Newspaper columnist and veteran editor John Kamau is leaving the newsroom to take up a teaching job at a university in Canada. He will be a lecturer in African Studies.
Kamau (pictured), popularly known as JK in the newsroom, is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, but it was not immediately clear if he was joining the same institution.
In university teaching, he is joining other Kenyan journalists who left the newsroom on becoming PhDs.
“Kamau is living the Nation Media Group’s twin towers to go and teach in Canada,” our source said, but he will likely continue writing his history column in the Sunday Nation, an NMG publication with the highest circulation in the region.
A historian with a Master of Arts degree from the University of London, Kamau has been writing his People, Power and Politics full-page column that he says is “award-winning”.
In one of his latest write-ups, he faulted the government of President Uhuru Kenyatta for neglecting the Kenya National Archives. “For the past 56 years since the Kenya National Archives was established, the monumental silence of its place in our national history is only broken by its neglect,” he wrote in his weekly column.
He said it was unbelievable that a gem that holds the country’s rich history was left to atrophy in a noisy city centre district with a thin security. Kenya National Archives is housed in an old building on Nairobi’s Moi Avenue that is a hive of activity, what with a bus stop whose din he equates to the bustling River Road.
For his PhD, Kamau is keen on State formations in Africa and Caribbean, black internationalism and decolonisation in British colonies in the two regions, he says on his University of Toronto bio.
He is digging into racial and political doctrine of Garveyism, pan-Africanism, and the concept of self-determination, but his dissertation is on Kenya under the founding President Jomo Kenyatta and his ties with Caribbean intellectuals such as WEB Dubois and Marcus Garvey.
Before his life at Daily Nation, Kamau was an associate editor at Business Daily that is also published by the Nation Media Group.
At Daily Nation, he sat on various desks as editor, but he will probably be remembered well for guiding the special projects and investigations teams. He has also written extensively on tea farming politics, files that earned him membership in a task force whose work led to changes in the leadership of Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA), a giant lobby.
Previously an independent contributor to various publications, Kamau worked at The Standard newspaper as a senior politics writer in the early 2000s.
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