He didn’t say when his father asked him, but I wonder what the old man must think in his grave. Jonathan Power is now 83 and arguably one of Europe’s most widely published columnists.
He was a young freelance journalist when his father asked him the question. Still, even if he had lived to see his son syndicated globally, including by some of the world’s most prestigious newspapers and magazines, I’m not sure his father would have retracted the question: when will you get a proper job?
Power’s father didn’t think of journalism as a job. Instead, he considered it a lens or a keyhole through which one looks at the world’s most notable jobs like engineering or medicine. A side hustle, in today’s language. That was perhaps the whole point of supporting him to study agricultural economics, a distant cousin – but a cousin anyway – of some of the world’s proper job routes, only for his son to go astray.
More than a betrayal
I’ve known Jonathan Power for over 25 years. But I met him again in his new book When Are You Going to Get a Proper Job? It’s a chronicle of his 60 years in journalism, which helped me understand why he once told me that I’d be better off being a plumber than hoping to make money from syndicated writing. It also helped me understand why my son regards journalism with courteous disdain.
But Power’s 227-page novel-like autobiography published by Noema in 2024 is more than a son’s betrayal of his father’s wishes. It’s also about relationships, love (especially eros), travel, religion and faith in the intrinsic goodness of the human being.
When Are You Going to Get a Proper Job? divides Power’s life into three main parts: his love/family life, his travel encounters mostly related to his job as a foreign correspondent or human rights advocate, and his quest for the essence of life.
The heart is not smart
Power is a passionate husband and a doting father but a woefully unlucky lover. If you discount the tragic end of the Barnes in Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, in which Dickie Barnes is a principal character, Power’s account of his love and marriage life reminds you of how complications and unresolved issues in a marriage can undo even the best intentions, leaving emotional scars that won’t go away, even when it’s all over.
I started reading Power’s 15-chapter book from Chapter 4, entitled “My long-time friend, Nigeria’s Big Man”, but quickly returned to Chapter 1, “I and Me.” I should have started here. While I could easily relate to Chapter 4, which deals with Power’s over 40 years relationship with one of the troublers of Nigeria, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, “I and Me” explores a more universal, human conundrum: love.
“If only I had been more lucky, wise, sensible…,” Power writes. “I never found the clarity of mind, the right sound or (the) perfect female. I died with no money in the bank.” He was talking to himself.
The women in his life
Two women dominate the first more than 20 years of Power’s love story: Anne and Mary Jane. He met Anne when they both worked on Martin Luther King’s staff, and he met Mary, the stewardess, on the plane. He was attracted to each woman for a different reason – Anne was his philosophical soulmate, and Mary, who came after, was the Beyonce missing in Anne.
When the tests came after three children with Anne and one with Mary – all girls – the gardens of the marriages were undermined by the foxes of irreconcilable individual differences. The endings were bitter. In Power’s earlier novel, The Human Flow, he quoted Chimamanda Adichie as saying: “You don’t fall in love. You climb up to love.” Power climbed but fell badly.
Man on the road
The book is more than a failed love story told by a journalist with a heartfelt, almost naïve honesty. Power’s travel diary is remarkable, not just for his travels but also for the purpose, people, sights, sounds, and smells, as well as the impact of a few of the dramatic moments, like when he was almost stranded in the Caribbean after losing his guide, and later, his wallet.
His visits to Tanzania, Nigeria, Brazil, Guatemala, and India make for fascinating reading. Curiosity took him on some of these visits, but the quest for the truth, the desire to make a difference by chasing down the main actors – sometimes at significant personal risk – kept him returning to the trail.
Journalism did not discover the law of gravity, invent the submarine or split the atom. However, this improper job can also be gratifying by occasionally presenting the opportunity to change the course of history by engaging those who sometimes deploy scientific inventions or power in devastating uses.
Who knows what the world might have been if Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward hadn’t played their part in exposing Watergate or if Oriana Fallaci hadn’t tackled the Shah of Iran?
Walking a tightrope
From Chapters 3 to 10, Power writes about his relationship with former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere and how Ujamaa fell far short of its redemptive promise despite the iconic leader’s best intentions.
A chunk of Power’s diaries on his encounters with influential people is devoted to his friendship with Nigeria’s former President Obasanjo, whom he met in the retired general’s first life as military president.
The dynamic of Power’s relationship with Obasanjo is quite interesting. He stroked Obasanjo’s ego when asking testy questions, for example, about allegations of human rights abuses against Nigeria’s military – the most appalling of which was in Odi – almost spoiling the interview.
The relentless stream of presidential guests sometimes threatened his interviews. Still, he managed to navigate it as he navigated his host’s tempestuous mood by sometimes enduring his self-adulatory game of squash. Obasanjo is a bundle of contradictions, nice and nasty in unequal measure.
Yet, Power managed to get away with openly complimenting the “gorgeous breasts” of Obasanjo’s wife and teasing him about the misuse of oil money, the bane of all Nigerian governments. Did Power get a pass because he might have contributed to saving Obasanjo’s life by speaking to German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt on his behalf when Sani Abacha jailed the general on charges of coup plotting?
The spirit of Martin Luther King
Power’s visits to Brazil, where, as changes in the Amazon occurred, he observed significant shifts in power relations between peasants and clergy on the one hand and politicians, including Lula, who would later become president, on the other; his incisive conversations in New Delhi with Sonia Gandhi and Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad; and his encounter with Jimmy Carter that may have, by Andrew Young’s account, tangentially been responsible for Carter’s presidency are far more than one can get by viewing history from a keyhole.
The author’s early years of working on Martin Luther King’s staff in the ghetto slums of Chicago instilled in him the values of pursuing social change through peaceful means, fighting against injustice and discrimination, and fostering a society where everyone is treated with respect.
Power’s views on US-Russia relations, sometimes sounding like a broken record, are also rooted in his sense of justice, respect and fair play.
A chastened life
These values come through, whether in his journalism or filmmaking – even intruding in his love quests, which perhaps explains why, despite the cost, he prioritises a peaceful breakup with Anne over a bitter divorce. The peacenik in him even sometimes brings him into a head-on collision with his improper job, journalism, which prefers to lead if it bleeds.
The book ends the way it starts: with existential questions about love, life and meaning, viewed from Power’s Swedish soul chastened by adventures. If the world was his oyster, the book is the reader’s shucker. As I look for a proper job, the book’s unpretentiousness and light touch in attempting to answer life’s difficult questions will make me read it again.
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