Long before he burst into global literary acclaim and stardom, Ngugi wa Thiong’o joined the newly founded Daily Nation in the early 1960s first as a cub reporter and then later as a columnist. The Aga Khan, the owner of what was then known as the East African Newspapers (Nation Series) Limited, had just bought the publication from Charles Hayes in 1959.
Hayes had founded the paper in 1958 as a Kiswahili weekly named Taifa. Having completed his studies at Makerere College in 1963, Ngugi soaked himself in the world of journalism in a country that was brimming with hopes of gaining political independence from British colonial rule.
His first novel – Weep Not, Child – was published in 1964, followed three years later by one of his seminal works, A Grain of Wheat, which revolves around the betrayals during the struggle for independence. Ngugi’s sporadic 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 (now deceased), 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. Ngugi, who died on May 28 2025, aged 87, joins a long list of celebrated novelists and authors who have often dabbled in journalism and vice versa.
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 Ngugi’s second novel. Marquez, unlike Ngugi, 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 style 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’, Ngugi’s former classmate at Alliance High School, and later colleague at the Daily Nation and intellectual rival. The two constantly sparred over issues such 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 and retired 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 earned him accolades among ordinary readers, scholars and intellectuals. 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 (though now among media practitioners and journalism students), I Accuse the Press, in 1992. In the book, he ferociously attacked the media for abdicating its function of informing and educating society.
Among the recent generation of writer-journalists, Tony Mochama stands out. With 10 books under his belt, including his poetry anthology, What If I am a Literary Gangster?, which stirred a long-running debates 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. To honour Ngugi, scholars should go back to the archives and collect his journalism for the benefit of future generations.
