Affirmation long at last

 

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The Pilgrim, July 29, 2022*

A very personal thing happened to me last week. It involved my longtime mentor and me.

When I started writing this column in November last year, it was on the heels of four years of unbroken journalistic service to this newspaper, initially as a correspondent and subsequently as a staff writer.

Nothing happened by fluke. Like many things in journalism—for example, from intern to reporter and reporter to editor—this was a designation that came in small installments.

But I was in the newspaper industry much earlier, though unofficially, under the guise of apprentice. It was a guise because that is what it pretended to be.

When I met my first journalism mentor back in Ndola around 2011, we didn’t have the understanding that I would be his apprentice.

What we had was rather mere interaction born out of my father’s relationship with him.

Soon I was spending more time with him than I did with any possible teenage occupation such as playing football or video games.

I was entranced as he regaled me with heroic stories of his wartime reporting or the ones he did on the subject of desertification in Ethiopia in the 1970s.

He spoke with child-like excitement about how he was once robbed as he cabbed around in Ethiopia, or when he was in situ in the Democratic Republic of Congo covering the historic boxing fight between the charming Muhammad Ali and his seemingly never-tiring opponent George Foreman on October 30, 1974.

I started wondering what it would be like to experience the thrills and spills of such an adventurous profession. In earnest, the romanticization had begun.

While my own original fantasy about a career in journalism could be traced back to when I was in eighth grade because of incessantly watching Jane Dutton presenting Al Jazeera News Hour, Musuku gave me actual reasons as to why I should be a journalist.

They weren’t completely frivolous. Like every journalist, he spoke in high-sounding words about the matchlessness of the profession as a public good. Any journalist will tell you that their profession is top public priority, and they often have the data to prove it.

So to me, a journalist was a saint, if not more than that. I imagined that I could use it to save society from its worst excesses, which sometimes manifest themselves in form of war or economic inequality and poverty.

There isn’t anything so deep about this really, but it’s a fact that the journalist has a special mandate to interpret issues for society and they find themselves in a privileged position, because of the magnitude of their platform and education, to show with pinpoint accuracy where society has gone wrong. Besides the preacher, only the journalist can call out society for its greed and other vices.

This is the type of philosophy Musuku instilled in me and there was no stopping me after I finished high school in 2014. I knew I was cut out for journalism.

But for many years since I have tried to impress Musuku with my writing to no avail. My work has been met with indifference in the past, not because of lack of merit, but because the journalism of Musuku’s day isn’t the journalism of today.

For him, digital disruption entails that young reporters like myself cannot derive as much fulfilment from the profession as before. But I’ve tried to show him through my own work why this isn’t true.

So the affirmation came long at last in the form of an email that I received last week. I received unsolicited acknowledgement for my work from Musuku himself!

Remember last week I wrote about his conversion to Christianity after he physically encountered God and expressed contrition for having lived in denial as an atheist.

The column elated him, and he expressed admiration for my work in his email. He wrote: “Victor, what a stunner to read. From you, nobody else. When I stumbled across your mum, a good while in Ndola downtown, she exploded in engrossment: ‘My son, Victor, has leaped far beyond your journalistic mark’. She was dead-right.”

It was the resignation with which he spoke that caught my attention. It was as if he was passing on a button and saying he would be happy to see me take over from him.

Well, all of this has happened so fast. The clueless rookie who learnt from him by osmosis has forged his own path amid a crashing advertising market for newspaper journalism. Within Musuku’s lifetime, he has seen me serve the most important state media in my country and launch a column in my own name.

If that is not affirmation long at last, then I don’t know what it is.

*This column is published every Friday in Zambia's leading newspaper, Zambia Daily Mail