“Publishing is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.”
– Hunter S. Thompson: American author and journalist
The maverick inventor of what he called “Gonzo Journalism”, Hunter S. Thompson, who was widely recognized as a pioneer of New Journalism alongside Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion strikes a chord with his word on publishing.
Good men hardly ever survive the cruel and plastic money drain pipe of publishing where pimps and thieves reign.
Prof Bart Nnaji had been publishing a magazine out of the Northeast of the United States, and he was not doing it for profit or any commercial gain whatsoever. He was publishing experimentally, providentially as a test-run for proper magazine venture.
Fortuitously he teamed up with the legendary novelist and professor, Chinua Achebe, who was then a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to work on the idea of a new magazine. Bart’s projection was that Achebe’s name would be able to elevate the magazine to a lofty status.
The name of the magazine was then chosen: African Commentary. The structure of the magazine was set up. Chinua Achebe would serve as chairman and publisher while Bart would be the president running the operations and using his computational acumen to install computers and hire the workers.
Achebe came forth with the idea that Okey Ndibe, a brilliant and resourceful journalist working for African Guardian magazine in Lagos, Nigeria should be given the job of editor.
“We didn’t have much money,” Bart Nnaji said. “So it’s like a shoestring type of operation, but we thought that we would be able to raise money as we got along.”
Neither Achebe nor Bart had run a business before, but they believed that the beautiful idea they had would thrive. They also believed that they could get adverts to sustain the publication, because magazines ideally made money based on adverts.
They assumed that the beautiful idea making formidable statements on Africa and the Black world would compel people to key in and support the project.
Because of Achebe, they were able to attract key people, a lot of very eminent people in the world such as Nobel Prize winners and famous writers as members of the board, contributing editors, associate editors, patrons etc. A magazine that had influential names such as Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Professor Ali Mazrui, Professor Michael Thelwell etc was indeed worth its weight in gold.
Chinua Achebe in the maiden edition of African Commentary published a piece entitled “Our Mission” in which he made this declaration: “The goal of the African Commentary is to ensure that Africa and the rest of the Black world step into the next century with dignity.”
The reception of the magazine was great. Newspapers like USA Today, the Detroit Free Press, and the New York Times, penned positive reviews.
It did not take much time for the paucity of operating capital to start taking its toll. Those in the know about magazine publishing stated that the promoters of African Commentary needed to have had about $5 million dollars to start the magazine, and would be losing money for years before ever thinking of breaking even.
According to Editor Okey Ndibe, writing in his memoir, Never Look An American In The Eye, “African Commentary hardly had a fighting chance. A typical American magazine of comparable ambition would have a start-off budget in excess of five million dollars. Even so, a good number of those publications were still susceptible to high mortality rates. The magazine I edited never had a smidgen of that. To illustrate: the day after my arrival in the United States, Bart Nnaji, who served as the magazine’s president and CEO, told me that African Commentary had only eleven thousand dollars in the bank. The dire implication was not lost on me: the magazine did not command enough cash even to pay one-third of my annual salary. For most of its checkered existence, even at the best of times, African Commentary could not count on five thousand dollars in its bank account.”
Bart Nnaji relied on the abilities of Okey Ndibe whom he rated highly as a first class editor, and C.Don Adinuba who was hired as West African Bureau Chief. There were other good-hearted committed workers. It was in the course of establishing African Commentary in 1988 that Bart met Professor Emmanuel Obiechina who had inspired him to go into academia during a majestic visit to the State Sports Council in Enugu.
Okey Ndibe could feel for Bart Nnaji, as he stated: “I felt particularly sorry for Nnaji. He was saddled with the impossible task of running a magazine with a pittance of funds. It was more than a full-time job, since there was always some fire to put out. He spent a lot of time at the magazine’s office, ever busy at everybody’s tasks. Much of his time was taken up with cajoling our creditors – printers as well as phone and power companies, among others – to accept piecemeal, often minuscule, payment. I often marveled at what he was able to accomplish, especially considering that he was also a first-class scientist and researcher. His robotics lab at the University of Massachusetts received substantial grants from General Electric and the National Science Foundation, among others.”
Bart Nnaji doggedly battled for the survival of African Commentary, and he was formidably backed by Okey Ndibe and the Jamaican novelist and professor, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, author of The Harder They Come. When the American comedian Bill Cosby was at the height of his popularity with “The Bill Cosby Show” he came to his alma mater, the University of Massachusetts, to give a talk.
Thelwell made the chancellor of the university to arrange a meeting between Cosby, Bart, Thelwell and Okey Ndibe over the possibility of investing in the struggling magazine. Copies of the magazine were given to Cosby together with Chinua Achebe’s latest book, Hopes and Impediments. The troika then asked the comedian to become a columnist for African Commentary. It did not work as Cosby said he could not be writing columns given his hectic schedule. Another proposal of the magazine doing a cover story on him was equally gently declined by Cosby. It was Cosby who then shocked Bart, Thelwell and Okey by announcing that he would rather invest in the magazine!
Thereafter Cosby gave the name and address of his investment company, and asked the trio of Bart, Thelwell and Okey to forward the requisite investment proposal to the company, which they instantly did.
In the words of Okey Ndibe, “Close to two weeks later, we received a response. Cosby would not be investing after all, the firm wrote. We had felt buoyant after meeting with Cosby,; now, with the rejection letter in hand, we came crashing down, mercilessly, on hard ground.”
Other attempts at getting investors equally fell through. There was the case of the poet and novelist, Kofi Awoonor, author of the controversial much-anthologized poem “Songs of Sorrow” and the novel This Earth, My Brother, who was then serving as Ghana’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations, asking some New York-based Haitian doctors to invest in African Commentary.
These Haitians initially agreed to invest half a million dollars for some shares in the magazine but then added the request that Achebe would need to relinquish one of his posts as chairman or publisher for one of their members to take over. This did not meet with the acceptance of Achebe, and the proposed investment crumbled.
It was in January 1992 that Bart Nnaji faxed in his letter of resignation to the other board members of African Commentary magazine.
