You know I’ve spent nearly half a century writing about other people’s lives- it is tough when you have to find words about your own working life.

This is what I face on the 40^th anniversary since the day I picked up the pen to learn my trade as a skinny youth, with an even skinnier tie, on July 6 back in 1981. This was at a tiny, weekly, newspaper in the middle-of-nowhere; getting from there, to where I sit today as and editor, is tantamount to climbing from the bottom of a deep, dark, well and is just as satisfying.

Six months on probation, a four-year indenture ln a pittance; many of the people who have told me they were journalists wouldn’t have lasted six weeks.

From that day on, I practised this craft with a passion – always looking to see where I could improve and move forward in my trade. Listening, reading and working.

I studied shorthand – for you youngsters, that was a precise and complex way of speedwriting – with secretaries on Monday nights along with typing. Every morning I tipped of bed early and sat late into the night at council meetings, protest meetings, parish councils and civic functions. On Saturdays, we covered football in winter and cricket in summer.

Writing, writing, we never stopped. When I wasn’t writing I was doing the other chores we juniors had to endure: making tea, fetching sandwiches and newspapers, enduring the sniping jibes from those colleagues who wanted to let me know they were my senior.

It was an exhausting ten-year grind before I arrived in Africa; an ordeal that make the fruits of reporting on the fascinating continent even sweeter and worth every day of hard graft and professionalism.

There were dark days, sad days on the road, days as dark as ditch water when I doubted my ability to string words together. Exhaustion mixed with self-doubt are not always bad, they can steel you to do better.

Guns in your back, gas that chokes you half to death, late night threatening calls, batons at your throat and landmines that puts death half a step away.

For the best part of 30 years, I have travelled hundreds of thousands of kilometres across the continent in search of the truth. It has been  a journalist’s dream: Nelson Mandela’s warm handshake and smile as he said my name; the dignified determination of the bereaved mothers of Malawi marching after the fall of Hastings Banda holding pictures of their murdered sons; the quiet resolve of protestors in Harare as they stood, chins up, in the face of an onslaught of gas and batons at the hands of police; the joy  of a farmer in Mozambique waving his arms and smiling as a land mine clearance meant he could go back and till his fields. Indelible images all.

All I know to be true as I saw it with my own eyes. Precious eyewitness reporting that puts the reckless hyperbole of social media to shame.  My reporting saved a few heads from being cracked, made people think, made the thugs think twice about beating their own people and occasionally inspired a few young African dreamers.

Presidents sat down with me for interviews and I remember them all: the contempt of Mugabe, the kindness of Kaunda, the unexpected humour of Chissano and the gritty realism of Kagame.

I flew into the depths of hell too. The shattered, besieged, cities of Angola full of wounded and desperate people; where people would pay a bribe for the chance to cling to the wing of a transport plane just for a chance to get out. A world reduced to piles of rubble, everything smashed. Broken   children struggling through the debris along without an arm, or a leg, or both. A smell of rats, decay and cordite that will live with me forever.

Yet, I saw hope too, in abundance. Many Africans refused to settle for the poor hand they had been dealt by life. They worked hard and took risks, against high odds, to take economic control of their lives. As the continent opens up to free trade these brighter stories can only multiply.

That is one story that keeps me getting up early to do a job that still excites me 40 years on from the day I wrote my first sentence. How do I sum up those four eventful decades? I struggle. I leave it to the succinct and sweet words of Saberne, my shining 21-year-old first-born.

“My father reaped the fruit of what it means to experience a life,” she told one of her cousins the other day. That is good enough for me.