Correspondent tells story beyond the story

By Noel Baker 
Special to The Irish American Post

Fergal Keane has barely had time to stand up straight in the town of Cobh, before people are seeking him out, leading with their outstretched hands. An English woman relays how much she "loves his programs," before delivering the ultimate compliment — "you've made my day."

Keane is unerringly genuine in his thanks. He's smiling, but obviously a little embarrassed by all the attention, as he drops his jacket over his shoulder and lollops into the Sirius Arts center where he is to give a reading from his new book, A Stranger's Eye. Accompanying this relaxed, urbane figure, is Keane's wife, and cradled in her arms, their son, Daniel, a small boy who has made an impression on the world maybe unrivaled by any other child his age.

Cobh is resplendent this sunny Sunday afternoon, with its Corpus Christi bunting and brass bands, people holding melting ice creams, as the steeple of the cathedral rises to the sky behind them. We stroll to a nearby restaurant, where, over coffees, Keane gives the lie to the old aphorism — that interviewing journalists is like draining blood from a particularly unhelpful stone.

More than coincidence It's more than a coincidence that Keane should give a reading here, as the concept for the BBC Forgotten Britain series (which spawned A Stranger's Eye) originated from a Cobh native, documentary producer James Hayes.

"He watched my work from abroad, and put the idea to the head of BBC 1 of getting me to do a series about Britain, and they jumped at it," explains Keane. With his quiet, unhurried tones, it's as though he's imparting covert information, or telling you something in the strictest confidence.

"James and I spent about 18 months traveling around the UK — the series came from him, but the idea was taken from the things that pre-occupy me," he adds.

Keane's nationwide trek took him to the Glasgow shipyards, a Leeds housing estate and a rural farming community in the south of England. Typical of his reporting style, the protagonists weren't pushed into the background.

"I think the key thing was giving "ordinary people" the chance to talk, because when they get the chance to talk they're bloody articulate," he says. "And these people didn't come across as helpless, they were simply trying to do their best — I hope that came across in the book and I hope it came across in the TV series."

Discussing the last program in the series, where Keane himself had to face up to his own prejudices regarding the farming community, he arrives at a line which could be attributed to his entire style of reporting. "It's all about getting to know people as individuals, not as a label," he says, almost imploringly. "Get behind the bloody label.".

'Get behind the label' From the days of his first job in the Limerick Leader, this nephew of the playwright John B Keane and self-confessed Corkman has strived to "get behind the label."

He went from print media to RTE, and after a few years as Northern Ireland correspondent, moved to the BBC over a decade ago, where as a foreign correspondent he reported from Kosovo, Hong Kong and various other ports of call in Asia, all over Africa, and beyond. It was his years soundtracking images from South Africa, however, with which he has become synonymous - the job had always been his life's ambition.

So which came first: journalism, or South Africa?

"I'd say they were probably born around the same time," he replies. "I always wanted to be a writer, and then I fell in love with South Africa through a book, Cry the Beloved Country. Even when I was at the Leader, I was applying for a work permit for South Africa — I have letters going back to 1980."

 The dramatic shift in South African history which Keane witnessed has stayed with him. "'I've just finished reading a book written by a couple of photographers who I knew very well, and it brought back to me what a powerfully emotionally wrenching time it was," he explains. "The tension. The mixture of terrible violence and incredible hope. It was a changing experience. It was just one of those things in your life, those years in Africa."

"A lot of people were saying, 'Oh, there won't be black majority rule.' but I thought there was always the potential for the violence to be much worse," he continues. "I always thought they would get it (black majority rule), but that there would be a lot of violence, and there was a great deal of violence, but in the end, there was nothing as bad as there might have been."

Enduring theme Whether reporting or writing, an enduring theme of Keane's work is that of hope where there should be none, of a glimmer of light in the darkness. Yet there was one place where even this tenet took a hammering.

"Oh, yeah — I think in Rwanda," his voice descending to little more than a whisper as he recalls the atrocities and attempted genocide which ripped through the small central African country in the mid-'90s.

"It took a long time to get that out of my system."

That aside, his belief in power of hope has seldom wavered. "Maybe it's a particular human thing to me, that for me, luxuriating in despair just wasn't on. I want to get on and make a go of things. I think it's the sense of going back to these places, going back to South Africa and watching the fact that people keep working."

Rwanda may have displayed the nadir of humanity for Keane, but there has been many occasions when his belief in humanity has been powerfully vindicated. One episode in particular stands out.

Outside polling booth "We were standing outside the polling booth in Soweto, on the first day of the elections," he recalls. It was the day when all the old people came out to vote. This old guy came limping out of the polling booth, Robert Kanten was his name, and his son had been killed by the security police. He had been tortured himself, and I said to him, "You've just voted, how did it feel?'"

He said, "Today, I became a human being once more!"

The job of a foreign correspondent is fraught with its own all too real dangers. One of these is the risk of inflaming an already incendiary situation. "On more than one occasion. I had the cameraman stop and put it away,", he says. "If there's any sense that our filming could be a catalyst for violence, then put it away. It mightn't be immediately obvious. For example, you see someone who's about to be executed. The one time that happened, the cameraman put out his hand and said to the guys who were doing it, 'Stop,' and they did."

