Goodbye, Eddie Agyemang

The Sunday Mirror newspaper, founded in 1952, was a very entertaining organ that dominated the entertainment life of Ghana throughout the 1950s and early '60s. It was a edited with a very free spirit before being enveloped in the political confusion that marked the acquisition of the Ghana Graphic publishing company by the CPP Government in 1962.

It remained a reflection of Ghanaian society even after the acquisition; it touched on love in all its aspects; the changing lifestyle of Ghanaians (it harboured a puritanical attitude towards young ladies who “smoked and drank” or who were habitués of “hotels, night clubs and bars”. Yet at the same time, pretty girls made a constant appearance on the cover page, with more inside!

Indeed, the paper was slick! I mean – it got away with the self-evident contradiction whereby although it was called the Sunday Mirror, it was actually published on Saturday. The fact that the village and town shops that sold the paper would be closed on Sundays, must have had something to do with that.

In its day, the Sunday Mirror was a very good read, and was so commercially savvy that it moved from self-promotion to being exulted in another medium: it got the ''hi-life king” of Ghana, E T Mensah to compose a catchy song for it that became a national hit:

Sunday Mirror
It is a lovely paper,
Lovely paper,
It is the Sunday Mirror...
It costs you nothing
– Tuppence!
It costs you nothing
Kumkpaanyor!...
...Kobo biu ...
...Daama
(Etc.)
One of the original journalists who made a success of the paper was Eddie Agyemang, a handsome, friendly guy whose meek appearance hid a tough intellect that easily absorbed the technical expertise of the mother paper, the London Daily Mirror and tried to apply it to the Ghana version. Eddie Agyemang has just passed away, aged 85. Sadly, all the company he had served for many years could offer him was an anonymous tribute on its website written by someone who must have known little of him.

It was the sort of tribute Eddie would have spiked, for it didn't even give the age at which he died; didn't tell us where he was born (Kwahu); where he went to school; or indeed anything about the family he has left behind. These are all facts that must surely exist somewhere in the files of the Graphic Corporation? And – couldn't the Graphic Corporation have unearthed even one person who had worked with Eddie and knew him intimately? It is such a shame that there is so little love shown by Ghanaian journalists for other members of their own profession.

I didn't know Eddie well, but I can bear witness to this: the output of Eddie and his colleagues was most satisfying to young people on the verge of adulthood, such as I was in 1952, when the Mirror first appeared. I remember devoting Saturday mornings consuming its offerings: the “human interest” stories that were the paper's stock-in-trade; trying to win its weekly crossword puzzle (until I discovered by accident that my entries were being unlawfully detained in a drawer at our postal agent's by the jealous guy in charge there, whom I simplistically reckoned to be a 'friend' of mine!); p[pondering the advice offered to love-lorn readers by the resident “Aunty”, called Mary, who dished out the sort of “Wait-till-you-are-married” emotional fare that Ghanaians 'Christians' cherished but which wasn't of much help to young males filled full with testosterone, or, for that matter, to young ladies who indulged in romantic fantasies gathered from the fiction of Bertha M Clay or Marie Corelli.

The Sunday Mirror had its own literary taste and published many excellent short stories by Ghanaian writers. It also ran weekly beauty competitions; and played a dominant role in the annual selection, by its readers and others, of a “Miss Ghana”. It had columns that reviewed such plays as were put on in Ghana at the time, as well as the music scene. Most interesting of all, it had a “Radio Critic” who critiqued a subject that had been aired by the Ghana Broadcasting System. Occasionally, the paper published serials: I remember that two of the novels of Cyprian Ekwensi – People of the City and Jagua Nana – were first introduced to Ghanaian readers by the Sunday Mirror.

When I became a journalist at a magazine called New Nation, I made a very good friend in the person of Ekow Des Bordes Acquah, the Graphic's Film Critic. I used to visit him at the newspapers' offices on Brewery Road, Accra, where I read articles by Peter Wilson (Sports Writer) and Cassandra (Political Columnist) among others, in the bound copies of the Daily Mirror of London that abounded there. It was then that I noticed Eddie, with his smiling face and large pair of glasses. He was friendly but unobtrusive, and always seemed busy, carrying wet proofs about and querying reporters about aspects of what they had written. I think Eddie with Francis Awuku and a guy called Ghansah were among the bright Mirror staff whose work told you clearly that the paper had a pedigree of high standards tot look up to.

I have one anecdote that will serve to illustrate what a great soul – and journalist – Eddie Agyemang was. In mid-February 1970, the vicissitudes of journalistic life took me to the Daily Graphic, where I was appointed “Guest Editor. I had found myself debating whether I should accept the Graphic job or not, given the way the editor had been dealt with. But I had, not too long ago, been quarrelling publicly about journalistic standards with John Dumoga, who was then editing the paper, and I felt that if I declined the opportunity to go and demonstrate, at the Graphic, what journalism in Ghana could be, I would have no right ever to open my mouth about the subject.

I arrived at the Graphic never having worked on a daily newspaper before. I was trying to find my feet when one day, out of the blue, Eddie Agyemang (who was editing the rechristened Mirror) elbowed me in the corridor and said simply: “Brother, read the pages!”

I didn't know this at the time but Eddie had spent some months on attachment to the Daily Mirror in London, and this advice he gave me, distilled from many years of experience, was easily the best I would ever receive, as the editor of a daily newspaper.

Ajoa Yeboah-Afari, who worked under Eddie as deputy editor, tells me she was discovered by Eddie when she was still a student at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (where I had taught her Creative Writing). She took him a short story and he not only published it but invited her to become a columnist. The rest is history: Ajoa's column, Thoughts of a Native Daughter is still fondly remembered, despite her having left the Mirror years ago. She confirms the fact that Eddie was indeed a very generous – and educative – person to work with.

If for nothing else, Eddie deserves the gratitude of the Graphic Corporation for having trained so many journalists for it. I learn that it was Eddie, in fact, who bit the bullet and instigated the change of the paper's name from the incongruous Sunday Mirror to The Mirror.

My condolences go to his family. I know how they are feeling, for I too am mourning my Aunt, Maame Afia Mansah, who is being interred at Asiakwa this weekend. I shouldn't say my “Aunt”, for on mother's side, she was the only sister left and thus, in Akan usage, she was my Mother incarnate! I weep for her.