Aga Khan’s dream: how ‘Nation’ became Kenya’s biggest newspaper
His Highness the Aga Khan (right) during a cake-cutting ceremony to celebrate the Nation's 25th anniversary in 1985.
Expatriates hired from London’s Fleet Street to work with Kenyan journalists in starting a new English-language newspaper were dismissed as a bunch of ignorant upstarts by cynical rivals and told not to bother unpacking their bags since the project would fail.
The doubters were proved wrong in short order as the Kiswahili-language Taifa, bought by His Highness the Aga Khan in 1959, soared while the newly-established Sunday and Daily editions of the Nation stamped their authority and soon overtook the Standard.
In Part 2 of a three-part serialisation of ‘Birth of a Nation, the Story of a Newspaper in Kenya’ by pioneering editor Gerry Loughran (2010), we look at the founder’s determination and vision to set up a world-class media organization.
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Taifa newspaper was the sole item on the agenda when the Aga Khan’s new company, East African Newspapers (Nation Series) Ltd (EAN), formed on April 2 1959, held its first meeting at Mercury House, Victoria Street (in Nairobi), one month later.
Present were (Michael) Curtis (an editor and aide of the Aga Khan) in the chair and Charles Hayes (who founded the Kiswahili-language Taifa), with J.P. Ord, accountant, in attendance. The meeting approved the purchase for £10,000, payable in cash, of ‘the newspaper Taifa together with certain photographic equipment’. The Hayes–Tebbutt company (who sold the newspaper) took £6,500 in shares in EAN and used the remaining £3,500 to pay off outstanding printing bills.
There then ensued as frantic a development programme as any publishing company could have known. The targets were to acquire staff, premises and a printing plant, turn Taifa into a daily, launch a weekly English-language newspaper and then add an English daily.
As the Nation’s first editor John Bierman agreed in retrospect, ‘It was inordinately ambitious to start a daily Swahili, an English Sunday and an English daily all in one year, especially since we were using a revolutionary method of production, the offset press. But we were all young and we thought we could do anything.’
His Highness the Aga Khan acquired a “tiny” Kiswahili newspaper from former District Commissioner Charles Hayes and his business partner, Athea Tebbut, in 1959.
The first weekly Taifa under the aegis of EAN appeared on 28 April 1959, and Curtis put his Fleet Street experience to use in considerably less sophisticated conditions than the panelled halls of the News Chronicle. ‘I was up all night seeing it printed and distributed’, he reported to the Aga Khan. ‘The editorial was my own work. Sales are doing well considering there is no organisation behind it at all.’
The first Curtis issue sold out at 15,000 copies and carried ‘a record £200 advertising’. But the accountants estimated it would run at a loss of £1,000 a month for the foreseeable future. The paper carried the title Taifa the Nation and must have impressed the colonial administration because the powerful Chief Secretary, Sir Walter Coutts, asked Curtis if he would be interested in government sponsorship.
‘I told him quite impossible’, Curtis noted at the time. ‘Taifa must be independent of government funds and influence.’ It was an early example of a Kenyan government trying to manipulate an independent newspaper in its own interest.
The Aga Khan had by then acquired a printing company, W. Boyds and Co. Ltd, which became East African Printers (Boyds) Ltd. It cost £72,000, including stock and equipment. But the plant was antiquated, limiting circulation potential. The company promptly ordered a £36,000 rotary press from Copenhagen and soon afterwards placed an order for an American typesetting machine that was then the marvel of the printing world, the multi-font Photon. It cost £21,000, with £3,500 worth of ancillary equipment.
At the same time, Curtis rented for £5,000 a year the former Elliott’s bakery in Victoria Street, a modest two-storey building that had burned down and been refurbished, to be the new company’s headquarters, Nation House. A financial statement dated November 1959 added £8,000 for vans and cars and £1,500 for alterations to Nation House.
At this point, the Aga Khan had committed something like £200,000 to Boyds and £75,000 to EAN. These figures should not suggest that Curtis had money coming out of his ears. The Aga Khan, at that point still a student at Harvard University, was in the process of settling his late grandfather’s estate (and soon afterwards the estate of his father, Prince Aly Khan, who died in a car crash in Paris in May 1960).
With the settlement of onerous death duties, the flow of cash to Nairobi was restricted and efforts to find co-investors for his publishing ventures were proving difficult. At one point, Curtis reported, ‘The cheque from Switzerland (the Aga Khan’s monthly contribution) was four days late. I had a very awkward time with the vendors. There was simply not enough in the kitty to hand over the money when I had promised. I managed to get a temporary overdraft from the bank.’
