Rest In Peace Alhaji Razak El Alawa

ONE FINE SAY IN 1986, I attended a ceremony held in Lagos to celebrate the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to my friend, the Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka.

After the ceremony, I was looking for a taxi to take me back to my hotel when I heard my name shouted out from amongst the throng: “CAMERON!”

I turned round. Who in Lagos knew me?

A tall, smiling guy approached me and threw his arms around me.

“I am Razak El Elawa. I used to work at the Daily Graphic!”, he said.

I now had one of those moments that those who had clocked long years on earth are often confronted with: I didn’t remember the guy!

“Gee!” I thought. This guy had probably worked for me when I was editor of the Daily Graphic, and I didn’t remember him?

I was confused. I had always prided myself with possessing a prodigious memory. Was it gone?

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But Razak soon put me at my ease by telling me that he arrived at the Graphic five or so years after me! He had also been Press Secretary to Dr Hilla Limann post-1979, he said.

Saved from the embarrassment of not recognising him, I said warmly: “We must meet!”

But we didn’t (as usually happens). I regret that very much, for Alhaji Razak El Alawa passed in early May 2021, at the age of 76.

We had laughed at each other for missing the opportunity to hang out in Lagos, when, years later, he invited me to his house in Accra to enjoy the main annual Islamic Festival celebrations, with his good self and a number of guests from the media, including my old colleague, the sports writing ace, Ken Bediako, and a few other friends.

What I didn’t know when I got to Razak’s house was that he had a nice surprise for me – one of his guests was Joe Lartey, the legendary football commentator.

Now, Joe and I went back a long time: As editor of Drum Magazine, I was privileged to publish his heart-stopping account of how he survived being torpedoed into the sea during World War Two, when he was serving as a sailor in a British warship!

But what brought down the house was when Joe and I narrated our separate tales of running into each other by accident on a Lagos street in the 1980s.

Wasn’t it amazing that I had once run into both Joe and Razak by accident in Lagos, and we were now all, thanks be to God, socialising together in Accra? What are the chances of meeting someone familiar in the streets of an over-crowded, hyper-bustling city like Lagos? A million to one? It was quite incredible.

I say all this to highlight the fact that being with Razak was tremendous fun. He had imagination – imagine inviting Joe Lartey to a party and not telling the other guests that “OVER TO JOE LARTEY!” would be there. The laughter that Joe and I belted out, as we recalled how he had insisted that I should jettison my programme for the day and go with him to the house in Lagos which he shared with two of our former GBC colleagues – the brothers Sidi Ali – could have enlivened a meeting of ‘The Dead Souls’ Society.’

Razak had a generosity of spirit that was absolutely unsurpassed. Over here, too, I chanced upon him one day at the History Department of the University of Ghana, where I was doing research into my forthcoming book on the life of the late Prof. Albert Kwadwo Adu Boahen.

Quick as a flash, Razak arranged to meet me later, and out of our subsequent conversations, he published some biographical articles about me in his column in the Daily Graphic.

He won my heart with the series because he was not only accurate in what he wrote, but also, he was empathetic. His own background being brought up in Kumase enabled him to to fully understand the difficulties I had passed through in early life, having gone through, as a village boy who, unlike him, had never seen the inside of a secondary school, endeavouring to acquire qualifications through private study by correspondence courses, carried out mostly under candlelight, after a full day’s work as a pupil teacher on a primary school.

Razak was, in fact, that not-so-rare bird in Ghanaian history: a person of Yoruba extraction, born and bred in Kumasi, and thus totally bilingual. Or trilingual, if one adds English. I had attended school with a boy of a similar background – my best school friend, Ladipo Joseph.

Culturally “multi-ethnic”, Razak he was also a very cultivated individual as a person. His interests cut across the disciplines that journalism tends to force upon people. For instance, I once encountered him engaged in a spirited technical discussion of railway and road-building projects in Ghana, with a European engineer whom he’d invited to the International Press Centre in Accra!

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at that, for Razak was the three-times winner of the coveted “Journalist Of The Year” award of the Ghana Journalists Association. This award took him to Liverpool, in England, where he must have taken the opportunity to exchange ideas with all manner of businessmen, thereby acquiring an interest in developmental matters.

There is so much to say about Razak – how he was uniquely blessed in being one of the pioneers of the University of Ghana’s Department of Post-graduate Communications Studies, both as a student and as a teacher. (His students, I believe, included ex-President John Mahama).

And one only contemplate with envy, his service as a leader, both in and out of campus, of the famous “Vandals” of Commonwealth Hall, Legon!

He also distinguished himself as a thorough-going professional journalist, by enthusiastically embracing a posting to Northern Ghana as the Daily Graphic’s regional correspondent, based in Tamale. A more superficial character would probably have considered the posting as the manifestation of being sent into exile! Yes – many journalists do want to be based in the metropolis – the centre of things. But, of course, it is in the countryside that some of the most important stories unfold and which, if covered properly, can bring real benefits to both the journalist and his hosts in the locality.

In fact, cosmopolitan ingénue that Razak was, he adopted the local, (then) obscure football club, Tamale United, and helped it to become a formidable team in the national league.

I last saw Razak at the 70^th anniversary dinner of the Daily Graphic, where, like me, he was given an award and had his name mentioned by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Sadly, our face masks made it impossible to exchange anything but a few cursory words. I didn’t realise, of course, that those muffled words were the last I would ever hear from him.

Truly, journalists have lost an immensely sociable character, who enjoyed conversation and was endowed with the one quality above all, that marks a journalist out as an excellent practitioner of his art – curiosity. (For instance, he was one of the few people who knew the origins of the moniker I use for emails, and always greeted me with the full nomenclature!)

Well, he will have no regrets about being granted time to rest – for he used the time granted him on earth to enjoy life as much as possible.

I pray to the Almighty to look after the large family that survives him

Alhaji, da yie, wae! [Sleep well, dear Alhaji.]

[PS: By the way, the Ghana media, in its coverage of Razak’s life, has done one of its practitioners proud: for if you GOOGLE Razak’s name, you will be pleasantly surprised at the number of warm-hearted entries you’ll find!]

By Cameron Duodu