Wits), Johanneburg, South Africa. She writes this column for www.vuvuzela.org.za, the website for Wits' journalism department.