Our story ends earlier this year. One sunny Friday Jemima Beukes, deputy general secretary of the Namibian Media Professionals Union, mounted a rostrum before 30 of her members. “Climate change has already brought drought and floods to our country”, she told them. “If we are going to hold government officials and others to account, then the media is key”. It was the start of a two-day workshop on reporting climate change. Meteorologists, government officials and NGO representatives took it in turn, guiding the reporters through the science and politics of rising global temperatures.
The surprise is the thread linking this meritorious event under Windhoek’s beating sun, to London’s Fleet Street in its pomp.
Funding for the training came from the Lord Deedes of Adlington Charitable Trust, a fund established by the former Daily Telegraph editor Bill Deedes. He enjoyed a remarkable career – a member of Harold Macmillan’s cabinet in the 1960s, he later took the Telegraph’s helm for a dozen of its most influential and successful years. He stepped down in 1986, but wrote columns until the very end of his life in 2007.
It was an assignment when he was only 22, however, that etched Deedes into journalistic folklore. Dispatched to Africa in 1936 to cover the second Italo-Abyssinian war, he found himself in the company of an equally youthful Evelyn Waugh – who would go on to become one of Britain’s most successful novelists. Neither young man made a great success of war reporting. Deedes’ misadventures, however, provided the raw material for Waugh’s most enduring character, William Boot, protagonist of his 1938 novel 'Scoop'.
It was the books that Deedes wrote in later years that generated the funds that are today administered by his eponymous Trust. And whatever is the truth of his jejune journalism, the Trust’s support for initiatives to help African media workers are inspiring. It has supported IFJ programmes all over the continent for several years now.
Participants at the climate change workshop were certainly positive. Martin Endjala, a journalist at the Windhoek Observer said: “This course was a pivotal moment for me. Reporting climate change requires technical understanding, particularly of terminology, something that not all of us possessed. Learning about UN work on this issue, and standards that our own government should achieve will really help us to hold them accountable. Training opportunities are scarce for Namibian reporters, so grasping this was a no-brainer.”
At the end of the Windhoek workshop, the Namibian journalists agreed that reporters have a deep responsibility for making climate change understandable to their readers and viewers. Public understanding of science underpins all our capacity to hold politicians and other decision makers to account, they resolved.
Rather like Deedes' life itself, it is evidence that whatever our starting point, with sufficient application, great things are always possible.