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Stanley Mushava  Literature Today
Book: Creatures at the Top
Author: Stephen MpofuPublisher: Spiderwize (2012)

Stephen Mpofu belongs to that rare breed of Zimbabwe’s pioneer journalists for whom the newsroom was a vocation and not a default option.

Back in the day, journalism did not occur naturally on the inventory of professions available to blacks.

By virtue of its location among the four estates of the realm, the colonial establishment hedged the newsroom out of the reach of blacks.

Per-chance a ‘native upstart’ ventured in, he or she would be consigned to the mundane, the trivial and the peripheral.
Not so with Mpofu, if his riveting memoirs “Creatures at the Top” are anything to by.

The elder scribe’s autobiography is not only jam-packed with personal recollections but also with Zimbabwe’s political history from the 1960s to the 2012.

Related undertakings such as Geoff Nyarota’s “Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Newsman” have been short-circuited by critics for being big on self-aggrandisement and lax on historical rigour.

Mpofu’s desists from an inflated account and, aside subjective hindsight, as can be expected of an autobiography, does not attempt to bend history into his corner.

His principal achievement – since much of the nationalist history is recycled from the public domain – inheres in a modest perceptual aptitude.

The events are exhaustively punctuated with moral justifications or reprisals. Mpofu comes across as a rigid adherent for integrity for much of the narrative bar one instance when he allows his house to be abused into an adulterous rendezvous by a base fellow who later turns out to be a Rhodesian operative.

“Creatures at the Top” refer to that species which constitutes the bull’s-eye of any media practitioner worth his or her salt.

These are the politicians – custodians of power, arbiters of our national prospects – whose work ethic the journalists always summon to judgment and align to the mass interests at the base of the class pyramid.

The title of the book is culled from President Robert Mugabe’s 1989 BBC interview where he referred to some party leaders and Government officials as “creatures at the top out to amass wealth”.

There was need for the scribes, then as now, to scale up their normative billing and take these creatures to account.

Across the dispensations, before and after Independence, the country has bled profusely to gratify these ravening creatures. The story of journalism consists of sustained efforts to tame the creatures and keep them away from the dues of the masses.

It is also an anticlimactic one as those mandated to man the Fourth Estate have been unduly cozy with power for the most part.
Mpofu worked in both dispensations, in and outside the country, espoused to nationalistic ideals and averse to ethical dysfunction in the profession.

In 1961, a 19-year-old Stephen stood above his village peers, determined to chart his course into the dizzy terrain called journalism.
Journalism presented the arsenal by which to dismantle the caste system of the day where one race was deified while another was dehumanised.

What germinated as a mild inclination grew into a hardened resolve in the face of resistance.

When a prospective sponsor, Bishop Albrekston, told him point blank that “journalism was a career for white people,” Mpofu proposed a compromise whereby he would be given a “black wage” just to pursue his heart.

After further rejection, Mpofu decided that he would become a journalist anyhow and, rather than edit the racist congregation’s pocket handkerchief publication, journalism would be his launch-pad to nationalism.

“I would seek employment with bigger publications, or seek funding, team up with any other prominent African journalists to start a national newspaper whose objective would be to change the political order that subordinated blacks to other races in the country,” resolved the penniless young dreamer.

The ultimate turn of events evokes Frank Sinatra’s observation that the best revenge is massive success.

Orwell, Faulkner, and Golding feature among several notables whose work was rejected by prejudiced publishers. One dull publisher told Orwell that “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA” with reference to “Animal Farm”.

Mpofu also defied rejection and went on to score a first as Zimpapers’ first black news editor before holding a number of editorial portfolios at the company.

The Mberengwa-born writer’s determination to strut his stuff in the exclusively European domain also flourished as a result of the expectations assigned to him by the community subsequent to subsequent to his training in Zambia.

“I realised that the peasants somehow regarded my pen as some kind of magic wand I should have waved to open up vast tracts of ‘European land’ for them to move in and settle down there, with their newly wed children, building their own new homes and raising their own families on it and with enough cropping land available as well as abundant grazing land,” Mpofu recounts.

Mpofu takes the reader through his adventures in Zambia where Zimbabweans had a love-hate relationship with the newly independent host to the north. The expats were accused of hiding in a free country and patronising hotels for chicken instead of going back home to fight Smith.

However, Mpofu lauds Zambia, along with other countries, for its role in the liberation of other African countries.
Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda and Samora Machel are credited with running revolutionary relay races for Africa at no mean national sacrifices.

The Pan-African sensibility which was fermenting during the epoch is what the continent needs now beyond mere window dressing.
Mpofu’s 17-year stay in Zambia included brief stints in charge of papers that side, where he was adamant on distinguishing news from political advocacy.

“Politicians habitually claim that they, not journalists, are the voice of the people, while journalists contend that they especially represent the voiceless majority,” Mpofu notes.

The apparent clash of functions can be resolved by observing that politics and the journalism are complementary rather than exclusive and the latter’s mandate to the people optimally requires the facilitatory and monitorial operations of the media.

“Creatures on the Top” comes down on the top-down economics which made life unbearable for ordinary citizens back home in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s.

The Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) cost 32 000 people their jobs, created a budget deficit, and demanded charges for social welfare among other challenges.

Against the backdrop of mass penury, the creatures at the top were all out to amass as much perks as lay within their disposal, whatever the values at stake, as some of them are still doing decades on.

“At home many other maggots joined creatures at the top in an orgy of celebrations followed by an open rat race for riches and the Leadership Code, already in its death throes, was sacrificed on the altar of self-aggrandisement,” Mpofu laments.

The grand old scribe, who has since retired to his Killarney home, has two novels “Shadows on the Horizon” and “Zambezi Waters Run Still” under his belt.

Two more “Little Hearts Can Also Dance” and “The Man with One Ear and One Eye” are pending publication while “Girl of the Orphanage” is work in progress.

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