Remembering KB Mensah

There is an old-fashioned English pub, a stone’s throw away from New Broadcasting House in London. It is called The Yorkshire Grey and for decades it has been the favourite watering hole for BBC journalists. It was therefore the obvious choice for our evening to remember KB Mensah, who presented Focus on Africa and other BBC radio programmes during the 1980s and 1990s.

I bumped into a man from Ghana as I made my way up to the cosy fire-lit room we had reserved for our gathering. He told me he first met KB at boarding school in England, when they were aged about six. They had remained firm friends ever since.

I carried on up the stairs, past black and white photographs of old-school BBC presenters speaking into big metal microphones which swung down from the ceiling. There I met another Ghanaian who worked at the BBC in the 1980s. He told me one of his colleagues had been Peter Kenyatta, a very close relative of not one, but two Kenyan presidents.

Good times with KB

The room quickly filled to bursting point. We spilled over into the bar area, taking over the whole upstairs of the pub. Luckily the barman was used to journalists, as our behaviour became ever-more raucous, stories flying about the good times we had with KB. The mood became more thoughtful when we listened to recordings of KB presenting, as only he knew how.

It is a testament to KB that the people who gathered to remember him on that cold winter evening were among the best and the brightest of journalists, all of whom share a love for Africa, and a commitment to telling its stories. 

The formidable former editor of Focus on Africa, Robin White, was there in a bright purple jumper and a turquoise shirt. When I called Robin on New Year’s Eve to tell him KB had died, he fell into stunned silence. After several minutes he told me he had never met a man like KB. A man with such enormous brainpower that he could remember every date, every name, every event, every detail.

The TV star Rageh Omaar was there. This was the first time we had seen him in years, but nothing was going to stop him from coming to pay his respects. Not even the fact that, within a very short time, he was due to broadcast live outside Downing Street on ITV’s Ten o’Clock News.

Rageh and I spoke about our crazy days at Focus on Africa in the 1990s, when we were just starting out in journalism. How we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, and how KB saved us on several occasions. How our editors, Robin White and Elizabeth Ohene, would send us, armed only with a tape recorder, to Africa’s maddest, baddest places, and how KB would work his magic, introducing our reports in such a way that they made sense. 

KB’s encylopaedic knowledge

I cannot count the number of times KB’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Africa saved us from disaster. If we got wrong as much as a date, or the pronunciation of a village, we were in serious trouble. The phones would ring off their hooks, page upon page of outraged text would spew out of the fax machine. Focus on Africa’s millions of listeners felt the programme was somehow part of them, that it belonged to them, so we had to get it right. 

This makes sense when one considers that listening to Focus in those days could help people make up their minds whether, now that the rebels were so close, it was time to flee the village. It is why, when I went to Liberia in the 1990s, everything came to a standstill at 1700 GMT as people gathered around radios to listen to Focus. Why at 1700 GMT Somalis stopped fighting in Mogadishu and President Museveni interrupted cabinet meetings. Why, when I met General Gato, all thin and weak after years in the bush with Angola’s UNITA rebels, the first thing he did was sing to me the Focus on Africa signature tune.

The BBC presenters Julian Marshall, Paul Bakibinga, Audrey Brown and Bilkisu Labaran all came to The Yorkshire Grey to remember KB, as did the former West Africa correspondent Elizabeth Blunt and Africa Editor Martin Plaut. The Nigerian journalist Donu Kogbara was there, as was Zimbabwean film-maker Farai Sevenzo. There were plenty of non-journalists too, including the head of the Royal African Society, Richard Dowden.

Senior journalists from The Financial Times, The Guardian and Reuters spoke of how much they had learned from KB, and, unlike most journalists, how incredibly generous he was with his knowledge, contacts and time. The Editor of Africa Confidential, Patrick Smith, gave a speech about KB’s contributions beyond the BBC – to Africa Confidential, The Africa Report, Bloomberg and many other media organisations. 

One of the BBC’s rising stars, the Africa Security correspondent, Tomi Oladipo, described how KB had been his role model, how, as a boy, he heard KB on the radio and thought ‘I could do this too’. He spoke of how KB had been so kind to him on a reporting trip to Ghana, and how KB had praised his journalism, when it should have been the other way around, him praising KB.  

But that was what KB was like. He was a presenter without ego. He was the kind of journalist who did not put himself at the centre of the story. Who, perhaps more than any other journalist I know, did what the BBC taught me when I first joined. ‘It’s not about you, it’s about the story. Your job is to allow other people to tell their stories.’ 

And KB did just that. With his calm, warm, authoritative voice, he allowed the stories of Africa to be told.

• Mary Harper is the BBC’s Africa Editor and the author of ‘Getting Somalia Wrong? Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State’ (Zed Books). Her website is www.maryharper.co.uk.