Sleep well my brother Eddie Kuhlmann
Galebolae Ngakane | Friday August 18, 2017 16:05
I am talking about our formative years, both as journalists and media houses, which were also still in their formative stages. Those were truly humble beginnings when newspapers that I found running were The Botswana Gazette, Mmegi and The Botswana Guardian.
The Guardian and The Gazette appeared to be better resourced with a good advertising while Mmegi was all grey with a lot of text that was mostly unsupported by advertisements.
While The Guardian had the likes of Augustine Matumo, with his popular column, Legusto on Friday, Linchwe Aaron Kgaswe with his sports and entertainment features, and Botho Kgengwenyane, Mmegi had people like Keto Segwai, Morula Morula, Tshimologo Boitumelo, Doreen Morupisi and, I think, the tallest journalist in the land, Dikarabo Ramadubu and Chris Modipe Nkwe.
The latter five or so were sponsored for a year-long course in Zambia and I remember how at The Gazette we salivated over the prospects of going to such a course, but management seemed content with in-house training and short courses around the country, especially in the capital city of Gaborone.
By then Segwai was writing from the SWAPO war front in the grey pages of Mmegi and Mesh Moeti would tell us what a great journalist he was. We would then pore over stories of how the SWAPO guerrillas were battling to free Namibia from the grip of Apartheid South Africa.
Oh! Before I forget, there was also the deputy editor of Mmegi at the time, Douglas Tsiako aka Didugso (or something like that), who had a weekly column using the pen name Didugso.
However, my subject here is not the whole lot, including the other departed. My mission is to talk about Eddie Kuhlmann. My mission is to eulogise a man who would have taken this article and before long told me, “Always apply brevity in your stories.”
“Monna, Gale, there is no point in writing a story that even yourself cannot read,” he would say his bushy brow furrowing, but the impatience betrayed by a widening grin that is usually followed by a coarse laugh.
It was hardly a week after The Gazette had employed us and as we scratched our heads on seeking out stories to present at the editorial meeting, Kuhlmann would come in and give us an impromptu lecture on news processing, especially writing.
I can picture myself sitting at my desk at The Gazette offices as this towering fellow in a white t-shirt and sporting a cap comes in and stands vertically by the door, his other arm holding the far corner of the doorframe.
It had become his ritual, especially when it was time to knock off. I didn’t know he was a journalist, but there was no need for introductions because sooner he would regale us with stories he wrote from the past.
I soon learned that it is what he has been doing all along, even before we came. That is, myself, Bernard Ragalase and Meshack Moeti. I think by then he must have been at Mmegi, but journalists in those days had a penchant to flock together, literally.
He was visiting another luminous journo in Nicholas “Macaravan” Sebolao who took us under his wing together with another relatively new reporter, Abraham Motsokono. A lady, just as diminutive as Sebolao, Mmarobi Kenosi (now married and using a different surname) also helped us feel at ease.
The Gazette offices were by then located behind Tsholetsa House, the Botswana Democratic Party high-rise office block that has since been transformed into Mascom head office.
The general manager then was Scholar Puso, who interviewed us and then wrote us appointment letters. The editor was Horace Somanje, a Malawian who had taken over from another Malawian by the name of Al Osman before the trio of us was hired.
Tuesday mornings were meant for editorial meetings where each of us was to come up with a story idea. One day when I was late, I tried the trick of saying there was a big accident that caused a lot of traffic. Sebolao said, “Hey you know, we do not have the lead story. Please get busy call the police. Did you talk to anyone at the scene? Bla! Bla! Bla!”
I was put in a tight corner, but soon learnt that you do not pass incidents when you are a reporter. Everything that looks out of place is a potential story idea. Eddie would come as we knock off and stand by the door.
He would then talk to us in a way that point to ideas that we could develop into stories. In exchange we gave him five pulas with which he would buy a six pack of Castle beer at the bar inside Tsholetsa House where he would sit with BDP head honchos like Kebatlamang Morake, Tombale (not the BMC one)
You see, story ideas could desert us such that whenever Kuhlmann was around, we knew we would get something of substance from him.
It used to be so bad that one day, one of our guys who resided in Bontleng arrived without a story idea one Tuesday morning because he had knocked off before Kuhlmann had visited. He told the meeting when he passed by a home in Bontleng, a man was shouting at his wife that he was going to kill her.
