What's a ‘scribe’, for Christ’s sake?

So, you thought ‘scribes’ only existed in the Bible?

I have news for you!

Scribes also exist in the flesh, here on earth, outside the pages of the Holy Book.

It’s the nomenclature with which the older Fleet Street [London] journalists used to describe each other.

It’s an esoteric term, of course; so esoteric, in fact, that as good a novelist as Evelyn Waugh (whose intimate revelations about how British journalists operate are amusingly recorded in the novel, Scoop) did not seem to know it. Well, he didn’t use it in his book, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, I chanced upon the name by accident. It was in 1957, and hundreds of foreign journalists had descended on Ghana, to cover the independence celebrations of "the first of Britain's better-known colonies in Africa", to obtain its independence.

The Information Services Department of the new nation, headed by the impeccably knowledgeable ex-journalist, Jimmy Moxon, had, in an ingenious PR operation, laid on a couple of brand-new luxurious buses to take the journalists from their hotel (the Ambassador Hotel in Accra) to the various venues where ceremonies were taking place to mark the handover of power.

Covering the ceremonies for the first media organ for which I ever worked, New Nation Magazine, I noticed that the white, foreign journalists were accorded the privilege of being taken to the venues of ceremonies sometime before the notables – such as the Duchess of Kent and Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah – arrived at the scene.

Forced to look for taxis to take me to the same ceremonies and thereby arrive there late sometimes, I one day put my “Press” badge around my neck and summoned the courage to board one of the buses.

It was only carrying white men! What would happen? My heart was beating fast as I found a seat on the bus. But no one attempted to eject me!

So, I settled down and got into a conversation with one of the journalists.

He identified some of his colleagues for me. They bore the names of journalists whose work I had been coming across when I read London newspapers; among them, John Redfern of the London Daily Express.

Although the Daily Express was known to be an arch-imperialist newspaper, I found Mr. Redfern to be very courteous and chatty. Because the photographers in the group always put their cameras in camera cases and stowed them safely under the seats of the bus, I couldn’t tell which of the journalists was a cameraman and who was a writer.

So, encouraged by Mr. Redfern’s friendliness, I asked him directly: “What do you do, please?”

“I’m a scribe,” he answered laconically. He was good enough to point to the other “scribes” – Anthony Mann from the Daily Telegraph was one of those he pointed out to me. Having been a “junior journalist" for less than six months, seeing journalists in the flesh whose dispatches I had read from remote places like Hungary, Poland, Egypt, and other centres of "hot news" in those days, was quite exhilarating.

What wouldn’t I give to become a “scribe” who traveled to foreign countries, at a newspaper’s expense, to live in nice hotels and write about them! (I told myself secretly).

I suppressed the quiet thought that arose in my mind that, perhaps, covering foreign countries could be a” dangerous” thing to do, seeing that “foreign correspondents” usually went to countries where wars were taking place. Indeed, in 1957, the Ghana story was about the only one in the world that could be properly called a “happy” story.

Cyprus (war with a devil of a leader called Archbishop Makarios); Kenya (war with a monster of a leader called Jomo Kenyatta); Hungary (rebellion led by a heroic anti-communist leader called Imre Nagy) and Poland (rebellion led by another anti-Communist leader, Cardinal Vishinsky or something). At any rate, those were the classifications of those figures I absorbed from the writings of some of the people I had joined on the bus.

Well, it took me a relatively few years to become a “foreign correspondent” myself. I started with nearby Togo (don’t laugh!) where I went to investigate juju practitioners and their powers, for Drum Magazine. [Drum Ghana Edition, August 1961; Nigerian Edition, September 1961].

It was a story I loved doing, as all my vivid descriptions of juju in action were illustrated with marvelous photos by an ace cameraman called Christian Gbagbo. I was bowled over when the editor-in-chief of Drum continent-wide at the time, Sir Tom Hokinson (former editor of the world-famous picture magazine, Picture Post [published in London]) wrote to say that the story was “the best story we’ve ever had in Drum! “Not a bad start for a budding “foreign correspondent”, eh?