My brilliant career
Aidan Hartley
In the summer of 1986 I got a job as a busboy in Burger King on the ChampsElysées. I was given a funny pair of trousers, which I was ordered to wear as part of the uniform. I refused, and so later the very same day the only employment with steady prospects I’ve ever had in my life was terminated. I took to busking on the Métro with my friend Lloyd. Even after that summer ended, I stuck to busking — and to be honest I have been doing it ever since. OK, so Van Morrison tunes got dropped in favour of freelance journalism. But it’s all the same thing.
I became a war correspondent. I assumed people might take me seriously. It took a dozen conflicts, coup d’états, assassinations and sundry acts of God to conclude I was wrong. By my age, hedge-fund traders have already retired to their yachts. I, on the other hand, am still a stringer in Africa.
Poverty does not bother me so much, but it would have been nice to earn some recognition along the way. Nice, even, to be invited to do things based on my empirical knowledge that I might still turn down: to help the Tories brush up on their Africa policy; to pass information to MI6 in return for brown envelopes; to lecture female undergraduates at an American university; to boast of my bravery at dinner parties in Dorset (where I might have bought a good house with all my hefty pay). Instead, I’m still the dodgy bloke with sand in his boots.
For example, I scored a BBC radio assignment to visit Chitral, in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Rather than the hunt for Osama bin Laden, my story was about a local headmaster and his school. Still, the BBC told me a special security meeting had to be held to decide if it was safe for me to go. I was secretly pleased. It meant they cared about me. Indeed, I thought I was quite brave. Finally I was ‘green lighted’. I could just imagine what they had said at the meeting. This is one fearless journalist. ‘Well, no, actually,’ my BBC producer said. ‘They weren’t at all worried about you being killed. Since you will be recording in a school they wanted to be sure you weren’t a paedophile.’ The other day I was pitching a TV com missioning editor. It had been tough to get the meeting. As a result, I had been preparing for days. He was from a TV department that commanded the really big budgets. I was pretty confident. Yours truly had repeatedly appeared in various currentaffairs hotspots, which he must have known about. So this was it.
Exactly 65 seconds into my pitch the editor looked at his watch. ‘Let me stop you there,’ he said with a smile. ‘And before I say anything else, allow me to say what a wonderful job you guys do over in current affairs.’ He gave me both thumbs up. ‘Yeah — risking your lives for stories that deserve to be told. And I’m really pleased that what you do is ring-fenced and doesn’t depend on how many viewers you get.’ He now turned the two thumbs towards himself. ‘But what we’re trying to do over in our department is get millions and millions of people to watch our programmes.’ The pitching meeting was over.
I could live with being treated like a miserable imposter if I was appreciated back home in Kenya. A big fish in a very small pond — I can live with that. Yet if anything it’s worse in East Africa. Black and Asian Kenyans immediately assume I have just arrived off British Airways and know nothing. They say things like, ‘Are you taking your holiday in Mombasa? That’s on the sea. It is very beautiful. Hakuna matata. Yes.’ White Kenyans, on the other hand, assume I must know all the masonic handshakes. They turn sour when I apparently do not. ‘What the bladdy hell are you up to? I had an investor who was going to come in with 20 million until your last story spooked him. Now it’s all gone chapalanga, man. Balls up.’ Being lambasted for reporting on the alarming things I see at home disheartens me particularly because these same people attacked me when Kenya’s troubles erupted in January. They’d stand at the bar and give me Tusker beer squinty frowns. ‘What were you up to? Kipping, man? Why didn’t you bladdy see this coming?’
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