In 1956 I arrived in Kenya to start a career in the national parks. In the postwar years, jobs in the colonies, as we still called them, provided a good outlet for British graduates.
It was a great adventure. Though I had a wireless, I felt short of news about Britain so dropped by the East African Standard bookshop in Nairobi, then the largest bookshop in east Africa, and discovered the Manchester Guardian Weekly. It more than met my expectations, particularly as it then had full cricket scores. I had seen the Manchester Guardian before but never knew about the weekly edition that I have taken, mostly by subscription, since then in both east and west Africa and since 1977 in the US, where I was a university professor before retirement more than 20 years ago.
In Ghana, when we had shortages of practically everything in the 1970s, its special paper was wonderful for packing.
Though I live in the US I still appreciate Gary Younge’s perceptive insights on America. The Weekly has changed over the years, shrunk as I have, but it has remained eminently readable. It is the one outlet that provides a full coverage of the developing world. I consider it a balanced news weekly though many Americans regard it as liberal, a word that has assumed the stigma once conveyed by “pink”. I eagerly await its weekly arrival and I read it almost from cover to cover.
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