This week, Nairobi hosts a Pan-African media jamboree which will bring together heavyweights from different professions.
While participants take stock, history shows that several prominent Pan-Africanist personalities had beginnings in the media.
And among the participants is Benjamin Mkapa, who was editor of Uhuru in Tanzania and later became country’s president.
Long before Mkapa, the media had helped to define early Pan-Africanists through their ability to spread anti-colonial messages or challenge racial stereotypes.
W.E.B. DuBois edited The Crisis, a weekly publication for the NAACP, in which positive information about Africa could be found.
Marcus Garvey’s The Negro World stressed Africa for Africans and challenged European colonialism so much that all colonial powers banned it.
Those who read Garvey’s The Negro World included Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya and Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria.
Both men, Kenyatta and Azikiwe, were founding editors of newspapers and became prominent anti-colonialists.
Before going to England, Kenyatta edited Muiguithania for KCA.
Azikiwe on returning from studies in the United States, edited The African Morning Post in Accra and then founded The West African Pilot in Lagos as a regional newspaper for West Africa in 1937.
Azikiwe became the first president of independent Nigeria in 1960 while Kenyatta acquired the same status in Kenya in 1964.
The 1960s were transformative years politically as colonialism gave way to independence.
In addition, media that identified with the African position appeared to thrive.
In the process, the nationalistic media nurtured journalists in radio and print.
Some of these journalists, like Leonard Mambo Mbotela in broadcasting and Philip Ochieng’ in print, became permanent features in Kenyan media.
There was only one radio station in Kenya then, KBC, which became Voice of Kenya.
Notably, some of its broadcasters sounded fresh and innovative.
There was Job Isaac Mwamto with “Porojo za Mwamto”.
And then there was Mbotela with his Sunday lunchtime programme, “Jee, Huu Ni Uungwana?”
Mbotela’s programme has been running for more than 40 years.
No one else can claim this feat in broadcasting.
Prospects for independence in Kenya led to the founding of the Nation Newspapers in 1960 which quickly captured the public mood as a nationalistic alternative to the dominant settler-leaning media.
It also became a kind of an unofficial training organ for future household names.
Just before independence, one name that started featuring was that of James Ngugi, or rather Ngugi wa Thiong’o, with his weekly Sunday column, “The Way I See It.”
Other names started featuring soon after independence to become synonymous with the Nation.
These included Joe Kadhi who started newspaper work 1958 but it was at the Nation that he distinguished himself, mostly on a Sunday with a column titled “Joe Kadhi Asks Why?” addressing anomalous issues of the day.
Hilary Ng’weno, apart from being an editor, was a humour columnist.
Ngweno went on to found a successful news magazine, Weekly Review in the 1970s.
Challengers to Ngweno’s supremacy included Njehu Gatabaki’s Finance, Gitobu Imanyara’s Nairobi Law Monthly, Pius Nyamora’s Society, and Peter Kareithi’s Financial Review.
Gatabaki and Imanyara became politicians.
Prof Macharia teaches at USIU-Nairobi.
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