In Kenya, once upon a time, you symbolised high culture and educational achievement whenever you were seen merely carrying the STANDARD newspaper. Set up in Mombasa in 1902, the STANDARD remained Kenya’s only English-language daily all the way till the end of the 1950s. When I first visited Nairobi in 1955, to be seen with a copy was to be “with it”.
But that was time that was. Nearly 60 years later, a daily was born in Nairobi called NATION that has given the STANDARD no end of grief since then. By 1966 – the year in which I joined the NATION as a cub-reporter – the NATION had overtaken the STANDARD both in circulation and in display advertisements (ads) following a period of cut-throat competition.
I can even remember the “splash” headline that symbolised the NATION’s overthrow of the STANDARD after this Lonrho newspaper had monopolised the news and ads market in East Africa for over 50 years. This overthrow was symbolised by sporting event one. I joined the NATION at the height of prestige and excitement of the East African Safari, an annual motor rally which attracted competitors from all over the world.
One Safari night, we – reporters and sub-editors – had to stay extraordinarily late at Nation House on Tom Mboya Street to await the last lap. Brian Tetley – the ebullient and creative journalist from England’s Isle of Man (who was acting as night editor) – came up with a “splash” headline that was audacious in its simplicity: “HOW THE MIGHTY FELL”.
The fallen ones – named on page one against their mugshots and contraptions – were world giants from other international rallies, many of whom, indeed, had, in earlier years, carried the victory in the East African event. By noon, not a single copy of the NATION was to be found anywhere in the streets of Nairobi.
In those pre-computers days, our switchboard was inundated with calls from all over the republic, readers demanding copies of the NATION. By contrast, even by the time that the sun was getting ready to disappear into the western horizon, veritable mountains of the STANDARD still stood at all sales points in the city.
The STANDARD had just as many – probably even more – human imports from London’s Fleet Street. The difference lay, I think, in their orientation. The STANDARD had been a colonial newspaper throughout, governed, in the main, by white settler ethos and prejudices and – knowingly or unknowingly – remained European in content as well as outlook.
In a manner of speaking, then, the way in which the mighty had fallen on that Safari occasion long ago soon became a metaphor for the almost perpendicular downward path that this colonial mouthpiece began to describe on that very day. I am told that vis-a-vis the NATION, its new rival, the STANDARD has never recovered.
The explanation may lie in that, in contrast to it, the NATION’s London imports were mentally and culturally different, better brought up socially, more empathic with the interests of and difficulties facing a nation newly liberated from decades of oppression by the selfsame England from which Kenya was importing its journalistic trainers.
By and large, the NATION’S Fleet Street imports were broader-minded than the STANDARD’S, more in keeping with the nationalistic and innovative path that the soon-to-be-born political nation hoped to traverse. The NATION’s biases for Jomo Kenyatta and other nationalists who were just about to usher Kenya into independence were clear to see.
Against the inconvenient broadsheet form that the STANDARD took (what with its deeply conservative headlines), the NATION’S very packaging – its tabloid format and fast headlines – was what was in keeping with the youthful mood of a new nation. And Kenya’s youth took to it like moths upon the sudden appearance of a SUPERNOVA.
Almost from the word go, the NATION hired a highly capable indigene, the now legendary Hilary Ng’weno, as it chief editor, and –as the chief investor – the Aga Khan issued a clear Africanisation policy by which the company methodically replaced the British imports without lowering the quality and quantity of its product. In its Africanisation process, by contrast, the STANDARD trundled like Mzee Kobe.
Yet it took the NATION almost a whole decade of extremely strenuous work to overtake the STANDARD in circulation and to make its first profit. Why? Because – contrary to popular assumption in Kenya and as Ng’weno should already have known – circulation is not a publication’s chief income earner.
