Remembering David Page: Indefatigable champion of the media and dedicated advocate for Afghanistan

David Page visiting Khuram wa Sabarbagh, Samangan province, in 2014, where Afghanaid was rebuilding homes damaged by flash flooding. Photo: with kind permission from Afghanaid

 

David Page was born in Derby in 1944 and went to school in Loughborough in the English Midlands, winning a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he gained a 1st class honours degree in History. He then went on to teach English as a VSO volunteer at Peshawar’s Edwardes College in Pakistan. He returned to Oxford to study for a doctoral thesis on the constitutional origins of the partition of India. It became a book, ‘Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control, 1920-1932’, published in 1982 and, quite rarely for an academic thesis-turned-book, still available.

BBC Pashto Service’s first editor

Page joined the BBC Urdu Service in 1972 and became its editor in 1977. When, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the British government – at that time the sole funder of the BBC World Service^[1]– asked it to establish a Pashto language section, Page was tasked with setting it up, recruiting journalists and navigating many issues, including which dialect of Pashto they should broadcast in. This was important to Page, said one of his colleagues, William Crawley,^[2] as he was committed to serving all the BBC’s audiences, including in this case, Pashto speakers on both sides of the Durand Line. He tried to get expert advice, said Crawley, but found that the only British academic expert was teaching in Germany at the time. They took the counsel of a retired Pakistani army officer, Colonel Yusuf, who recommended the dialect used by the Afghan state broadcaster, described by another former colleague, Shirazuddin Siddiqi, as a “softer dialect of Pashto from central eastern Afghanistan,” which Pakistani listeners had been exposed to through listening to Radio Afghanistan.

“There was immense pride from listeners in that there was a Pashto service,” said Gordon Adam, who become BBC Pashto editor when it was made a stand-alone service in 1986. He remembered the cultural programmes, particularly poetry and literature and some music, that were especially popular, something “reflected in listeners’ letters, which we got in large numbers, as many as 60,000 a year, many by Afghan refugees living in Pakistan.” Adam said that Page was “my mentor, my immediate boss, always incredibly helpful.” Recalling his “hugely high standards,” Adam said there were words from Page that he learned to dread: “After he’d read my first draft [of a script], he’d say: ‘I think this needs a bit of re-jigging.’ In other words, it needed to be completely rewritten.”

Adam described Page’s work at the Urdu Service as an inspiration. The genesis of the Pashto Service producing drama – a weekly series called ‘Good Health’, leading on to the well-regarded and extremely popular soap opera, ‘New Home New Life’, which is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary on air this year^[3] – lay, he said, in the Urdu Service and the programmes that Page had pioneered there and his acknowledgement of the “power of theatre and particularly comedy.”

Another colleague, Safia Haleem, who joined the service in 1985 and also went on to edit BBC Pashto, recalls how Page would “always come round to say hello to that small team. Everyone spoke highly of him. I realised that he was a caring boss. … He was always cheerful and made jokes of bad situations with typical English humour.”

Page worked at the BBC for twenty years until 1994, eventually becoming responsible for all the language services of South Asia at the World Service, which then included Pashto and Persian. He left, relatively young, after a major reorganisation of the language services.

Voluntary work for Afghanaid

David Page had a rich intellectual and activist life after the BBC, including a long and deep association with Afghanaid. Set up in 1983, this was Britain’s Afghan ‘solidarity NGO’, a humanitarian response to the Soviet invasion. Page was associated with it from 1995 onwards and, said a statement from Afghanaid, was “a passionate supporter of the mission to support the rebuilding of Afghanistan, despite decades of conflict.” He joined its Board of Trustees in 1996, served as its chair for ten years from 2004 to 2014, and remained on the Board until the end of his life. Afghanaid said:

[David] played a key role in shifting Afghanaid’s focus from emergency relief to long-term development as we increasingly took on large-scale infrastructure projects such as the construction of roads and bridges, as well as micro-hydro and irrigation systems. During this time, our community-led approach became ingrained in our identity as we began forming and collaborating with local councils and self-help groups. We also launched our first long-term disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation programming, which remains central to our work. Additionally, David oversaw the expansion of our programming into Ghor and Samangan provinces, where we remain to this day.

In 2013, Page asked Orzala Ashraf Nemat, who would go on to become director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, AREU, to join the Board of Trustees. Nemat described how she had got to know Page when she began her PhD in London in 2010. “[I could] reach out frequently and get his advice on many matters related to my work,” she said. His advice was “always … reasonable and well-guiding, based on his years of experiences in leadership and management,” adding:^[4]

As a true friend of Afghanistan, David kept himself very updated and well-informed on different matters that Afghanistan faced. From community development to women’s rights, issues around [natural] disasters and climate change, he was always a person with updated knowledge on matters related to Afghanistan.

