Remembering Ngũgĩ the Writer as a Journalist 

I cherish two distinct memories of veteran Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The first memory goes back to the early 2000s (I was 11 years old) when I stumbled on a copy of A Grain of Wheat, Ngũgĩ’s 1967 classic, among my father’s books and dissident magazines. The book revolves around the betrayals during the struggle for independence. The second memory is that of finally meeting the man in 2014 (and even taking selfies) at Kenyatta University when he delivered a lecture. Like many people, I was taken aback by how short he was. The following year, I contributed to Jalada Africa’s Language Issue, writing a short story in Dholuo, before translating it into English. An arduous task! My short story, Geno Makende (The Last Hope), was part of an ambitious decolonisation project of finally putting theory into practice. Ngũgĩ had called upon us to decolonise our minds and reclaim our African cultures. From that translation series, Ngũgĩ, who died on May 28 aged 87, published one of his most translated short stories, The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright. 

Today, I wish to remember Ngũgĩ differently. I continue to disagree with his decolonisation project of writing in indigenous languages because it risks dividing us as a nation along ethnic lines. And in a world that is increasingly globalised and interconnected through social media networks, it’s a losing battle to insist on writing in the vernacular. As a journalist and media researcher, I want to remember Ngũgĩ the reporter, and how he fits within the tradition of writer-journalist and journalist-writer.  

Well before he came into global literary acclaim and stardom, Ngũgĩ had joined the newly founded Daily Nation in the early 1960s, first as a cub reporter and then later as a columnist writing under the name James Ngugi. The Aga Khan, the owner of what was then known as East African Newspapers (Nation Series) Limited, had just bought the publication from Charles Hayes in 1959. Hayes founded the paper in 1958 as a Swahili weekly named Taifa. Having completed his studies at Makerere College in 1963, Ngũgĩ soaked himself in the world of journalism in a country that was brimming with hopes of gaining political independence from British colonial rule. 

Ngũgĩ’s roles as a reporter and columnist at the Daily Nation elevated him to such a high level that, among other exceptional candidates, he was nearly considered for the editor-in-chief’s position. According to veteran correspondent Gerry Loughran, in his book, Birth of a Nation: The Story of a Newspaper in Kenya, he was deemed “an intellectual political ingénue… [who was] difficult and dangerous”. That’s how he missed the job. Ngũgĩ joins a long list of celebrated novelists and authors who have dabbled in journalism.  

Let’s take the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is famous for his book One Hundred Years of Solitude, published the same year as Ngũgĩ’s second novel. Garcia Marquez, unlike Ngũgĩ, had an extended period working as a journalist, starting at El Espectador in the late 1940s. He would later work for El Universal, a regional newspaper in Cartagena City. Thereafter, he abandoned his legal studies at the National University of Columbia to focus on journalism as a reporter and columnist at El Heraldo. Garcia Marquez’s deep attachment to journalism is now well known, and literary scholars have been scrambling to collect his volumes of reportage. In his 2020 article, “Reality Is the Better Writer”, published in the American magazine, The Nation, Tony Wood makes the point that “it was journalism that enabled him (Garcia Marquez) to make a precarious living while he wrote fiction…”. The Colombian writer, critically acclaimed for his themes of magical realism, would later publish a non-fiction book, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, in 1955, the subject of a long series of newspaper interviews with a sailor in El Espectador. 

Then there was Philip Ochieng, Ngũgĩ’s former classmate at Alliance High School, later colleague at the Daily Nation and intellectual rival. The two constantly sparred over such issues as the role of the press in a democratic society and the place of the writer in nation-building. Ochieng, an intellectual heavyweight himself, joined the newspaper in 1966, retiring in 2007. In between, he worked for various publications, rising to become the editor-in-chief of the Kenya Times in 1988. But it was the publication of his first book, The Kenyatta Succession (co-authored with fellow journalist Joseph Karimi) in 1980, that gained him accolades among ordinary readers, scholars and intellectuals alike. So successful was the book, according to Ochieng’s biography, The Fifth Columnist: A Legendary Journalist (2015), that it “sold more than 50,000 copies within the first few months of its release”. He would later follow with another classic (among media practitioners and journalism students), I Accuse the Press, in 1992. In the book, he ferociously attacked the corporate media for abdicating its role of informing and educating society. 

Among the later generation of Kenyan writer-journalists, Tony Mochama stands out. With ten books under his belt, including his poetry anthology What If I Am a Literary Gangster?, which stirred a long-running debate among literary scholars and journalists, the future of writing living side by side with journalism can only get better. Mochama also counts the Daily Nation as part of his formative years as a freelance correspondent before he moved to the Standard. 

Finally, would I wish to write such articles in Dholuo and then translate them to English? No. Does that mean the Ngũgĩ’s decolonisation project is dead because of its lack of pragmatic approach to the lived realities of the 21^st century? Again, no. I would suggest rethinking the project in terms of encouraging writing in a language such as Swahili, which unifies us across the nation and region. Otherwise, to truly honour Ngũgĩ, media scholars should go back to the archives and collect his journalism for the benefit of future generations of journalists keen to report news and write books.