On June 28, 2026, the operations of Nation Media Group in Uganda, including Daily Monitor, NTV Uganda, Spark TV, KFM, and Nation Couriers, were suspended, and soldiers took over their premises.
After a great deal of diplomacy, exactly a month later, on July 28, it was announced that the group would resume operations after Uganda President Yoweri Museveni gave the go-ahead.
These events, perhaps unsurprisingly, sent me down East Africa’s media memory lane. Pioneers, Rebels, and a Few Villains: 150 Years of Journalism in Eastern Africa, which I edited, was published in late 2021 by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Media Programme Sub-Saharan Africa.
Without sounding too self-congratulatory, I have to say it was very well received. It brought together excellent writing by some of the most thoughtful journalists from 16 Eastern African countries, and, unlike almost all media writing, it did not focus so much on journalism as on the journalists who made it.
What emerged were stories of some of the craziest, boldest, smartest, most eccentric, and, honestly, most foolishly brave characters you will ever encounter. It offered plenty of surprises about the emergence of journalism in Eastern Africa, and the machinery of its repression.
For example, compare Uganda and Kenya. The foundations of modern journalism and nationalism, which was closely tied to it then, in Uganda were driven by black Africans and the church.
In Kenya, they were driven by Asian Africans. It is a role that has partly been written out of Kenyan history, or left to fade. If you told a millennial or Gen Z Kenyan that the country’s nationalism and media history, and censorship too, is almost 50 per cent an Asian story, many would be surprised.
Their story is told in a chapter of the book by Zarina Patel, a prominent Kenyan-Asian author, human rights activist, artist, editor, and social justice campaigner. Zarina died in April 2024 at the age of 89. It was a life well-lived.
The first non-white-owned mainstream newspapers established in Kenya, nearly all of them anti-colonial in their outlook, were founded by Kenyan Asians. On November 15, 1901, Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee (AMJ) launched the African Standard. However, in 1905 he sold it to Anderson & Mayer, who renamed it the East African Standard. It changed its editorial line from the more progressive line pushed by AMJ, needless to say. Today it lives on as The Standard. In keeping with his progressive spirit, AMJ, who was Zarina Patel’s grandfather, gifted Jeevanjee Gardens to Nairobians.
There was the Colonial Times, founded in 1933 by G.L. Vidyarthi, and the Daily Chronicle, set up in 1947 by DK Sharda, Haroon Ahmed, and Pranlal Sheth, which served as leading anti-colonial voices and platforms for independence nationalists.
The deviation was Taifa, set up in 1958 by Charles Hayes, a former colonial district officer, and his business partner Althea Tebbutt. Taifa had some sympathy with African independence, albeit measured. In 1959, His Highness Aga Khan IV (Prince Karim Aga Khan) bought Taifa. The company launched its flagship Sunday Nation in March 1960, and Daily Nation in October 1960, both of which were more outspoken about independence.
Vidyarthi, who also established a Kiswahili publication called Habara za Dunia, was imprisoned in 1945 and sentenced to three months of hard labour over an article on World War II veterans of the King’s African Rifles that displeased the colonial authorities. In February 1946, he was convicted and again sentenced to hard labour for publishing a letter comparing conditions in India to concentration camps. In 1948, he became the first journalist in Kenya to be sentenced for sedition, for a letter published in Habara za Dunia, and was handed 18 months in prison. On October 20 1952, he was arrested during Operation Jock Scott at the start of the Mau Mau Emergency and detained at the Kajiado Detention Centre.
Meanwhile, the Daily Chronicle dovetailed with a tradition established in the overground and underground “Jua Kwali city” of Katwe, on the edge of Kampala, where anti-colonial newspapers doubled as offices for independence activists.
The Daily Chronicle press became the primary meeting point and office for prominent pro-independence fighters and the first generation of Kenyan post-independence leaders. The list is impressive: Pio Gama Pinto, who joined the paper in 1950, became a left-wing MP, and was assassinated; Makhan Singh, trade unionist and labour pioneer; Achhroo Kapila, prominent trial lawyer and anti-corruption campaigner; Hassan Rattansi, civil servant, philanthropist, and sports administrator; John Keen, MP and Assistant Minister; Achieng Aneko, Information Minister and later detained opposition MP; Tom Mboya, Cabinet Minister for Economic Planning, assassinated in 1969; Njoroge Mungai, Foreign Affairs Minister and Presidential Physician; Fred Kubai, MP and Assistant Minister; Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first Prime Minister and President; and Jaramogi Odinga, first Vice President and later main opposition leader.
It all tells us that history moves in loops: as regional media navigate modern closures, they quietly echo the early print shops that once sheltered East Africa’s nascent freedom, reminding us that independent storytelling remains a fragile, shared heritage.
The author is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. X@cobbo3a
