A day in the office with the maestro who sipped tea as he chopped stories, brewed words, marinated idiom, garnished headlines, roasted politicians, grilled reporters and baked sub-editors
A slight man saunters into the office in the early afternoon. Mbogo Murage's first order of business — after he has said his hellos — is to find a cup.
Jael comes to the rescue.
"I had a fancy cup that Mbogo liked, so he borrowed it. I never imagined it would take three months for him to give it back!" she says.
Cup in hand, Mbogo’s second order of business is to find a tea bag, which he does after a long tour of the newsroom. Thankfully, hot water is readily available at the water dispenser.
He finally sits down, rolls up his sleeves, cracks his knuckles and gets down to work.
A wave of relief washes over Wanjiru.
"When Mbogo settled down, the team was complete. I knew we'll be okay," she says.
Besides, Mbogo has brought her a peace offering of fruit salad, so all is forgiven.
Duncan is raring to go. He hopes to catch the 7pm Kiswahili news bulletin at home for the first time in a long while.
Josephine, who had not been "very amused" by Mbogo's tardiness, cannot stay mad.
"The minute he said 'Hi, Jossy' in that soft voice of his the anger would melt away and we’d start catching up," she says.
Valerie and Mbogo have a 'morning' ritual.
"He would say to me, 'Habari yako? Good, good, good', followed by hearty laughter, smiling eyes and hand gestures."
And then the copy tightening; fact-checking; sulky reporter calling; bad grammar, pathetic spelling and puzzling punctuation correcting; biased story balancing; libel avoiding; inverse pyramid of news story restructuring; house style maintaining; copy fitting; headline and caption writing; and deadline chasing storm kicks up in earnest.
The storm quickly builds into a whirlwind as the clock ticks towards 5pm.
Everyone on the desk is in a frenzy, nerves are on edge and tempers are short. But not Mbogo; he is calm and does not let the pressure compromise the quality of his work.
"One time, he sat at my computer and rewrote a story I thought I’d done a good job on. The page was late for press and Wanjiru was standing in front of us saying, 'Mbogo that page has to go to press now'. But he was as calm as could be, he was not letting a badly written and poorly subbed story be published," Josephine says.
Annah learns to doubt every single 'fact' in a story and verify it.
"Mbogo would always tell you to crosscheck the name of a person or a remote village. One day he was really getting frustrated that I kept forgetting the National Assembly and the Parliament are worlds apart in the not-so-new constitution. He said: 'Annah, how many times will I remind you that Parliament stands for both the National Assembly and the Senate?' Now I know," Annah says.
"If he came across a ridiculous story — which in the first place should not have seen the light of day — he would call you and say 'this is a nonstory'. Mediocrity is not an option."
Valerie learns to push herself to the limit.
"Once I wrote a lousy headline and he said, 'This is a nonsense'. He suggested a new headline that could not fit in the space allocated. He shook his head, saying 'Fikiria kidogo tu'. A few minutes later, he was back at my desk, smiling and bearing a flask of uji. He said maybe if we shared it we could come up with a headline."
Linda, a sub before she became the company's legal assistant, learns that subbing is fun and that a lawyer is not misplaced in the newsroom.
"Mbogo was very particular about the language he would allow on final copy. It was really hard to convince him to pass a story that named private parts. But one day I got a court story about a woman charged with insulting her husband’s mistress. I could not stop laughing at the insult 'matako yako ni nyeusi'. How did the wife know that the mistress had black buttocks? Mbogo asked me what was funny and, when I told him, he also broke into laughter. And that day black buttocks made it to press. Maybe if I had laughed about the Ps and the Vs, he would have let them pass too.
Claire, the newest sub, soon realises Mbogo does not accept what he calls "shoddy work", even if it is accidental.
"I was not done editing a page. Mbogo turned to me and asked: 'Which page are you working on?' I sheepishly said 13. 'That page should be ready by now. Try and hurry so I revise it'. In my haste, I misread a story and wrote that one of the youngest MPs was locked out of his house over rent arrears. As Mbogo revised it, he said: 'Which MP do you know that lives in Kawangware?' I reverted to the writer's copy and found it was the MP’s assistant who lived in Kawangware. Mbogo laughed it off and started telling me about how ambitious young MPs are and I got engrossed in the story… then I remembered, the deadline had long passed. I had to cut him short and get the page ready. Once that was done, he told me to make sure I verify every story, every time, then he continues with the ambitious MPs story."
Duncan learns to get straight to the point.
"Mbogo looked at my headline and the story and saw a disconnect. He asked how I arrived at the figures in the headline and I gave what I deemed a very professional explanation, one that only a trained teacher like myself can afford. But Mbogo’s reaction is a lesson I carry to date: 'Duncan, stop taking the reader in circles. Whatever you’ve just explained put it in the story'.”
