How Philip Ochieng evaded trouble by hiding in linguistic garb

Philip Ochieng' [Photo: Courtesy]

Over the past week, much tribute has been written for the late Philip Ochieng, the consummate provocateur and pioneering journalist who witnessed Kenya come of age in its post-colonial iteration, and proceeded to prodigiously chronicle the nascent nation’s growth and challenges using his superbly dexterous pen. His outstanding erudition, clarity, honesty and fearlessness only added to a soaring mystique.

His books, I Accuse the Press and the Kenyatta Succession revealed an extremely smart and profound author who conjured gems every single sentence he penned. Oftentimes, he wrote content concealed in proverbs, couched in impenetrable, jargon-littered English. He also oddly adopted Greco-Latinic etymology and Luo mythology as his pet subjects. With signature arrogance and irreverence, he adamantly refused to be a ‘normal journalist’, or to walk down his ivory tower to accommodate his whining readership, who often expressed desperation with his complicated language. Instead, he challenged them to read widely, up their own game and catch up. Ochieng seemed to have attained that mythical ability to always deploy the most appropriate English phraseology for any occasion.