Exit of an Anglo-Nigerian

It was with shock and grief that we learned of the passing of Kaye Whiteman on Saturday 17th May. He had called me early last month trying to catch up on what was happening on the Brussels scene. I was then en route to Lisbon and promised I would call him as soon as I got back. Sadly, I did not follow up as promised. Alas, Kaye Whiteman will never be able to respond to my promised call.

I knew the veteran journalist since the late eighties when I was in graduate school. He was at the time the famous Editor-in-Chief of the influential West Africa magazine and a frequent speaker at Africa-related seminars in the Oxford of those days. For many of us, West Africa was the must-read magazine reporting Nigeria and the sub-region in those good old days. The Internet was not yet what it is today and emails were still part of the secretive world of military electronic communications.

Kaye Whiteman was the quintessential cockney London boy made good. He was smart enough to make it to Oxford where he graduated with a degree in modern history. He took up journalism as a profession, beginning as a reporter with the Times of London. In 1964 he was posted to Lagos where, among other things, he reported on the tragic civil war. His sojourn in Africa’s most populous nation was to mark a turning point in his life. He made many friends in Lagos and also wrote for the Daily Times which, at the time, was the biggest newspaper by circulation on the continent. His love affair with Lagos began in those years and was to last all 78 years of his life on earth. Only last year his book, Lagos: A Cultural and Literary History, was published to wide acclaim.

Although he made his reputation mainly as a journalist, Kaye was, in fact, a jack of all trades and a master of all. A researcher, scholar and public intellectual; he was also a wonderful conversationalist and raconteur in the tradition of the political philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin. What is remarkable about Kaye was his indefatigable energy, passion and joie de vivre. He continued to write until the very end. He was not only a columnist for BusinessDay; he was also a collaborator with Kayode Soyinka in publishing Africa Today. He was also one of the luminaries of the Commonwealth Journalists’ Association (CJA) in London.

But Kaye Whiteman was more than just a man of letters. He did a stint with multilateral institutions, first, as Head of Information at the European Commission in the seventies and as Head of Information and Public Affairs for the Commonwealth Secretariat under Chief Emeka Anyaoku in the nineties. This experience lent some depth to the quality of his literary output in a manner that placed him on a different pedestal compared to lesser mortals who plodded through life as mere pen-pushers. 

Kaye Whiteman belonged to that disappearing breed of British people that I have termed “the Anglo-Nigerians”.  Foreigners who have had any encounter with our country tend to have extreme reactions of either love or loathing. Nigeria tends to leave an indelible imprint on people who have had anything to do with her. Kaye Whiteman was evidently bowled over. 

Before our time, there was Thomas Hodgkin and his wife Dorothy, famous Oxford Professor of Chemistry and Nobel laureate. We were told they always kept the doors of their well-appointed open to Nigerian and other African students. During our time, there was Tony Kirk-Greene who retired from St. Antony’s College and Gavin Williams, recently retired from St. Peters. In London, there was Murray Last, regarded universally as the world’s preeminent authority on the Fulani Caliphate. But none of these people had as many personal friends and as many social as well as professional networks in our country as Kaye did.

There is no doubting that he was troubled by our country’s descent into the dungeons, thanks to the incompetence of our government, high scale corruption, Boko Haram and the lot. But he loved Nigeria – adored Lagos with its chaos and hot-blooded vibrancy.

Hiding under the cloak of scholarship or journalism, there are some foreign intellectual cretins who worm their ways into the inner sanctums of our system, there to orchestrate our national collapse from the inside. Recall Carl Meier’s This House has Fallen. Recall also the soi-disant “scholar” Philip Ostien who wrote about religion and conflict in the Middle Belt. I would not spare the self-styled journalist who calls herself Donu Kogbara and the despicable film she made about Lagos Airport; a film that was, in my view, orchestrated to destroy the image of our country before the eyes of the world. Such people were feeding the global conspiracy aimed at de-robbing us of all honour among the community of nations and labelling all of us in blanket condemnation as nothing but scammers and scoundrels. An English judge even opined that “the more educated the Nigerian, the more dangerous”. 

Kaye Whiteman was far from being of that ilk. Unlike some Westerners who approach our continent with a mercenary attitude, he had no agenda beyond the need to satiate his unquenchable intellectual curiosity and to help in any way he could. The Kaye I knew was the quintessential English gentleman: worldly-wise, witty and courteous, with a self-deprecating humour. He was a man in whose company you never noticed the passage of time. In June last year we were all in Brussels to launch a book he and Ade Adebajo had co-authored. We later ended up at a rather posh restaurant. Kaye was in high spirits, although lamenting the condition of the world and what he regarded as his “genteel poverty”.

An interviewer once asked him what his decades in Africa had taught him. He had only two words: “profound humanism”.

Kaye, when you go, tell them – tell Ungbotari and all the ancestors — that you are one of us.

OBADIAH MAILAFIA