The reporter said he needed to go and check if indeed the deed had been done, only for him, as he peered through the hedge of the home to find the couple lovey-dovey and calling each other darling and sweetheart.
He came back crestfallen and could not write a story that day.
A few years ,later I was to work with Kuhlmann in person. Rraagwe Mary-Jane (as Kuhlmann was known), Sebolao and Tsiako had been contacted by some Afrikaners from South Africa who wanted to start a newspaper in Botswana with the aim of spreading the paper to the whole of Southern Africa.
I was at The Midweek Sun then as its pioneer reporter together with Grace Mosinyi-nee Patlakwe and James Motlhabane who has also since passed away.
Sebolao was The Midweek Sun deputy editor, but was frustrated by the slap-dash approach of the editor, Tendai Nyakunu, whose interest was only pouring text into the newspaper like a labourer shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow, without checking for accuracy, timeliness and all the principles that made, and still make journalism such a lovely field.
So one day he told me he was resigning and would be back for me soon. A week later, he did come and take me to Newslink Africa offices at Gaborone West industrial site. Dougie and Eddie were already there in the most futuristic newsroom I had ever seen. Tsiako was the deputy editor while Kuhlmann was the news editor.
There were computers, lined up against the perimeter of the wall of this spacious and sparklingly clean and exquisitely ambient newsroom. I had not typed on a computer before as previously we had used Brother Typewriters with their hard keys.
After typing on the typewriter on an A4 size blank page, we would then submit our stories to the editor by hand. The editor would use a red pen to either draw a long line to indicate the story is ‘half baked’ or the sources attributed to it are dubious. The pen would correct the grammar and spelling mistakes, which are usually common, even now, with greenhorn reporters.
Apparently, it took only a few days for Kuhlmann to realise something was wrong with these people who had hired us. They usually remained behind when we knocked off, to an extent that the boardroom would be chock-a-block with only white faces swigging cans and cans of Castle lager. We did not try to fraternise with these Afrikaners, but one day when Kuhlmann was going through the computer to check stories, he said he saw a coded message, which he showed to the other fellows.
They could not decipher the code, which appeared to have been transmitted to Pretoria, South Africa by way of modem, a channel that was used to take our stories to SA for further sub-editing. As we surveyed our situation, Kuhlmann would exclaim under his breath, 'it looks like this time we are in real sh—t!'
(Honestly, all of us, when we saw the huge offices, the cars, the amount of money we had promised as salaries, thuoght we had found a pot of gold).
Then came my run-ins with management of the company, especially the general manager by the name of Neil Burrows, who rapidly rose to become Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in no time. I mean, I was there from around end of 1990, but in less than two years, chain-smoking Burrows, who to me was a split resemblance of South African filmmaker, Leon Schuster, became the CEO.
In one of the run-ins with Burrows, I had just reported for work, when Burrows sauntered into the newsroom and went straight for the window ledge just above the computer I was working on. He asked me to stand up and clean the ledge. I refused. I pretended I did not hear him. When I looked up and said: “Ah! Excuse me Sir!”, Burrows boiled under his shirt and the next response was to point at the picture of Sir Ketumile Masire on the editor’s desk and gruffly say, “Ask your president!” The white supremacist then turned around and told me there was a story I must do downtown.
I said okay, I would go after it. He asked Kuhlmann to arrange transport for me. But by 12 noon, there was still no car available, and when he came in to ask what was wrong and I tried to explain my situation, he went apoplectic.
“Why are you still here when I said there is a story in town?” Before I could respond, with my ‘permanent perplexion’ as Kuhlmann would say, the man from Otse stood up and explained as maturely as possible that I had no car to take me to the main mall.
As Burrows’ abuse on me became a regular thing, Kuhlmann would laugh at my ‘permanent state of perplexion’ and say, “Monna G-a-l-e (pronounced like the wind), just cool down, China. This man won’t kill you”.
Kuhlmann would later, in the mid-1990s, leave for South Africa, where he joined fellow Batswana journalists in the late Sebolao and Pamela Dube at The Sowetan. He returned home around 2010, and worked as a dash sub-editor for The Sunday Standard and Mmegi among other publications.
As he is nowin a permanent state of sleep, I say Eddie, that perplexion is gone. An assured, self-confident man is in place. All these because of the education and story ideas you gave me. Sleep well brother!