Another member of the Afghanaid board, Shirazuddin Siddiqi, described how committed Page was:

He was always across all the nitty gritty. He never missed any detail, in the finances, the beneficiary selections, the programmes. A-Z, he’d know the design of every project, its location, its budget, how many people it reached. He was meticulous. That, to me, was very inspiring because this wasn’t something he was paid to do. He was giving his time voluntarily. But at the same time, he was absolutely great fun to work with.

Travelling with Page in Afghanistan, Siddiqi said, he connected with people straightaway, regardless of their level of education or language. “He made people feel so at ease,” said Siddiqi. “You hardly noticed he was speaking to them through a translator. His people skills were unmatched.” Siddiqi mentioned Page’s deep knowledge of South Asian media. The two co-authored the 2012 BBC Media Action publication, ‘The Media of Afghanistan – the challenges of transition’, which remains a baseline publication on Afghan media.

Pushing for freedom of the media

Page maintained a keen interest in media freedom, especially in South Asia. He co-edited ‘Embattled Media: Democracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka’ with former BBC colleague William Crawley and journalist and lawyer Kishali Pinto Jayawardena (Sage, 2015). Page, again with Crawley, led the three-year-long Media South Asia Project, with more than 16 researchers and journalists in the region. The result was a book detailing the explosion of television in South Asia, ‘Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture and the Public Interest’ (Sage OBIT, 2001). Indian journalist and filmmaker Nupur Basu made an accompanying documentary, ‘Michael Jackson comes to Manokganj’, and wrote:

I filmed from Peshawar to Kandy in five countries – India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. … David’s name opened doors in the corridors of power in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, and Bangladesh. Thanks to him, I got a visa to travel to Peshawar in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) – besides Karachi, Islamabad, and Lahore – where no Indian journalists are easily allowed.”

David Page was also remembered in an obituary for the Pakistan newspaper, Dawn, as “a towering figure in South Asian journalism.” He was a key figure in the Commonwealth Journalists Association, a member of the working group which drafted the Commonwealth Media Principles, that were adopted just days ago by the heads of 56 Commonwealth countries at their meeting in Samoa, 21-26 October. Noting that the “marked increase in the number of threats and violent assaults, including murders, as well as arrests and imprisonment in the course of [journalists’ and media workers’] work,” the Principles commit member states to “uphold the role of the media in good governance and to create a safe and enabling environment in which freedom of expression and information is safeguarded and journalists and media workers can do their work safely and without undue interference.” When he died, Page had been working on a status paper on the media for the summit.

Memories of David Page

I encountered David Page on his many visits to Afghanistan with Afghanaid and at fundraising and awareness-raising events in London.^[5] He always asked probing questions, which made for consistently engaging conversations. His fine intellect, grounded in experience gained through extensive travel in Afghanistan and a solid knowledge of the country’s history and politics, will be missed by many. “He was quick-witted,” said Shirazuddin Siddiqi, recalling Page’s humour. “He was open-minded, very knowledgeable, but he wore his expertise lightly. He had a PhD, but never mentioned it. He was a man of great humility.”

In its statement on his death, Afghanaid spoke about Page’s “extraordinary life,” marked by a commitment to fostering “understanding, peace, and development through his work in media, academia, and humanitarian service.” Indian filmmaker Nupur Basu described him as a “mentor and a compassionate friend … a champion of media rights.” Nemat said he has left “behind a legacy of compassion, courage, and the belief that storytelling can bridge divides. He will be deeply missed by all who had the fortune of knowing him…” Safia Haleem recalled her first (and lasting) impression of him as a “proper English gentleman, of the sort I had only read about in Jane Austen novels.” Crawley described him as “a passionate South Asia watcher throughout his career” and noted that, along with a fascination in the politics of the region, he loved cricket.

Eternal is he whose heart is animated by Love
Our enduring legacy inscribed in the universe’s chronicle
Hafez, Ghazal 11

هرگز نمیرد آن که دلش زنده شد به عشـق
ثـبـت اسـت بر جریده عالـم دوام ما
حافظ، غزل شماره ۱۱

David Page, born in Derby, 19 March 1944, died London, 10 October 2024, is survived by his partner, Ruth, sister Janet and their wider families.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

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