JOYCE NAFULA SIMIYU

Nation Media journalist who gave the sports desk a heart and the newsroom its best laugh

Joyce Nafula Simiyu filed her first match report from a plastic chair in the press box at Nyayo Stadium in 1988, and the sub-editor who read it asked, 'Who wrote this? It has a pulse.' She was the only woman in the row, which she handled by arriving earlier than every man and knowing more than all of them.

She was born in 1964 in Bungoma, where her father taught at a Friends primary school and her mother sold vegetables at the roadside. After Butere Girls' High School she read journalism at the University of Nairobi, and in 1987 joined the Nation Media Group as a cub reporter. For fourteen years she covered Harambee Stars and the Mashemeji derby. She was an AFC Leopards supporter by blood, since her uncles were Ingwe die-hards, and she never once let it taint a match report, although the headline writers were not always so restrained.

In 2003 she became Features Editor, a post she held for fifteen years, and for nineteen years her Saturday column, 'From the Terraces', made Kenyans laugh about football, marriage, matatus and the miracle of ugali. She mentored more than forty interns, kept a drawer of spare notebooks and reading glasses for any colleague who forgot theirs, and had a policy that no young reporter should ever be left alone with a sub-editor's red pen without a friendly witness. She married Tom Mukhwana in 1991, and loved cooking chicken stew for the whole newsroom on press nights.

Joyce died in March 2026 after a short illness, aged sixty-one. She leaves her husband, two children, a sister and a newsroom that has not yet stopped quoting her.

“Write it plain, write it true, and put a little pulse in it.”