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.