A historical account of Nation Media Group’s first 50 years will be released this week at a landmark Pan-Africa Media Conference in Nairobi.
The meeting was organised to mark the anniversary.
Titled Birth of a Nation —The Story of a Newspaper in Kenya, the book was written by Gerard Loughran, who was among a small band of pioneers who launched the Sunday Nation and Daily Nation in 1960.
Mr Loughran, a Briton, remained closely associated with the newspapers in subsequent years and still contributes a weekly column to the Sunday Nation, Letter From London.
“Kenya has changed unimaginably over the past half-century,” he said, “so that digging into the past, interviewing old-stagers and recording their memories was like exploring a foreign country.
“I was lucky to talk to people like Michael Curtis, the first managing director but really the man who created the Nation, the bedrock of it all, and Charles Hayes, a former colonial officer who started the Kiswahili weekly, Taifa, then sold it to the Aga Khan.”
Ismailimail 