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g By Richard Prince
Maya Angelou, the Renaissance woman who assumed roles ranging from poet to calypso singer, for a brief time was also a journalist. Angelou had her baptism of fire in journalism in 1960.
She had moved to Cairo with the man who was then her husband, Vusumzi Make, a civil rights activist there, and landed a job as an editor for the Arab Observer, an English-language magazine. Angelou knew nothing about being a journalist, but David Du Bois, a journalist in Cairo who was the stepson of the renowned intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, introduced her to Zein Nagati, president of the Middle East Feature News Agency.
"He was hiring a Hungarian layout artist, and already had twelve reporters working," Angelou explained in 1981's The Heart of a Woman, part of her six-book series of autobiographies.
"Du Bois said I was an experienced journalist, wife of a freedom fighter and an expert administrator. Would I be interested in the job of associate editor? If so, I should realize that since I was neither Egyptian, Arabic nor Moslem and since I would be the only woman working in the office, things would not be easy. He mentioned a salary that sounded like pots of gold to my ears ..."
Du Bois would tell her, "Girl, you realize, you and I are the only black Americans working in the news media in the Middle East?"
With Du Bois' help, she weathered the anger of her African husband over accepting a job without clearing it with him. Her next challenge was working with men who had never worked with a woman, except possibly their secretaries, yet were "cultured and capable." Angelou wrote that she felt like Bre'r Rabbit thrown in the briar patch.
Angelou was expected to cover African affairs and was assigned to a room with a library containing hundreds of books in English. "For two weeks I stayed in the room, using each free moment to cull from the shelves information about journalism, writing, Africa, printing, publishing and editing," she wrote. "Most of the books had been written by long-dead authors and published years before in Britain; still, I found nuggets of useful facts.
"The arrival of secretaries forced me back into the larger room with my male colleagues, but by that time I had a glimmering of journalistic jargon. I began to combine a few news items taken directly from the Telex, and insert some obscure slightly relevant background information. Then I would rehead the copy and call it my own.
“I stayed at the Arab Observer for over a year and gradually my ignorance receded.”
She spent several years in Ghana as editor of African Review, where, according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, she began to take her life, her activism and her writing more seriously.
From Journal-isms, a publication of The Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education@.
Maya Angelou
Was Also a Journalist
Maya Angelou , above, addresses the National Association of Black Journalists at its New Orleans convention in 1983.
(Photo courtesy of Merv Aubespin)