Dear Editor,
A long moment of sadness on learning of the death of Rafiq Khan; a broadcaster and broadcast manager of quality and a person who exemplified the standards we often now regret we have lost.
As for many of us, the memories have a personal aspect to them. In my late teens, and on a casual suggestion from Malcolm Panday (who may not even remember it) I decided to try for an announcer’s job. I felt I was a natural, having already a little journalism experience at the Chronicle, was an inquisitive reader, plus we spoke English at home. I confidently did the audition with Patsy Jackson Rohlehr. I would immediately learn that there would be much to learn. In the end becoming, with Michael Archer and Anne de Freitas, one of the last batch of the young to be trained personally by Rafiq Khan. We all later worked at ‘Radio Demerara’ and discovered that, as a manager, Rafiq Khan, like Harry Harewood in the newsroom, was a professional in many ways in advance of his time, and an exemplar of what I would later recognise as the best of the Guyanese management style – the mixture of disciplinarianism and paternalism that seemed to mark some hierarchical relations in our culture. We learnt rigour. He required of us what we would later recognise as ‘standards.’
In the history of local and regional broadcasting, Radio Demerara, I would realise later, represented a model of programming in a multicultural setting, from the morning broadcasts that offered Indian music, and not only Filmi, but ragas by Ravi Shankar and qaseedas, to the Sunday classical music slot which I ran for a while, to its role as a library of all the folk music ever produced in Guyana.
The station catered to all segments and interest groups and the range ran from shows like ‘Teensville’ for the talented young to recordings of Indian music groups done in our own studios. Apart from the news coverage in which I participated with editors such as Edwin Ali, there would be a commentary show called ‘Analysis,’ an opinion slot done by personalities like Lloyd Searwar and Donald Robinson and Hubert Williams. Perhaps because of the programme spread and geographical coverage, Radio Demerara was widely regarded as a national institution and a resource pool of talent for the entire Caribbean that later recruited its announcers, journalists, and managers at all levels of the profession. In all of this Rafiq Khan himself became a ‘legend in his lifetime,’ a style of flawless and authoritative delivery, a senstitive intelligence. He contributed, with the corps of professionals, many now passed on, to raising Guyana broadcasting to the highest level in the region and Commonwealth. And this in the era before TV, when radio dominated the wireless landscape.
Anne de Freitas on her Facebook page, like Angela Massiah, memorialises Rafiq Khan as the personification of the qualities we were later to identify as good management. Like me and Michael Archer, she later moved on. But, as I do in the case of the late Carl Blackman, I consider Rafiq Khan a model of how to handle creative people and run a media house in a developing, rapidly changing society. It was an asset to the Caribbean that he later made the natural transition to Unesco as regional adviser on broadcasting. In this post he worked in tandem with one of the many talents he spotted, and nurtured, the late High Cholmondeley. For when the biography of Rafiq Khan is written the list of his achievements would begin with the feature of his ability to recognise and train and promote many of the best among us.
Ron Sanders in his letter published in your edition of October 12, says Rafiq Khan (like Sanders himself I remember) insisted on reflection and preparation as we approached our work (‘Rafiq Khan was a consummate broadcaster’). At this time when we hear of a variety of opinions on competency levels in a greatly changed media situation, we think that the method should be encouraged in our media professionals who are doubtless no less talented than we, their predecessors, who benefited from the personalised training Mr Khan often gave.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
