How Aga Khan’s innovative spirit birthed The EastAfrican

With the launch of The EastAfrican in 1994, a long-standing ambition of the Aga Khan as a regional investor finally came to pass.

My entry into the project as the newspaper’s founding editor exposed me to His Highness’s far-sighted dream of journalism and media as a catalyst for change in the developing world. 

No one understood the newspaper idea better than my second-in-command, Gerry Loughran, the veteran writer and editor, who had previously led two media innovations close to the Aga Khan’s heart.

One was a bold venture in cross-border news coverage-- a news service covering the developing world and sympathetic to it called Compass News Features. Based in Europe, it distributed issue-driven articles about Africa and other emerging economies across the world, long before the internet.

The other was Loughran’s stewardship of The Sunday Nation’s launch, which he had overseen in 1962, as Kenya limped into independence from British colonial rule. Loughran had been part of a hardy team of United Kingdom journalists that the Aga Khan had flown to Kenya to help build a new media company he had launched with the purchase of a Kiswahili weekly, Taifa.

The Aga Khan’s ambition to publish news beyond the frontiers of Kenya was never a secret. He had named the founding company East African newspapers Ltd. Yet three decades after their birth in 1960 – the newspapers were still firmly rooted in Nairobi. Little wonder that, as politicians explored a proposal to revive East Africa’s regional integration in early 1990s, what leapt out to him was the opening for a cross-border newspaper, possibly a weekly, covering Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. 

Loughran, who had been a consultant editor at the Nation Group between 1993 and 1998, had been hauled back to Nation Centre from retirement by the Nation’s editorial head, Wangethi Mwangi, to help drive the project. He wrote the earliest concept papers on The EastAfrican. 

It helped that as Managing Editor of Compass, and, previously, Assistant Editor of The Sunday Nation, Loughran had interacted with the Aga Khan on media work and over time had built an extraordinary understanding of His Highness’ thinking on journalism and news publishing.  

“You’ll never get shouty headlines and badly written stories past him,” Loughran remarked as we reviewed the trial copies of The EastAfrican being prepared for one of many meetings the Aga Khan would hold with the project team  in Paris and London, examining the dummies page by page with an expert eye and sharing his views on unexpected details such as picture choice, headlines, layout, use of fonts and the masthead. 

When he came on board, Loughran had launched a market survey, talking to a wide range of news and business people, testing the temperature in the three capitals. His conclusions were entirely positive and a decision was made to develop the newspaper to ride on the new wave of regional integration.

Together with the late Jerry Okungu, who would be marketing manager, our triumvirate embarked on thousands of kilometres of travel, arranging focus groups, cocktail parties, face-to-face meetings and discussions with readers, advertisers and distributors in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Kampala, Arusha, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. 

Having established the need for a regional paper, debate focused on how often it should come out, what size it would be and what it would look like. A magazine did not seem the right vehicle for this type of project, nor did an insert or special section in the daily or Sunday Nation, and so the decision was taken to go for a separate, upmarket, weekly tabloid. 

A final contentious matter was the title. My suggestion of The EastAfrican, with “East” and “African” as a single word, suggesting a single entity, baffled many. Why not The East African Nation? Our response was that to use the word Nation would signal “Kenya” to the other two countries. A regional identity in the title was important and we instanced The Scotsman, The Sowetan and The Australian as successful precedents. 

Unknown to us, mastheads, logos and anything design, were issues the Aga Khan pursued with a scholarly passion. Analysis of design dummies took up much of his discussions with the project team, as he shared samples from some of the world’s best designed newspapers and explained why this or that presentation would not be suitable for a market like East Africa.

It was his idea to engage Jeanette Collins, a respected London-based newspaper designer, to give the proposed EastAfrican a dispassionate review. His Highness would listen patiently as we outlined the format options we had considered for the new publications and why we had settled on a weekly newspaper. 

A magazine had been mooted but did not seem the right vehicle for hard news project, nor did an insert or special section in the Nation’s existing titles. With doubt whether a daily market existed for regional news, a decision was finally taken to go for a weekly upmarket tabloid whose bottom line would be quality.  

A strategic concern the Aga Khan never ceased to emphasise was sensitivity to the political and cultural differences of the three East African countries. It was a valid concern, one whose implications became obvious as some of the paper’s headlines written by subeditors in far-off Nairobi later raised hackles in either Uganda or Tanzania. With time, consultation with local staff on sensitive stories became standard procedure as publication day drew nearer. 

The high quality His Highness expected of the The EastAfrican was never in doubt. In one instance, he had urged us to think of it as “the Sunday best in our wardrobes, the finest suit we would put on when occasion demanded.” In others he would stress the importance of audience targeting – why a small community of quality readers was better than a larger one with a mixed profile. 

Loughran and I took this to heart and, by the time of the launch issue, all hands were routinely meeting unaccustomed standards of accuracy and aesthetics. Issue 0001, which rolled off the press on November 7, 1994, was calm, reflective, and authoritative, a revelation to readers used to busy pages and shouting headlines. It was also a tribute to one man’s innovative spirit and commitment to media’s special place in national development.

Joseph Odindo was the founding managing editor of The EastAfrican and served as the Nation Group’s Editorial Director from 2009 to 2014