NAIROBI, KENYA — Sam Gonza Wainaina, who died of a heart attack on Sunday December 18 aged 53 and was buried at Kanyariri village in the Kikuyu division of Kiambu district on Friday December 24, 2005, had spent the past 30 years plying the precarious trade of a freelance journalist in Africa. He wrote for the Daily Nation as Sam Wainaina and as Sam Gonza for Executive (a business monthly where I worked from 1989-98) as well as various Western publications, including the Christian Science Monitor.

Many people have spent 30 and more years at their chosen trade and nobody has found anything remarkable in that; even in journalism, the better Western journalists end up more or less their own masters after a decade or two of writing, and tend to have at least one book in print selling reasonably well. This is true whether they work in London or Nairobi. I know of at least half a dozen journalists who, having spent time as Nairobi-based Africa stringers for international news agencies or big UK, US or European papers, have written well-received books - one or two of which, it must be said, are both accurate and readable.

Now a stringer is one of the lowlier species of freelance, physically and politically remote from headquarters, who nine times out of ten finds his extensive reports chopped down to two or three paragraphs and given sensational headlines by ignorant sub-editors in London, New York or Munich (like the Independent sub who inserted a kicker above a story of climbing Mount Kenya about the mountain “rising from the searing heat of the equatorial plain” at a time of year when the temperature in London was 37 degrees C and in Central Province a sweltering 24).

When even such bottom-feeders can find publishers and earn fame and fortune from writing about a culture and society of which they have barely scratched the surface, surely the real thing, their local counterparts, should be able to do at least as much? But it doesn’t work like that here; apart from a few honourable exceptions such as Hilary Ng’weno and Philip Ochieng, local journalists simply don’t have the resources and time to sit down and write a book, let alone find a publisher who can actually sell the thing.

Everything conspires against them - history, economics, Africa’s image as a helpless continent and linked to this, the fact that most lack the existential confidence to believe they can actually write a successful book.

This predicament framed both the tragedy and quiet heroism of Sam Gonza’s life. Though he never wrote them, he had not one but many books in him; he was, in fact, a living library. Kenya, for all that it is the size of France and has a population of 30 million-plus, is in many ways a small town - everybody knows everybody else and who’s sleeping with whom and what they had for dinner last night. Sam epitomised this national quality of detailed knowledge - he knew or knew about everybody who was anybody in any way - African, white, Asian, Somali, Swahili, Ugandan, Tanzanian, Sudanese or Seychellois -and the fortunes of their families for several generations back. He knew the gossip, he knew the facts, and he sympathised with nearly everybody, even those he felt to be moral monsters, for he firmly believed in retribution, and would shake his head at the nemesis that awaited transgressors. (We had heated debates on what difference it made to their victims that Samuel Doe, Mobutu et al came to bad ends).

This catholic curiosity about all races and classes was not just the product of a liberal outlook. The other unique thing about Kenya is that its colonial experience, marred as it was by more than its fair share of the usual evils and injustices, actually saw the emergence of competitive politics well before independence. While the political arena was at first dominated by European settlers and Indian (Asian) commercial interests competing to influence state policy, many other ethnic groups soon joined in as they began to acquire concrete interests in the emerging market economy, leading to vigorous and not always hostile transactions between peoples who had either been traditional enemies or had never before had any contact whatsoever.

While we regularly bemoan tribalism and racism in public life, the fact is that this is one of the most diverse societies in the world where, perhaps because of the regular interactions between different groups, ethnic animosities are nowhere near as intense as those that produced the genocides of Rwanda, India or Yugoslavia. One result is that you cannot hope to understand the dynamics of Kenyan society or for that matter the Kenyan economy if you only know one of its many African stories or just its white story or its Asian story.

Indeed, you have to know other East African stories as well - Uganda, Somalia, Sudan, etc. Sam realised this early, probably while growing up in Uganda during a turbulent period in that country’s history. The family lived in the King’s African Rifles compound in Jinja, where their Ugandan mother ran a shop while their Kenyan father pursued further studies abroad. (His brothers recalled in the funeral eulogy how, in June 1971, in the course of Idi Amin’s coup, heavy fighting took place at the barracks. Instead of running, the family kept their heads down, sleeping on the floor to avoid bullets - inevitably, the idea came from Sam, the heavy reader.)