A widely held view in Kenya and elsewhere that the Nation succeeded because it had access to an unceasing river of gold could not be farther from the truth. Funds in the early days were extremely tight except for essential capital expenditure, and the Aga Khan demanded the strictest financial control. Building a staff was the next priority. The ideal was to create a newspaper that would be written and managed by Africans for Africans, but the reality of 1959/60 was that there were very few African journalists in Kenya and even fewer African managers. Curtis had to look to Britain.
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To staff the new Taifa, Hayes brought to Nation House most of his editorial staff and ruthlessly poached others from Baraza (a Kiswahili paper owned by the East African Standard), including an outstanding trio of Joram Amadi, John Abuoga and George Mbugguss. There was also a young trainee, Francis Masakhalia, who soon decided his talents lay in other directions – good thinking, for in 1999 he was appointed Kenya’s minister of finance. Sammy Githegi, Harry Sambo, Moses Mumbo and Henry Gathigira were later joined by another young Kenyan who proved to have editor qualities, Joe Kadhi.
Mostly in their 20s, the newly recruited employees brought a fresh, aggressive style to Kenyan journalism, and, lacking colonial attitudes, they considered it perfectly normal that Kenya should receive its independence on a one-man one-vote basis as soon as possible. There is little doubt those political perceptions were shared by many in the Standard newsroom, but senior management was blinkered by settler politics and ingrained paternalism. Alastair Matheson’s son, Ian, joined the Standard in 1959 as a trainee reporter, along with Nation editor-to-be George Githii.
As well as editorial staff, Curtis had to fill the many positions that the complex organisation of a newspaper requires, and getting the technical side right was the first priority. Stan Denman was a young, former Royal Marine Commando working as a printing engineer as well as a print salesman for John Bull, who ran Boyd’s printing works in Nairobi’s Industrial Area.
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Denman redesigned an old bakery on Victoria Street to accommodate the flow of copy from teleprinters and reporters to sub-editors and thence to Linotype operators. To streamline the process, a hole was bashed through the floor next to the chief sub-editor’s desk and an aluminium tube inserted, down which stories were dropped to the printers on the floor below – speeded on their way by lead weights when the folios stuck. Denman subsequently moved into top management, but in 1959 he was key to the Nation’s most critical task – setting up an efficient printing operation.
‘The Aga Khan wanted the very highest standards using the newest technology, which meant web offset’, Denman recalled.
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It was on 15 January 1960 – a huge year for the company – that Taifa went daily, sporting the cumbersome title of Habari za Leo TAIFA (News of the Day TAIFA), later changed to Taifa Leo. It was the first Kiswahili daily newspaper in East Africa. The lead story concerned the black American chief justice, Thurgood Marshall, commenting on Kenya’s prospects for uhuru, and the front page carried a photograph of Kenyan politicians C.B. Madan, Musa Amalemba, Michael Blundell and Wanyuti Waweru arriving in London for the first constitutional conference on Kenya. The launch issue sold a modest 4,000 copies, but next day sales shot up to 11,000 and three weeks later the figure was 18,000.
Curtis cabled the Aga Khan: ‘The paper has been a tremendous success with Africans, although sales are certainly stimulated by excitement over the London constitutional talks.’ Much effort at this time was going into securing additional investment for the Nation, but overseas publishers foresaw little return from a newspaper in Africa and local businessmen were nervous about an economy that was slowing dramatically in the face of political uncertainty.
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Approaches to the Christian Science Monitor in the United States were turned down and, when the Aga Khan met the money men at The Observer in London, he found them ‘very sticky about the whole thing’. Boston businessmen were canvassed and a meeting was planned with Germany’s Axel Springer group. A cable from Rupert Murdoch, Australia’s super-tycoon in the making but then only proprietor of the Adelaide News, said, ‘Fascinated by your plans, would like to hear more.’ But nothing further developed. Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian newspapers were offered participation, as were Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald and the International Herald Tribune, as well as the Ford Foundation.
The Aga Khan was keen to secure outside participation in East African Newspapers because he felt links to internationally known newspapers would add gravitas to the Nation’s image and help alleviate suspicions in Kenya about his own role as head of an Asian community. Clearly, too, injections of capital would be critical to create newspapers of the highest editorial and technological standards. In the event, only a few investors were brought aboard.
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With the Nation failing to generate significant outside investment, a certain asperity began to greet Curtis’ continual requests for funds, although the Aga Khan did acknowledge that EAN was ‘living on a shoestring’. When Curtis reported plans to buy a factory site to extend Boyd’s, which the Standard was also pursuing, the Aga Khan replied, ‘I entirely agree, but don’t expect more capital from me.’
