Ochieng made his presence felt as soon as he arrived in Dar es Salaam, beginning a column weekly soon after.
The title was later changed to Daily News in 1972. The Standard Tanzania, as it was first renamed, was merged with The Nationalist, a party newspaper belonging to the ruling Tanzania African National Union party. He was then already being wooed by the Tanganyika Standard after President Julius Nyerere had nationalised it from its private owners, Lonrho. In 1970 he was forced to resign his Nation job after poking a colleague with the burning end of a cigarette. The second was I Accuse the Press: An Insider’s View of the Media and Politics in Africa.īut he was dogged by controversy in his early years. The first, The Kenyatta Succession, was co-authored with fellow journalist the late Joseph Karimi. In the course of this, Ochieng wrote two books. Wherever he worked, he helped many improve their writing skills through constant drilling – but also straight in your face memos delivered in his stern newsroom manner. His brilliance was matched only by his willingness to mentor young journalists in the profession, many of them untrained as he had been. Ochieng emerged as a towering figure in the three East African countries. This would mark the beginning of his life-long journey in journalism, which took him back and forth between Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. While here, the letters he wrote to the editor of the Daily Nation caught the attention of Githii, who hired him as a cub reporter. Later, he would be employed as a protocol officer in the ministry of External Affairs. On the eve of independence, Ochieng returned home, where he was employed as an English teacher in Migori. He moved on to France and East Germany as well but he never graduated with a degree. In the US, Ochieng joined Roosevelt University but he did not complete his degree. The programme was organised by the former politician and trade unionist Tom Mboya and his colleague Julius Kiano. These students were being prepared to take over positions of leadership in anticipation of the country’s independence. Soon after he finished school, he joined the pre-independence airlift of young Kenyan students to the US. This fast-tracked him to the prestigious Alliance High School, a national school for high achievers near Nairobi. In Awendo, Migori County, close to Lake Victoria where he was born in 1938, his classmates remembered him as a genius who topped his class from the time he set foot in primary school. Mastering his environment in such a short space of time was typical of Ochieng. Within a year he was entrusted with a regular column debating the social, political and economic issues of a country that had gained independence from Britain only a few years earlier in 1963. Ochieng began his journalism career in 1966 when he joined the Nairobi-based Nation newspaper group, which was then only a few years old, at the invitation of then editor-in-chief George Githii. He was an East African par excellence who counted former Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa and revered Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani among his circle of friends. Philip Ochieng – who has died at the age of 83 – was a celebrated Kenyan editor, author and hard-hitting columnist who made his mark across East Africa.