Everybody familiar with the world of commercial publishing knows that advertisements are by far the greater source of revenue for all market-oriented publishing houses. Ng’weno himself was soon ceaselessly complaining in public about the niggardliness of potential advertisers. For, by that time, he had branched out to form his own publishing house
THE WEEKLY REVIEW, his chief title, was an analytical magazine which went down extremely well both locally and on international campuses. However, with many years as the Nation Group’s editorial pontiff, he probably knew why the advertisers were and remain so mean to budding young indigenous publishers
According to an English saying, it is because blood is thicker than water. All the potential advertisers were Western companies. And Ng’weno soon discovered that, in Nairobi, all such companies prefer(red) to advertise only in the two dailies (a) because of their great readership and (b) because of their Western affiliations.
Throughout East Africa, lack of advertising support has been a major roadblock to indigenous investment in the news publishing business. Every attempt at a newspaper or magazine of which I am aware – including the WEEKEND MAIL of which I was the editor in the 1990s – has come a cropper after only a handful of editions.
But there was a political dimension as well to the rivalry between the STANDARD and the NATION. It is not lost on observers that Kiambu’s George Githii, editor-in-chief of both successively, was the personification of the tug-of-war, with two other Kiambu men – attorney-general Charles Njonjo cabinet minister Njoroge Mungai, as the titans on the opposite ends of the rope.
President Jomo Kenyatta’s seat at State House was, of course, the target. And Githii used both the NATION and the STANDARD to the maximum to create a Njonjo cult with many thoroughgoing ramifications nationwide. The struggle to succeed Mzee Kenyatta was concluded only when a third party, Vice-President Daniel arap Moi, pulled a fast one on the Kiambu titans.
The self-styled “professor of politics” – hitherto a seemingly self-effacing man from the hitherto underrated Kalenjin community of the Rift Valley – moved fast to give all his tormentors from Kiambu District carefully woven political ropes from which all of them proceeded, as it were, to hang themselves.
Githii had, in the meantime, left Nation House not only in a huff but also ignominiously. He had received his marching orders after having published a series of scathing articles on the leader of the Bohra, an Islamic sect close to the Ismaili followers of the Aga Khan, the NATION’S majority shareholder.
Githii lost no time in declaring total war on the NATION. First, he raided the NATION’s newsroom by offering employment and much better terms to all grades of the NATION’s reporters and sub-editors, claiming, into the bargain, that they represented the cream in Kenyan journalism
Yet, by publishing their names and pictures in the next issue of the STANDARD, he shamelessly revealed to all and sundry to see that all of his new human acquisition were members of his own ethnic community. But, despite this bravado, the NATION to beat the STANDARD in terms of both headlines and display adverts.
It was soon after this that the STANDARD started writing and publishing a series of terribly uncivil editorial attacks on the NATION group as a whole. I was not yet a member of any policy-making committee of the NATION. So I did not know why it never tried to reply to that onslaught from the other side of Nairobi.
Yet, just a few years after Githii had transferred from the NATION to the STANDARD not only the Njonjo cult but also the anti-Mungai hate policies – Githii suddenly disappeared from the local scene. After some I know-not-what internal disagreement, the STANDARD’s board had decided to rid itself of the controversy-mongering editorial steward.
Githii was then reported to have taken a job with the United Nations in Vienna, the Austrian capital, before crossing the Atlantic to become a Christian preacher in the streets of Ottawa, Canada. That was the last that I ever heard anything about the man who – with NATION founder-managing director Mike Curtis – had once given me my first job as a cub-reporter.
No, I have never worked for the STANDARD. Upon my return from Tanzania, I tried to get a subbing job on Likoni Road. But Henry Gathigira, that time’s editor, rejected me out of hand as a “Luo communist”. In Kenya, in those days it was bad enough to be a Luo. But how horrendous to be a “communist” into the bargain!
In later years, I would be terribly scared when AG Njonjo told Parliament that a “certain Luo” was among the anti-government ringleaders at Nation House – a reference which could only be to me since, as chief sub, I was not only the one in charge of everything that entered the DAILY NATION as news but also the highest ranking Luo in that company.
I am told that the rivalry between the NATION and the STANDARD continues apace. But now it seems to be commercial only, revolving merely around the quality of the product, rather than around political personalities outside the publishing firm itself. That is how it should be.
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