Josephine, who has a BA in Languages and Linguistics, learns that journalists use English in a special way.
"When I first met Mbogo, it struck me that my entire knowledge of the English language was a joke," she says.
The whirlwind is now a tornado but everything is going swimmingly until Mbogo decides he must take one of his sudden, random breaks.
"Amidst a crisis, Mbogo would choose to go and camp in the kitchen. Sometimes I would physically go looking for him, but he'd come back 30 minutes later," Godfrey says.
Tom, on his way to the water cooler, bumps into Mbogo coming from the kitchen and they share a moment.
"Mbogo asked me one day in late 2014, 'Are you the one who used to run the Stanchart Marathon and write about it in the Star?' I wondered how he knew. [Tom freelanced for the Star before he was hired]. A smile greeted my curiosity. It was a knowing smile, like a relative at a get-together who’s asked a nephew, 'Do you remember me?' and gotten the blank face he expected from one too young to eat at the elders’ table," Tom says.
Linda learns 'how' to eat in the office.
"I would come in at 10am and leave at 9pm without putting anything in my mouth because I had never worked in an open plan office before and the feeding logistics were a bit peculiar to me. He would ask me why I was starving myself. He would get a thermos of tea every day, bring two cups and make me drink. 'You must eat something!', he'd say as he shared his nduma and ngwaci. Thanks to him, I mastered the open plan feeding system," Linda says.
Meanwhile, Duncan, who is still diligently working towards his target of getting home before 7pm, is starting to think he set a rather lofty goal.
"Mbogo returned my last page proof and found a queen cake on my desk. 'Kumbe kuna mali hapa?', he remarked. I started fixing the corrections but there was a problem – the headline Mbogo suggested wouldn’t fit. Our vocabulary reserve iswas under ‘siege’. We tried word after word and for every attempt, Mbogo took a piece of the cake. After five minutes, Mbogo had done a perfect job – we had a brilliant headline. But I discovered he was not only a meticulous editor, but a fantastic multitasker – he had cleared the cake. I was done for the day, but I went home hungry."
Annah leaves with something for her tummy.
"One day Mbogo did not have time to eat his packed lunch. As I was leaving at around 7.30pm, Mbogo insisted I carry that food home. It consisted of a juicy piece of chicken, rice and vegetables. Needless to say, I was saved my usual wrestling session with sufurias after a tough day.
Josephine goes home with reassuring words.
"When I was new on the job, I would meet Mbogo at the door with his trademark cup of tea. I would moan about how bad I was at my job and he would tell me to take heart. 'Once you get used to it you’ll see it will be a walkover', he would say."
Tom leaves with new knowledge and in awe of Mbogo's.
"I came to learn that many of the faces in the newsroom had not been around for as long as Mbogo, and even fellow veterans did not quite have the elephant-sized gift of memory Mbogo did. Whenever there was something that needed recollection, Victoria [Graham, the training editor] or Wanjiru would tell me, 'Ask Mbogo'.
Indeed when Mbogo's health took a turn for the worse and he could no longer make the Tuesday morning training and review meeting, the subs would shelve contentious issues (should the the first 's' in Cabinet Secretary be upper case? why should we say three times and not thrice? land-grabbers or land grabbers?...) and agree that Mbogo was best placed to issue a decree to solve the problem once and for all.
The storm is over.
As subs dash out of the office, Mbogo lingers.
"When I was just ready to leave, Mbogo would stop me at his desk to discuss politics. We shared a love for politics, although his was the politics of earlier times — the era of Kihika Kimani, GG 'Grace Gathoni' Kariuki and Koigi Wamwere. He did not care that I was rushing to catch a free lift home; I still had to give him audience," Godfrey says.
Wanjiru finally corners Mbogo who is always willing to lend her an ear. She goes home upbeat.
"Aside from teaching me almost everything I know about subbing, and as unlikely as it may sound, Mbogo was my 'Agony Uncle'. He was a good friend and the best listener," she says.
Remember Jael and her borrowed cup? She leaves with the most precious gift.
"One Sunday evening as I walked out, exhausted from battling four full pages, he stopped me. He reached into his bag and pulled out a cup. He still remembered! The cup had a kind message: 'We met by chance and turned into friends and now our destiny keeps us close to each other, making our friendship grow more with the passing time. You are a friend for lifetime!'."
Mbogo walked out of the newsroom for the last time on Sunday January 24 ready to take a week's leave. He was found dead in his house on February 1.
No one can replace Mbogo, our encyclopaedia, sage, mentor, historian, grammar prefect, nurturer, accidental comedian, good friend and uncle.
"I will remember him, and the three months it took him to find a cup with such a kind message. Tea has never tasted better than when I drink from this cup. He took mine for three months, I will have his for as long as I live," says Jael.