Born on Christmas Eve at a Kisumu hospital everyone still calls “Russia,” to his teenage mother, Beverlyne, who got through those first days on boiled tea and borrowed arrowroots.
Raised in Manyonyi village, Lugari: a grass-thatched mud house, no electricity, no glass in the windows, a floor resealed by hand with cow dung every week. His father, Joab — nicknamed the Lion — ran a nightly news quiz at home that built a journalist before any classroom did.
His mother was raised not by her birth parents but by her aunt Gladys and David Zarembka, an American Quaker peace-worker who became, in every way but paperwork, Eugine’s grandfather — and whose library first put a wider world within reach.
At Mahemas Primary, a deputy headmistress named Madame Zipporah fed him tea and bread in a cramped library office — the first door anyone held open with no cane behind it. A classmate, Hassan Omar, once paid his 25-shilling exam fee out of his own pocket. Neither has been forgotten.
English Literature teacher in Kakamega. Radio and TV host in Thika. Then a bilingual news writer in the Citizen TV newsroom — 200+ stories in Swahili and English, learning the floor of a newsroom from the floor up, literally, carrying cables as an intern before anyone let him near a script.
Today he’s the co-anchor of Urban News on PPP TV, alongside Lucy Ogunde, and Head of Digital at the station.
He taught himself to code and shipped an automated news-to-social pipeline that runs part of the newsroom’s social output.
He founded Roylandz Media and co-founded the Urban Gang Tour with Lucy Ogunde — a school a week, a stage, mentorship pods, a runway, and a national broadcast.
He is now an author: Born Broke, Built Loud.
“Born broke. Built loud.” ✦
Milestones
On set & off script
