There is a photograph of me standing outside it. Suit on. Doors turning behind me. A security officer in a yellow vest just off my shoulder, doing his job, paying me no particular attention.
I did not get inside.
Since COVID, Broadcasting House does not admit visitors unless someone who works there invites you in. Not a policy aimed at me. Not a slight. A rule that applies to a retired teacher from Manchester and a foreign correspondent from Nairobi in exactly the same way. You need a name on the inside.
I want to be honest about what I felt standing there, because the easy version of this story is not the true one.
The easy version is that I was kept out. That a young journalist from Kenya travelled a long way and was turned away at the door of the most famous newsroom in the world, and that this is a small tragedy worth writing about.
That is not what happened. What happened is that I ran into a piece of infrastructure.
Access is a building, not an attitude
I grew up on the World Service the way a lot of African journalists did. Not as a fan, exactly. As a student. You listen to how a question is built. You listen to how a correspondent holds a line under pressure. You learn the shape of a broadcast hour before anyone teaches you what a broadcast hour is.
So Portland Place was never just an address to me. It was the place where the thing I do was invented and refined and defended, decade after decade.
And then I got there and found that the way in is through somebody who is already in.
That is not a scandal. Every serious institution works this way. Every newsroom I have ever entered in Nairobi, I entered because someone inside said this one is fine. Access is not a set of opinions about who deserves to be there. Access is a building, a badge system, a list, and a person on that list willing to say your name.
Which means the question is never really whether they want people like me in the room. Usually they do. The question is whether you know anyone on the list.
The same door, closer to home
I say all of this without complaint, because I know exactly what it maps onto.
Kenyan media does excellent political journalism. I have watched people in this industry do work under conditions that would stop most newsrooms in the world, and do it well. That is not the problem I am interested in.
The problem I am interested in is narrower and more boring than a scandal. Presidential interviews have happened in Kenyan media. Not one of them has ever been conducted by a journalist with a disability. Not because anyone decided against it. Because of the list. Because of who gets sent, who gets briefed, who gets the accreditation, whose name someone already knows.
Standing outside Broadcasting House, I was looking at a version of the same thing, several thousand kilometres from home, with better weather.
What you do about a door
There are two responses available when you find a door that opens from the inside.
The first is to stand outside it and describe how unfair the hinge is. That is a career. Plenty of people have it. It generates a lot of engagement and almost no change.
The second is to build.
I am building Debatable because I would rather make the room than argue about the corridor. It is a long form interview series where working journalists explain how political journalism actually operates, so that Kenyans watching can read what a politician is telling them and decide for themselves. It is not a protest. It is a product. And it is designed to end, twelve months in, with a one on one presidential interview conducted by a journalist with a disability, on camera, in public, with a media partner who saw it coming.
I have albinism. That is not the headline of this article and it will not be the headline of that interview. It is context. It is the reason I understand access as a mechanical problem rather than a moral one, because I have spent my professional life reading rooms for how they are actually organised rather than how they say they are.
I will be back
I will go to Portland Place again. Next time I intend to have a name on the inside, because that is how the building works and I am not interested in pretending otherwise.
But the photograph I actually want is not of me going through those doors.
It is of somebody else, ten years from now, walking into a Kenyan studio to conduct an interview that nobody thought to question, because by then the list will have changed and nobody will remember it was ever an issue.
That one takes longer. It is worth more.