He is not gung ho, he says. "One of the greatest factors in these situations is the fear for your own life — if I intervene I'm going to get killed. With the exception of my son and my own family, I will always put my own safety first. Because dead reporters don't tell stories."

Flack jackets, iron nerve With flack jackets and iron nerve, many BBC foreign correspondents have become known as "firemen." With a wry smile, Keane deflects the idea that he might be one too — after all, it's just another label. "I've done lots of it, just being in and out of places, but I don't tend to favor it. I just think it's very hard get to grips with the truth of the story when you're just parachuted in, no matter how good you are. You have to gather 10 years knowledge too quickly, so the depth, the resonance, isn't there."

On the issue of impartiality when reporting, the name of Eugene Terre Blanche, white nationalist leader in South Africa, is mentioned, and Keane is in like a flash. "He's a fat bollocks, and you can quote me,", he says with aplomb, chuckling.

"It is not an impartial world and people do not behave in an impartial way, if they did there wouldn't be any need for news reporting. Journalists are very clever at finding forms of words that 'suggest' overtly, their own point of view, and you're pretty careful about that. But more often than not it's a judgment call, you're called on to make a judgment about how a situation will turn out, speculating, though it's more than that. But I'm very good at compartmentalizing."

'Obsession with trivia' While he lambastes the "obsession with trivia" which he feels is now rife in contemporary journalism, Keane also admits that he's becoming increasingly conscious of the tone of foreign reporting; that while a correspondent can catch a plane and leave, the camera's subjects are left behind.

"That's been on my mind a lot lately. I think we have to look at the way the agenda works. News, by its very nature, is dramatic, but I think there's room for presenting a more rounded picture. And it does help to create an image of the world, or of black people particularly, as helpless, and they're not. You try and survive in a South African squatter camp, and see the levels of ingenuity and resources that people use - we've got to do more of that. Not in a patronizing way, but just broadening the agenda."

The job of BBC South African correspondent may have been the one he always wanted, but as his work since has shown, there was no sensation of "having made it."

"I was in my late 20s when I became a foreign correspondent"," he argues. "No, I sort of moved on to a different level, I got a few awards for my work in Africa, and Letter to Daniel took me off in a different sphere."

Letter to Daniel didn't so much take Keane into another sphere, as into another world. Instead of the foreign correspondent who prints his autobiography, Keane was now a writer, someone who gives readings in bookshops. The original radio broadcast which prompted an unprecedented public response and led to him writing the book, did not, he says, convince him that he was compromising his reporting.

"I think the program it went out on, From Our Own Correspondent, is by its nature is very often polemical. I think if I'd been on the 9:00 news or on Panorama doing it, it would have been serious, I'd have felt that I'd crossed that line. The things that I'm talking about (in the book), they're personal, but they're also universal. These are things that impinge on the lives of everyday people and I don't see anything wrong with doing it."

He demurs when asked whether he is he now a personality. "I wouldn't want to put it that way, but I accept that that's how some people see it. You've got to adopt the attitude that people will write really flattering things about you, and that people will write really nasty things about you, and you pay the same attention to both, which is none. You just get on with it."

The birth of his son has changed everything, he says. Letter to Daniel tells of how Keane's father was often absent, due to alcoholism, during the Corkman's childhood. While his own situation is very different, Keane is determined to be a father first. "I'm no longer willing to take risks with my life."

Helpfully, the BBC has changed his brief somewhat — he is no longer expected to live halfway across the world for his work. Is this because they now see him as a valuable asset?

"I'd like to hope so," laughs Keane. "I can't see myself going back on the road. I'm a little bit older, I want to go where I want to go. There's loads of different stories you can do, it doesn't have to be dodging bullets all the time. And I don't think you can consciously bring a child into this world and then dread the possibility that you might not be there, when there's shooting and bombing. Then again, you could be killed crossing the road. But I think there's a way of substantially reducing the risk."

Turning to matters at home, the Ireland Keane left over a decade ago is very different to the one he finds today. He is not one for harking back to the good old days, but nor is he entirely convinced that all change has been for the better. "I think one must be careful not to overdramatize," he says, "but I think there is a clear danger, and I saw it in Asia particularly, that when you get an acceleration of prosperity, that the material becomes the imperative.

"Now, there's a lot of sentimental bullshit talked about it, what a great place this place used to be, where in fact it was introspective, dark and inward looking, and a lot of that was swept away, which is brilliant. However, the kind of crass materialism that you see, the attitude towards refugees..."

His voice trails off, but not for long — there are some aspects of old Ireland that he would like to see remain. "Just the ease of inter-personal communication — I'd hate to see that go."

He admits that he hasn't "been into long-term planning for quite a while," but says that an eventual return to Ireland is a possibility. He professes a strong love for Ardmore, the picturesque fishing village in Co. Waterford, but adds, "I just wonder that I've been away for so long that, would I find it hard to settle in."

It might seem a strange admission. After all, Keane, unlike other reporter/broadcasters, is someone who seems to invite himself into your living room. But then, his last book was called A Stranger's Eye. A journalist's detachment then, but tempered with a warmth which glows from the screen. Like he said, he's good at compartmentalizing.

A quote from Letter to Daniel condenses Keane's perspective on his job as a reporter.

"It is the fruit of witness. Our trade may be full of imperfections and ambiguities, but if we ignore evil we become the authors of a guilty silence."

It was only afterwards that I realized that no one had paid for the coffees.