What my father actually taught me at the breakfast table

People assume I grew up wanting to be on television. I did not. I grew up in Manyonyi, Lugari, with a father, Joab, whom the village nicknamed the Lion, a man who loved the news the way some men love football, and who could not understand why his sons would not want to talk about it too.

Every evening, without fail, he would ask what had happened in the world that day, and he expected an answer with detail in it, not a shrug. If you had watched the bulletin and could only tell him the headline, he would push further. Where. Who said what. Why it mattered.

I did not understand until much later that this was training. At the time it just felt like a man who cared deeply about being informed, and who wanted the same for his sons, whether or not the electricity, the signal, or the kerosene lamp we read by cooperated that night.

That habit, of not accepting the surface version of a story, is the exact habit that keeps me useful in a newsroom today. I have interviewed people twice my age and caught the gap in their answer because a man in a mud house in Lugari once refused to accept 'nothing much happened' as a real answer.

I do not know if my father ever imagined I would end up doing this for a living. I know he built the instinct for it without trying to.