Of the Dan Eldon legacy and why Dan innocently chose my career path.

"Wait a minute! It was Dan Eldon, he had something to do with why I chose to be a journalist!"

It was June of 1996. I was in my second year of high school. I had just come to Nairobi for my short mid term break and was at a house belonging to a friend of my family. You see my school was in Thika, few minutes from Nairobi but my home was in a far away place called Garissa. Travelling to Garissa for a short break was both costly and my mum would not hear of it. So my elder sister always had an army of friends who would host me for the midterm breaks.

Anyway, that day as I entered the living room of my would be hosts for the next three days, I stumbled upon some sort of a magazine. I cannot truly recall whether it was a magazine, a booklet or a photo catalogue but it was something I innocently picked and started perusing through. Maybe out of boredom or the fact that I did want to intrude on my hosts by making myself at home and turning on the television. I do not recall the reason nor the title. I picked it up and started reading. It had numerous photographs, photos about a war in Somalia I had little knowledge of, I was only 15 years old, I had no interest in the news and was hardly aware of what went on around the world beyond what went on in my teenage head.

This booklet/magazine was the first glimpse I had of a world outside TV sitcoms and VCR movies which I was fond of at the time. It told a story through photos, I remember reading some of the captions below the photos; something in the lines of "...the Somalia war started as 'my tribe against your tribe', then turned to 'me and my clan against your clan' to 'me and my brother against your clan' then 'me against my brother'...." or something similar. I am not absolutely certain of the exact text as I am writing this from pure memory of 18 years ago. I tried researching the booklet/magazine but without recollecting a name, author or something to help the search engines throw familiar words in my face, I am relying on this dim memory of mine.

The memory takes me back to one particular name I do recall though. Dan Eldon. I remember reading at the time that he died in Somalia, killed by an angry mob. I recall the pictures he took, they were vivid, sort of stuck in my mind to date. There were pictures of very malnourished grown men, of a 4 or 5 year old boy with a gun. There was a picture of someone with a begging bowl. I wish I could find this booklet/magazine again.

Why does the title of this post say "Of the Dan Eldon legacy and why Dan innocently chose my career path"? Simple. From the moment I picked up that booklet/magazine, I wanted to be in his shoes, not wanting to die or anything, but to take risks, to be in the middle of the action. But that must have soon faded as I went back to school three days later, and my head was again swamped with homework, passing tests and the good old teenage girl's boy-dramas.

However, the day we were filling out our career prospective forms, I remember jotting down "broadcaster" to the question 'what career path would you like to pursue'. At the time I had no idea 'broadcaster' actually meant the guys who own the TV stations!

So apart from that simple jotting down, I really never gave it too much thought until the year 2000, when my elder sister (she was sort of the head of the family after dad died in 1995) came home one day armed with application forms to the local Medical Training College, fondly referred to as MTC. She wanted me to be a nurse or some clinical officer. I told her I was not interested and that I had already applied to join Kenya Institute of Mass Communication, which was considered the place where all successful journalists in Kenya passed through.

I may not have actively obsessed over Dan Eldon or the author of that strange booklet/magazine but I did become a journalist: a TV journalist, then a radio journalist then freelance producer which I am doing at present. I am now 34 years old and as I was doing some soul searching on new year's day, I stumbled upon that little memory and I thought to myself "wait a minute, it was Dan Eldon, he had something to do with why I chose to be a journalist!" So I just but began obsessively searching for his work, I still haven't found that booklet/magazine, whatever it was called.

In reflection I remember I did travel to Mogadishu in 2006 while working as a TV reporter with Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. It was more than a decade after he did. I remember sensing the danger, the smell of gun powder and the general unsafeness of the place. Even at that time, for some reason the memory of the booklet/magazine did not trigger at all. I don't recall, reflecting on it at the time, maybe because the surrounding was too intense to go back in time into childhood memory.

It is strange why it only came back to me now. On new year's day, when the rest of the world was nursing a hungover. But since then, I have watched a bunch of documentaries about his life, about his family's honouring his work and about his journals. I rang the family's foundation called "The DEPOT"(The Dan Eldon Place Of Tomorrow) in Nairobi and tried to see if I could volunteer. I also managed to write this post. I don't know why, but I feel like he or the information my subconscious absorbed from that booklet/magazine had a lot to do with why I chose to be in this field. I do not know if I will go through with volunteering for his legacy, but I do know that until I find that little piece of collection again, I may never be able to pin-point exactly how he inspired me.

All the same I will say "thank you Dan, may the soul with which you did your work, inspire many more who never knew you!"

Disclaimer: I could not put any image of the guy who pulled me to journalism, you know copyright issues but I am sure whoever wants to find out who he was, can easily bury themselves in his work, photos and art which are allover the internet. For me I feel like that is not going to be enough. But that is another story for another day.