When editors assign reporters crazy jobs

Villagers celebrate the burning of a house belonging to suspected cult members in Nyahera, Kisumu North, in May 2011. Covering such functions for the media is highly dangerous. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Editors will dispatch a reporter on any assignment without much thought to the practicalities or consequences of the assignment.
  • The editors’ meeting chaired by my most senior Philip Ochieng, had ruled the story had deeper legal and social angles which warranted verification.
  • Getting to Geita in Nyandarua County was a story by itself.

I reported to work at the offices of the Kenya Times newspaper one morning to find Features Editor Mugambi Karanja waiting for me.

That was rare because you hardly saw Mugambi in office. He belonged to the old school when good journalists were handicapped by eccentricity of one kind or the other. In his case it was obsession with privacy.

Hardly anybody knew anything personal about him except his name. He would sneak in to the office just in time for the editors’ meeting then disappear just as fast.

He would reappear past eight in the night when almost everybody had gone home, lock himself in the Features office at the far corner and get cracking.

When done with his pages, he would place the edited copy on the Production Desk and slither away, snake-style, to God knows where.

Come afternoon he would call from a public telephone booth to be told about progress on his pages then again go missing until his “reporting” time in the night.

RELIGIOUS CULT

To see him early in the morning that day was a story in itself. “Young man we have an assignment for you,” he said without greetings.

The previous day, the newspaper correspondent in Nyandarua had filed a story about a religious cult in some place called Geita where members reportedly engaged in free-for-all sex orgies during nightlong vigils called kesha.

Coincidentally, the place is not much far from the notorious Happy Valley where early white settlers in colonial Kenya engaged in sins that included wife-swapping and animal sex.

The editors’ meeting chaired by my most senior, (now retired) editor Philip Ochieng, had ruled the story had deeper legal and social angles which warranted verification by an in-house reporter. Features Editor Mugambi was instructed to dispatch me to Nyandarua for the job. I was to go there on camouflage, register as a member of the “church” and hang around for about two weeks to attend one of the keshas to establish whether the reported free-for-all sex sessions happened.

SEX ORGIES

I listened as my boss gave me the brief, then asked: “What am I to do should it turn out to be true that the sex orgies took place and I happened to be in the session?”

“At that point you will excuse yourself to go to the toilet, then disappear in thin air”, my boss said without batting an eye-lid.

“Suppose they do like “Rev” Jim Jones and force me to join in the orgy or harm me for refusing to obey the “Lord” and Saint Paul’s command that man and woman should not deny “goods” to the other?

“Rev” Jim Jones’ story is worth telling here. It took place in Guyana, Central America, in November 40 years ago. The fast-talking, demon-possessed “evangelist” had a cult called the People’s Temple. During a kesha on the night of November 9, 1978, he said that he had instructions from “God” that everybody take a soft drink laced with highly poisonous cyanide. Anybody who refused to do so was instantly shot dead.

The sermon was that “God” wanted in “heaven” that very night all the 909 members congregating and they all had to die either by taking poison or biting the bullet. In less than half an hour everybody, including Jim Jones, lay dead! I doubt they went to heaven, wherever it is.

NOAH'S ARK

The same lunacy came closer home in March 2000 when a self-appointed “high priestess” in south-western Uganda by the name Credonia, herded her 500 followers into a church hall called the Ark in reference to the biblical Noah’s Ark, and set it ablaze turning everybody inside into ashes.

Earlier, she had told members of the cult called the Movement for Restoration of the Ten Commandments that Jesus Christ was returning to the world to pick them and take them to heaven on the eve of the year of our Lord 2000. When the said Christ didn’t show up — he must have forgotten where to board a bus to come back to a world he left so many years ago — the “high priestess” decided to take herself and her followers to where “Christ” lived!

***

Sorry for the digression. In response to the question what was to happen if I was forced to join in the group sex when the time came, my editor Mugambi told me that I must not open my zip and that if forced I could lie that I was HIV-positive.

“Suppose they say they didn’t mind my status and say something like that I was covered by the blood of the “saviour Jesus” and pronounced “healing” on me?”

PROTECTION

“Then you must carry protection should the worst come to the worst,” my boss said again without batting an eyelid. You’d have thought he was sending me out on a picnic.

“Suppose they say they don’t allow use of condoms?” I asked. “At that point you use common sense!” my boss said with a tone of finality, signalling that it was either I get going or start looking for a job elsewhere.

Getting to Geita in Nyandarua County was a story by itself. In those days the place was literally the heart of darkness. All over the place was a thick canopy of trees 10 times the height of an average adult. The heavy thicket appeared to touch the dark cumulus clouds and you hardly saw the sun even at midday.

It was a Saturday and I found our correspondent waiting for me at the local shopping centre. The good thing is that he was a schoolteacher and the locals didn’t know he used to moonlight for the Kenya Times newspaper using a different name.

STRANGE TONGUES

The following day we attended service at the mabati-walled building where the cult held its services. When those not “saved” were called forward to be prayed for, him and I stepped forward and were proclaimed “born-again” after a prayer half said in strange tongues.

Now “born-again” we were welcome at a kesha session that Friday where “brothers” and “sisters” allegedly exchanged “goods” generously and without borders.

I spent Monday and Tuesday seeing the place and looking for something I could write about but strictly without letting anybody know I was a journalist.

Come Wednesday, we attended a rally at the shopping centre addressed by Nyandarua District Commissioner Ezekiel Machogu. Today he is MP for Nyaribari Masaba in Kisii County.

He was a tough talking man in those days when DCs were a law unto themselves. He said he was aware of existence of some strange cult in the area and warned that its members would be arrested and prosecuted as the cult wasn’t even registered besides encouraging “weird habits not allowed in our traditions.” He also banned night keshas by all religious groups in the area.

CUT SHORT

With that, my mission was abruptly cut short. At night I dumped in a pit latrine the “protection” I had carried and returned to Nairobi the following day.

Postscript: Years later I learnt editors weren’t much different from spymasters when I read the story of a Russian agent of the defunct dreaded Soviet KGB.

While serving in the Italian capital Rome, the officer by name Leonid Kolosov decided to take a beautiful lass for a weekend excursion at the beach and have some fun. He says as Bill Clinton did in the case of Monica Lewinsky that he only “touched but didn’t do it” whatever that means.

Come Monday, the officer got a long-distance call from home to be hauled over the coals and warned that he must not compromise his status and that of the organisation he worked for by engaging in blind dating. Not long after, he received instructions from his bosses to spy on a lady of interest to the KGB.

JOB DONE

He was to do anything possible to get the job done, even if it meant taking the woman to bed! So it was bad if he’d illicit sex on his own will but could do so as long as KGB got what it wanted! In my case chances are that if I was in habit of going to brothels and strip shows, my editors would be alarmed and warn me against it in the name of keeping a good image of my employer. But here were the same editors sending me to an assignment with a high risk of compromising on my morals as long as I got a story for the newspaper!

Reader response: Responding to last week instalment of this column, a reader emailed regarding assassination of US President John F. Kennedy: “The killer of the killed has never been known. Neither has the killer of the killer of the alleged killer of the killed.” My reply: For now we just say they were all killed by death.