Peter Gavin came to Africa as a journalist to cover the Rwandan genocide. For several months, he moved from refugee camp to refugee camp documenting conditions of living of the unfortunate refugees. What he heard were stories of tears, destitution, destruction, disease, hunger, thirst and death. But there were also stories of courage and determination, dreams and hopes. And while he faithfully recorded and sent his stories back home to his newspaper, it occurred to him that these stories were good material for biographies.
That's realization set him on the path to a successful career writing biographies. “I realized that there was more to what I was doing than the superficial stories I was doing. In fact, I realized that all these people had stories that could ….that should have been written as books. I set about collecting materials. I have written five fine “autobiographies” that are doing very well,” Peter told me with enthusiasm when we met in a down-town café.
What Peter had found is an endless source of ghostwriting opportunities. “Everyone in Africa-and that's literally speaking-is an excellent subject for a biography. Everyone has had momentous experiences that can make good reading.”
Big Names, Big Money
Bookshops in most cities and town in Africa today are full of ghostwritten autobiographies. Politician lead the pack, starting from the adorable Nelson Mandela of South Africa to the ignoble Robert Mugabe, the dictator of Zimbabwe. They are also the easier to pay big money and quickly.
The most celebrated of these was that of Kenya's former president Daniel arap Moi. Faced with a growing dissent against his rule, Moi was in a hurry to write a book which he hoped would “do public relations work” for him. The book was written by a British journalist Andrew Morton-you'll remember him for his bestselling biographies of Princess Diana and Monica Lewinsky, the woman in the American Whitehouse sex scandal that nearly brought down former President Bill Clinton. According to reports, Moi paid Mr. Morton more than US$10 million.
A biography of the late Sudanese rebel leader, and first President of Southern Sudan John Garang, is said to have brought a small fortune to a Kenyan journalist. Mr. Garang who was killed in a plane crash, was also the Vice President of Sudan.
Idi Amin's Biographies
When headline grabbing former dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin Dada, was deposed and exiled to Saudi Arabia, almost all the people who had contact with him, including his cabinet ministers, had their autobiographies written.
The earliest and possibly the most famous of these “Idi Amin biographies” was that written by a British teacher, Denis Hills. In the book, Mr. Hills, then a lecturer at Makerere University, described Amin as “a village tyrant.” Amin's extensive spy network smelt out the book when it was still in manuscript form.
Mr. Hills recounted the events that followed in an interview with me published in a twice a week column I wrote in the 80's for the Daily Nation in Kenya, “I was startled when Amin's soldiers pounced on me,” he told me. “I didn't know how Amin got wind of the remark in a book that was not yet published!”
Amin sentenced Mr. Hills to death for treason in a case that was as comical and bizarre as it was tragic. He was “pardoned” and released only after the intervention of the British government.
Mr. Hills, who had by the time I interviewed him already written six more books told me that the British Queen was among those who were happy that he was released. “I wrote a letter to the Queen to thank her. Her secretary wrote back and said the Queen was happy that I was released. She had to be because had I not been released, it would have meant that her letter to Amin had been ignored.”
