Memory of Monster Tanaka

View from the gallery Mahmud Jega

Apart from stories of kidnapping, fraud and cost of living crisis which are the staple in Nigerian news media, the most “interesting” headlines I could find at the weekend were about policemen sealing an emir’s palace, labour strikes in some states to protest delay in paying the new minimum wage, epileptic restart of an oil refinery, a policeman who accidentally shot a governor’s sister that he was guarding, and the confusing debate over VAT sharing formula. Is that the best “news” we can generate? I therefore thought about some of the most interesting news stories I read in the last four and a half decades. I wish to recount some of them, in no particular order, with the hope that they will inspire Nigerian sub-editors to greater headline-casting feats. 

In the early 1980s there was this competition in Europe to identify the most interesting of all possible newspaper headlines. Tens of thousands of entries were sent from all over the continent. After the panel of judges, all of them highly experienced newspaper editors, studied them, the winning entry was, “Pope elopes.” There can be no bigger story than this, the editors concluded.

I thought of the biggest advert irony. The Dutch beer firm Heineken used to place eye-catching ads in all international newspapers and magazines. All of them ended with the legend underneath, “When you make a great beer, you don’t have a great fuss.” Then in 1983, Heineken Chairman/CEO Freddy Heineken was kidnapped in Amsterdam. The company’s executives shouted blue murder. In the opening sentence of its story about the incident, Newsweek magazine stated, “The company’s advert says when you make a great beer, you don’t have to make a great fuss but last week, Heineken made a great fuss over the kidnap of its chairman.”

Here in Africa during the 1980s, we didn’t like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher very much. While she was popularly known in Europe as the Iron Lady for her anti-communist, anti-union stand and her firm stand for British interests in European Union meetings, we hated her opposition to the international campaign to clamp sanctions against apartheid South Africa. We were not alone; Britain’s then powerful labour unions detested Mrs. Thatcher too. During one long strike, British steel workers held aloft a banner which read, “Smelt the Iron Lady.”

I sat up all night in November 2000AD to watch returns from the US presidential elections. Before it degenerated into recounts and dimple chads, CNN political analyst Bill Snyder delivered a memorable line. Democrat Al Gore had just won the key Great Lakes states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Ohio with immense help from the labour unions, which deployed hundreds of thousands of their members to mount a door-to-door, get out the vote out campaign. As he surveyed the returns, Schneider said, “Labour has delivered to Al Gore [he paused, nodded three times, then continued] big time.”

There was this story and picture in 1982 of the Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini. His fragile coalition government had collapsed, and after many weeks of haggling with his coalition partners, he managed to cobble together a new cabinet. It so happened that every minister made it back to the cabinet and to the same position he vacated. So, Newsweek stated, “Spadolini unveils his new cabinet [his old one].”

Unforgettable, to me at least, was a mid-1980s interview that the BBC Africa Editor Robin White had in Kampala with then Ugandan President Milton Obote. Daringly, he asked Obote if it was true that his friend, President Julius Nyerere of neighbouring Tanzania, gave him ideas of rule. Obote lost his temper. He said, with heavy East African-accented English, “You come here and insult me in my own capital? You say that somebody puts ideas in my head? You are not a good person!”

Memorably prophetic was a 1979 Newsweek magazine headline about the hanging of former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto by the man who overthrew him, General Zia Ul-Haque. Haque went ahead with the hanging, after Bhutto was convicted of murder of a political opponent, despite appeals from all over the world, including from the King of Saudi Arabia, who was thought to have a lot of influence on Zia. Newsweek headlined its story, “One grave for two men.” Indeed that was what happened. Nine years later in 1988, a bomb exploded on Zia’s plane as it took off from a military airport, with no survivors.