Journalists, especially freelancers, have a poor image in literature, and even the latest Harry Potter movie repeats the stereotype of malicious, sometimes extortionist snoops motivated by jealousy and spite. In Sam’s case, I believe that what he once described as “the loss of a generation of friends in a senseless war” led him to become a student of the general human condition. And so, while most people who start out as freelancers either get a job at a newspaper or magazine as sub-editors or hang in for a few years as “special correspondents” (who are basically freelancers using the company phone and computers, with company accreditation to produce when interviewing sources) before moving on to greener pastures, Sam Gonza hung in there for 30 years.

With the help of his earnings from the Christian Science Monitor and the All-Africa Press Service of the All-Africa Conference of Churches, bless them, and of his sturdy, well-worn footgear - he was given to plucking at his trouser leg, sticking his feet out and pronouncing, “A freelance journalist’s best friends are his shoes” - he kept going, apparently never tempted to find a “real job” and make some decent money.

Before the reader runs away with the idea that Sam Gonza was a biographer or even a political commentator, I must hasten to record that “his chosen field,” according to the eulogy, was scientific and technological innovation, social development, the environment, nutrition and so on - he penned many timely warnings about the dangers of aflatoxin and GM foods and anthrax as a terrorist weapon just a few months before 9/11. He could and occasionally did write perceptively about Kenyan and East African politics and business and geopolitics in general. He did an extensive cover story for Executive on Chinese entrepreneurs in Nairobi well before the rest of the media took notice; one article about oil and the fate of Southern Sudan in The EastAfrican was especially prophetic - and he once did a story on skydiving for Msafiri magazine in which the main picture, taken in mid-air, carried the credit “Sam Gonza” - he had jumped with the regular skydivers, wielding a borrowed camera, hi s own zoom camera having been taken by AK-47 wielding bandits near Lamu some years before!

But his encyclopaedic knowledge really came into play in private conversations - mostly in various pubs in the Westlands area, on long golden afternoons in the early and middle 1990s; by the end of the decade, the increasing frailty of his heart had forced him to give up drinking and we saw rather less of him in the old haunts.

Sam Gonza was, of course, no angel, though he was remarkably free of various deadly sins like greed, covetousness and envy. Many people who did not know him well thought him a pessimist - even though he relished dire predictions, the impish grin that invariably lit up his face when he did so was thoroughly disarming. He was alarmingly paranoid - once he asked me out of the blue, “Why do you always patronise the same pub?” “Because it’s next door, Sam,” I replied, adding, “Why do you ask?” To which he said, perfectly seriously, “Because your enemies will know where to find you…” Obsesssed with his health, he was often to be found sporting acupressure pads on his ears like multiple ear-studs (that Chinese connection again!); eventually, his turned out to be a case of “Just because I’m hypochondriac doesn’t mean there aren’t evil little bugs out to get me.”

Always studiedly unostentatious in dress and bearing, he was never awed by wealth and influence - I cannot recall any of his numerous prosperous, important acquaintances ever trying to patronise him. He in turn was capable of judging a man not by his politics or the size of his bank account but by the state of his ulcer - and, as I said, of feeling sorry for him.

An eccentric’s eccentric, a conspiracy theorist’s conspiracy theorist, he carried a torch for all sorts of controversial figures like Doctor Stone, the man with the miracle Aids cure. But it was all part of his charm, because he was never boring nor did he ever try to shout you down. In his never-quite-shabby clothes, scruffy beard and scuffed shoes, Sam Gonza lived the life of his choice.

Born on July 9, 1952 at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, to the late John Mbugua Wainaina and Eleanor Matama, Samuel Gonza Wainaina attended the Army and Police Primary School, the Rubaga Primary School and Victoria Nile Primary School before proceeding to Jinja Secondary School where he did his A-levels. He started writing in 1975 after moving to Nairobi with his parents.

Source: Ali Zaidi, The East African