In August 1960, in response to a request for £27,500 ‘to see us through to the end of September’, the proprietor replied, ‘I have already put a huge amount of money into EAN and Boyd’s. I will come through for the last time on condition my loan is reimbursed before January 1 1961.’ He softened this response by adding, ‘I do not mean this letter to sound harsh, it’s always thumbs up.’
By late 1961, the Aga Khan was expanding his Ismaili community welfare activities in Kenya, including extending the open-to-all-races Aga Khan Hospital, and he warned Curtis it would be ‘extremely difficult’ for him to continue supporting the Nation as in the past. In fact, the records show the Aga Khan invariably came through in a crisis during the difficult early years, a confidence which was repaid in kind when his venture eventually reached and passed break-even. Constant dialogue between Curtis and the Aga Khan was the nexus of the Nation’s early years. Scarcely a day passed without the two exchanging telegrams, letters, tapes, telephone calls or Telexes.
President Jomo Kenyatta has a word with HH the Aga Khan while watching displays of traditional dancing after the State House lunch during Kenyatta day on October 20, 1966.
The exchanges were generally businesslike but often ended on a personal note, as when Curtis added, ‘I am taking flying lessons and hope to do my first solo this weekend’, or when his correspondent scribbled a weary postscript, ‘I now have two 30-page papers to write for Harvard for my MA next year.’
The modes of communication reflected the young leader’s (Aga Khan’s) life-long interest in technology. When he did not write by fountain pen in an elegant forward-sloping hand (‘My dear Michael … as ever, K’) he liked to use audio discs. These were less than saucer size and played on a gramophone. Later he sent what were known as ‘dictabelts’, announcing happily, ‘This letter has been dictated on my new Dictaphone. I recommend it to you.’ The record suggests Curtis was less enthusiastic. Notably, the proprietor’s views were almost always conveyed as recommendations. He knew he was operating at a distance, and direct instructions, except very occasionally when Ismaili affairs intruded, usually came only when Curtis sought a specific decision.
With the major printing problems solved and the editorial department running smoothly in Nation House, Taifa Leo’s circulation began to rise: 21,000 in March 1960, 22,000 in June, 24,000 in July, 30,000 in August, 35,000 in December. The figures were boosted when Hayes’ staff launched a feature-focussed Taifa Weekly, which caught on immediately and consistently sold around 43–45,000. By now Bierman and his staff were putting out dummies for the first issue of The Nation, the English-language Sunday paper whose debut was set for 20 March, with a print order of 20,000. The first issue of the new paper arrived on time and, unusually for a new publication, without serious problems – something the daily failed to replicate when it appeared in October.
The Nation led with gloomy news of arrests of opposition politicians in Ghana, the first of Africa’s independent nations. A cartoon on the editorial page showed Kenya’s black and white leaders gathered round a new-born infant in a pram marked Nation. They are saying, ‘He’s a cute little fellow, but will he behave?’ It was a cogent caption considering the many painful conflicts that lay ahead between the paper and the politicians. The editorial promised readers ‘a vigorous, inquisitive and cheerful’ newspaper, expressed support for the transfer of power to the African majorities in the region within the next few years, and declared that Europeans and Asians should still have a role to play.
His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Shia Ismaili Muslims with Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and Mama Ngina Kenyatta.
The Nation also told the coming African rulers, ‘The old carefree days of frivolous opposition, personal jealousies and tribal rivalries are, or should be, over. There is a crying need for efficient leadership and a sense of unity.’ A story that quickly won the paper wide attention, as well as considerable hostility, was an exclusive photo-spread on Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s most talked-about and least-seen politician, who lived under restriction at distant Lodwar in the Northern Frontier Province, having recently been released from prison in Lokitaung. Bierman told the story of the scoop: “Charles Hayes had got wind that Margaret Kenyatta was being allowed to visit her father and suggested we get her to take some photographs. I jumped at the idea. No pictures had been seen of the old man since he was convicted years before and there were many gossipy stories that he was in ill health, drinking heavily and so on. Margaret used her own little camera and we gave her a couple of rolls of film. I told her to shoot them all off in the hope that we might get one or two useable prints. I remember she was eking out a living as a bookbinder with a small Asian-owned firm and I personally collected the film from her at her workplace just down the road from Nation House. What she brought back far exceeded my expectations and made a massive impact.”