There was this 1980 American “faction” [i.e. fact plus fiction] novel, which said then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was suffering from a “Masada Complex,” which it defined as “a fundamental inability to comprehend a problem from any other than its Jewish dimension.” I wonder how it will characterize his current successor, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Too many cooks, spoil the broth is a saying we were much familiar with in our primary school days. Our teachers often cited it when too many of us were doing the same job and marring it in the process. In the 1980s, there was a story in Newsweek that criminals had infested Chicago city’s brothels and were driving away regular customers. So the story headline was, “Too many crooks spoil the brothel!” Talk about a play of names in headlines. Last decade, the Saatchi Brothers sold their stakes in the famous advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi. So, TIME magazine headlined its story, “Saatchi Without Saatchi.”

The simplest boast I saw in newspapers was in a 1979 edition of TIME magazine, when it managed, with great effort, to secure an exclusive interview with Leonid Brezhnev, the all-powerful General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and President of the Soviet Union. The magazine took a full coloured page with a large picture of Brezhnev and placed beside him a quote, “It is not in my nature to grant interviews.” It then added underneath, “Leonid Brezhnev, in an interview with TIME magazine.”

I have read and heard many stories in newspapers and the airwaves over the years, but few were funnier than a late 1980s BBC story about a bank robber who was caught just outside the bank. He had the bag of money with him, and was identified by the bank staff. It looked like an open and shut case but he still appealed his conviction. His grouse was the female bank clerk who said she identified him. He shouted at the judge, “How could she identify me? I was wearing a mask when I did the job!”

In 1999 when US President Bill Clinton led NATO forces to oust Serbians troops that were committing atrocities in Kosovo, BBC World Service had a live radio interview with the British Defence Secretary, who tried to justify the NATO operation. A skeptical listener however phoned from Serbia and asked why NATO did not intervene to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide but was now intervening in Kosovo. I thought the minister was cornered, but he memorably said, “The fact that you cannot help everybody does not mean you should not help somebody.”

There was a quote from WEST AFRICA magazine in, I think, 1984 that I have been mulling over ever since. The then President of Cote D’Ivoire, grand old man Felix Houphouet-Boigny, was speaking in Parliament and warning against unrest to protest cost of living increases. When an MP said people were going to protest because there was injustice, Boigny said, “No one has ever died from injustice. But a lot of people die from disorder.”

A most memorable cleansing was from 1983. The British Roman Catholic priest Monsignor Bruce Kent was at the head of the very vibrant organization called Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament [CND], which mounted a civil disobedience campaign to stop the deployment of American short-range nukes in Britain. Some  people sent a petition to Pope John Paul II and said Kent was engaging in politics, which Catholic priests are not allowed to do. But Pope John Paul declared, “Campaigning against nuclear weapons is not politics. It is a moral issue.”

A most shocking public campaign of civil disobedience occurred in June 1963. To protest what they saw as President Ngo Dinh Diem’s discriminatory policies against South Vietnam’s Buddhist majority by the minority Roman Catholic rulers, Buddhist monk Thich Quang-Duc marched to Saigon city square, accompanied by 300 singing and praying monks. He sat down, collected a gallon of kerosene, drenched himself in it, then set himself ablaze. He did not move an inch while the flames consumed him, while his mates continued to sing and pray.

Talk about capital punishment for open defecation. I thought about the American writer David Bergamini, who said in his 1950s book that the Japanese are the most awkward of English speakers. During World War Two, his family was held in a Japanese camp in the Philippines, and he recalled a notice they pasted at the gate, about prisoners and natives defaecating in the surrounding bush. It said, “Some Igorot people who are living around Baggio are spoiling the place… This is not good behaviour anyway. If the Imperial Japanese Army catches those who intend to do so, it shall shoot them by guns.”

Some people who read these old stories today might say that this columnist has a large memory of old stories. Which reminds me of former Japanese Army Major General Tanaka Takayoshi, a star prosecution witness at the Allies’ International War Crimes Tribunal for the Far East, which tried Japanese war criminals in 1945-48. Tanaka had a huge head, so Western reporters at the tribunals nicknamed him “Monster Tanaka.” He remembered in great detail meetings that took place years before, who was present and who said what. Don’t call me Monster Mahmud. My  head is of normal size.