JOURNALISTS SHOULD YEARN TO PRODUCE MORE REFINED WORKS

EAST AFRICAN JOURNALISTS SHOULD WRITE LITERARY TEXTS

By Maritim Kipngetich

East Africa has been accused for years of being a literary desert yet when you read our newspapers you come across many talented and exciting journalists who can easily come up with brilliant works of literature, but have not done so.

All they do is waste their potential covering our gloomy politics, drab entertainment stories, sports, business, and such, and shroud themselves with veils of complacency in newsrooms thinking that their mission is done.

My university linguistic professor Okoth Okombo normally narrates to us sophomores how West Africans has a low regard for books written by East Africans.

They believe that no worthy writer can come out of this region where small-minded, uneducated journalists colour their dour stories by only quoting “ancient philosophers and dead poets.”

Others are contented with the shallow comforts of the newsrooms, reclining on their armchairs, figuring out how to pen the next piece about our corrupt parliamentarians or Vera Sidika’s lightened skin.

Our very best novelist to date, Ngugi Wa Thion’go, started his career at Daily Nation as a political writer in the 1960s, but eventually branched to serious literary work. He can be remembered as the only former journalist who has shown great interest in coming up with literary texts, though he faced serious criticism from the then Kenyatta’s regime.

Even as a young journalist, he and Mazrui (who died recently in the US) were already asking President Jomo Kenyatta if they could pen his memoirs.

 Apart from Ngugi, prominent writers have come from professions far away from the newsroom.

Think of Grace Ogot, Margaret Ogola, Yusuf Dawood, Kinyanjui Kombani, John Kiriamiti, Muthoni Garland, Marjorie Oludhe-Macgoye, Mwangi Gicheru the list is endless.

Chinua Achebe (prominent West African Writer) worked as a radio journalist prior to writing his magnum opus, Things Fall Apart, Wole Soyinka edited the greatest and most thoroughgoing journal of our time called Transition, Okot P Bitek was in a class of his own as a journalist and critic...all these celebrated. These are some of the writers who should inspire our own East African journalists to stop following news stories alone and start writing fictional literary texts.

There is an interesting and fashionable trend among the current crop of journalists, of rushing into writing biographies of political heavy weights, who can pay, or whose names can generate sales. This is not a bad thing, but journalists should go ahead and try to write poems and literature books.

Although news and feature writing does not relate in any way with writing novels, journalists have a splendid opportunity since they can read widely and learn more as they write stories to be published in the newspapers.