A friend who read my last article emailed me to say:?Your article on Tuesday shows how far you have come. I will be waiting for the concluding part. GBC is 75 and they should have invited you to be part of the activities.?
I laughed when I read the part about the GBC inviting me to be part of their activities.
My friend obviously has no grounding in the Bible. Otherwise he would have remembered what Jesus said, namely, that ?A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country.?
The Ghana News Agency, where I have never worked, was kind enough to invite me to be its guest speaker at its 50th anniversary celebrations.
Even when, because of a funeral I couldn’t avoid, I couldn’t be present physically, the Managing Director, Nana Appau Duah, insisted that we should find someone to read my speech for me. Ironically, the man we chose was someone I had worked with at the GBC, the incomparable John Hammond.
Indeed, I hope John Hammond, the man whose golden voice graced its airwaves daily for some two decades, is on its high profile list. John was very sick when I visited him in Accra last year. He appeared pretty lonely to me.
I do not normally engage in special pleading, but I shall abandon my practice and urge all Ghanaians who have been delighted by John Hammond’s golden tones to flood the GBC with letters and telephone calls until the GBC makes it its official duty, as an institution, to take care of him, both physically and psychologically during his indisposition.
As for me, let’s hope I’ll still be around when the GBC’s centenary celebrations take place.
For I am sure that by the time the institution reaches its 100th year, it will have come to appreciate that some of us, unsung though we are, contributed to make it what it is today.
At its best, GBC was an institution of which its mother organisation, the BBC ? which seconded the top personnel who set the GBC up ? would have been proud.
When I joined the GBC in early 1957, at a time that everything in our country was being turned upside down, every top official in the organisation was a white man. But this soon changed. And yet it continued to retain the affections of the public.
The Director-General of my time was the soft-spoken J. B Millar. As I said in my last article, my story Tough Guy In Town, had made quite an impact. And on the back of it, I wrote to the Head of Programmes, Henry Swanzy, to tell him I wanted to join the GBC.
I was interviewed by a panel headed by Mr Millar himself and which included a Ghanaian called Mr Gadzekpo.
First, they asked me to write an article about the most important thing that had happened recently.
I chose the Middle East, which then as now, was boiling. The article impressed them and they gave me a news bulletin to read! Now, I had never been inside a broadcasting studio before, but they put me in one, with a microphone standing on a table covered with green gauze, and asked me to read the bulletin.
As every schoolboy did, I had practised the opening lines many time beforehand; ?This is the Gold Coast Broadcasting Service. The time is one o’clock. Here is the news read by Cameron Duodu? They watched me carefully from behind a glass panel as, thrilled to bits, I said those lines.
I knew they would hear any noise I made, as it would be caught by the microphone, and instinctively realising that any nervousness ? or otherwise ? would count, I was very careful in handling the papers.
The news bulletin itself was of world news and they wanted to know whether I could read it fluently and meaningfully. It contained two ?trap? (difficult) foreign names in particular that I remember ? Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.
I sailed through these without pausing, because I listened to the BBC every day. I also pretended that I was reading a real news bulletin, and paused in the middle of the bulletin to announce, rather ponderously, ?This news broadcast comes to you from the GBC, Accra.?
My performance impressed them greatly and I overheard Mr Gadzekpo, who had a strong voice, say from behind the glass door, ?He must listen a lot!?
So I wasn’t surprised when Mr Millar congratulated me warmly when I came out. He was the sort of boss who could get you to eat out of his hand. He knew that everyone who joined the GBC wanted to read the news so that his voice could be heard all over the country, and that, if I wasn’t appointed a news reader, I would be disappointed.
So what he said to me ? straight away, no ‘go and we shall write to you’ business ? was ?Cameron, we would like you to go to the newsroom, which needs strengthening.?
Wow! The DG thought I could help to ?strengthen? the newsroom? Cool, man.
When I took up my job in the newsroom, we were still at the Old Broadcasting House, near Flagstaff House. We were in wooden sheds built on stilts.
It was thrilling to meet in the flesh, the owners of the voices one had heard on the radio so many times: Kwame Amamoo, Appeah Kubi, Robert Owusu, Ashie Kotey and others, and those who read the news in Twi and Fanti, whom I had been listening to ? Adanse Pippim, Kweku Budu Ewusi Dadzie, and others.
In the newsroom itself, among the old hands I met were a cool, elegant man called Robert Tabi, who was from Kwabeng, near my home town.
He died unexpectedly, at his desk, about a year after I’d joined. Then there were Kwadwo Awere, Dankwa Smith, Osei Acheampong and my lifelong friend Charles Segbefia. We cracked jokes as we worked. Except when one of three men was present.
The roost was ruled by a triumvirate headed by the Head of News, Ian Wilson, the Chief Editor, Eric Adjorlolo and an Editor, Shang Simpson. I think at the time I joined, Shang was only a Sub-Editor, but even then, his authority was unquestioned. He ruled the newsroom by the sheer force of his personality.
He called us, the underlings, not by our first names, but by our surnames. And when he called you, he made sure you knew he had called you: ?DUODU!? And you practically ran to him. He was such a terror that eventually, we all called him ?God?! But he was extremely efficient, and did most of the work that both Wilson and Adjorlolo should have been doing.
Wilson went to so many cocktail parties that we called his secretary, Mr K K Ketsubor, ?KK Accept? (which was the only three words Wilson scribbled on every single invitation he received to a cocktail party.) We laughed at him a lot, behind his back, saying that so long as he had Shang to run the newsroom for him, he would attend every party in the world.
Adjorlolo too liked parties, and he had the irritating habit of sometimes, ringing up, when we were about to finish a bulletin, and dictating details about a party he was attending and asking us to include it in the bulletin.
We knew he would ask the host and those whose names he mentioned to go and listen to the bulletin, and hear their names read out on the air. This show of vanity diminished our respect for him.
But he was a very friendly and generous man.
Credit: By Cameron Duodu
Fabulous days filled with ?Hot African Gossip? [there?s no gossip quiet like African gossip -folks] ?and nights spent in clubs like, The Petite Prince ?and bars like the Rex [a cigar bar] ? have all left an indelible mark. I remember sitting in sister Cinthy?s salon one hot afternoon ?and watching in awe as an uber skinny Cameroonian woman [nobody eats in Zurich] ?jumped out of her turbo [4×4] ?and walk into the salon [catlike] in all her ?I-am-in-Europe? glory [all tight polyester top and trouser combo] ?carrying a large leather travel bag. With her ‘winning-woman-of-Africa-ca-ca’ beauty [paid for red skin, big weave-on, ?God-will-see-me-through? nails and ?mummy-needs-medicine? red lipstick etc], – she walked into the salon [African stylee], -crouched on the floor and emptied the bag ? creating a mountain out of fresh, crisp Swiss notes [no coins for this cat!]. Well I never! In her broken Franglais she told her story [I was the only one who didn?t understand] -and the rest of the women smiled [and what a sight, because apart from Cinthy -none of the other sisters smiled]. Some time later Cinthy explained that our uber thin sister [you alone be winner ooOO] had paid a visit to her [special] friend [all special friends in Zurich are old white men] ?and he had given her some money to go shopping [nudge, nudge, wink, wink] ?and thus my lessons in the workings of the wannabe ‘winning-woman-of-Africa-ca-ca’ had begun. But it was not all about special friends; ?the sisters, Cinthy and I -had some serious fun.