The Nation of 19 June 1960 carried a front-page picture of Kenyatta in shorts and sandals, describing him as ‘corpulent but as vigorous as ever’, with another five photographs inside under the headline, The Old Man Who Waits at Lodwar. There was also an editorial saying for better or worse he must be released, and there would be no peace and progress until he was. ‘This story was a sensation and the papers sold like hot cakes’, Bierman recalled. ‘It caused consternation at Government House. The settlers hated us for it, they felt Jomo should be buried in some distant prison and never seen again. I got a lot of nasty phone calls. One chap actually threatened to horsewhip me. But it was a brilliant editorial success.’ When two African politicians, Ronald Ngala and Masinde Muliro, were permitted to visit the Mzee, Ivor Davis, who ran the Africapix photo agency with Mohinder Dhillon, gave a loaded camera to Muliro and his pictures appeared in the Nation and the Standard.
In a telegram to the Aga Khan on 23 March, Curtis reported, ‘First issue Nation great success, sales estimated at 17,500.’ After the fourth issue, he followed up, ‘More advertising than the Sunday Post, searching everywhere for newsprint.’ On 11 May, circulation reached 18,500, on 24 July, 24,000. A telegram of 10 August reported: ‘Progress on all the papers continues to be almost too good to be true. Nation print order 35,000, returns under 10 per cent.’
The Aga Khan replied, ‘I am thrilled.’ As late as June 1960, the precise nature of the projected Daily Nation had not been decided. Curtis wrote, ‘My plan at present is to make it an afternoon paper in Nairobi and district, replating in the early evening and selling as a morning paper in Mombasa and upcountry.’ That never happened, but the proposal must have leaked and, when the daily came out as a morning paper, the Standard was taken by surprise.
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The Nation was Kenya’s first truly national newspaper. Said Bierman, ‘The Standard had never trucked papers to the Coast, they had their Mombasa Times for that area, and we were considered insane for even thinking about driving overnight down 300 miles of dirt road which could easily be cut in three places in the rainy season.
‘When the dreaded Mombasa run started, one van was charged by a rhino, and on two successive nights vehicles ran into herds of elephants. One driver was swept five miles downstream in a flood but survived, though over the years several Nation workers lost their lives in the high-speed charge to the Indian Ocean Issue No. 1 of the Daily Nation (The Nation had earlier changed its name to Sunday Nation) came out on Monday 3 October 1960 and upheld the tradition in publishing that ‘the first’s the worst’. One point that had evaded the planners was that a Monday paper carries Sunday’s news and there is often not much of that.
His Highness the Aga Khan (centre) with Nation's top management at the newspaper's printing press in Nairobi.
So it proved with the inaugural issue, and Curtis confessed to the Aga Khan, ‘I’m afraid the first issue was not a particularly brilliant effort. There was almost nothing to print except our own launching ceremony. Dr Kiano, Minister of Commerce and Industry, pressed the button.’ Even the lead story – Fit as a Fiddle Sultan is Back – proved an embarrassment when the 81-year-old Sultan of Zanzibar, newly returned from a visit to doctors in Europe, went to his reward six days later.
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The print order for the inaugural Daily Nation was 15,500, and it sold 13,000. If the Standard’s senior management disdained the Nation as, in Bierman’s words, ‘a bunch of ignorant parvenus’, the same could not be said for that paper’s circulation department. Denman remembered, ‘We had a terrible time with the Standard when we started. They messed up all our vendors and their vendors threw our papers into the gutters. They gave us hell.’ Curtis noted, ‘The Standard was very strong indeed in Nairobi and we wanted to make an impression in the rural areas. On the day we first came out we heard that a large Buick saloon with two portly Europeans was seen distributing the Standard in Kisumu.’
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Just 14 days after the Daily Nation hit the streets, a statement from the Kenya African National Union (KANU), signed by its president James Gichuru, VP Oginga Odinga and general secretary Tom Mboya, accused the paper of seeking ‘to use rumours from every source to vilify and discredit KANU, its leaders and activities’. The Nation had not expected gratitude from politicians for its forward-looking stance, but the hostility was surprising.
The reason for the nationalists’ anger was a story which claimed Odinga was bidding for the leadership of KANU. Standing by its account, the newspaper replied on its front page, ‘It is right and proper that Nation Newspapers should report and comment on these differences [within the party].’ It would, it warned, continue to do so. The KANU statement was the first shot in a battle between successive Kenya governments and the Nation that was to become the leitmotif of the newspaper’s history. The cute little fellow in the pram simply would not behave.
Tomorrow:Growth of a fiercely independent newspaper that defined the nation