Joyce: Media fraternity has lost a rare person

While the newsroom is about compiling, writing and editing stories, it’s also about people staying together as a mingling of individuals of often diverse social backgrounds.

As a media house employee, you get to appreciate or be appreciated, not just as a journalist exercising the power of your pen, but also as an ordinary human being. This perhaps best serves to define Joyce Mmasi, a lovable media colleague who died on early Wednesday, Dec 6, at the tender age of 39.

The Old Moshi-born last child of Mzee Lamwel and Mama Dorothy’s family of 11, Joyce is sure to be remembered, first and foremost, as a good person and then…as a hardworking, self-driven journalist. One who so loved journalism that she was filing stories for Majira while still an O-Level student at Moshi’s Kiombo Sec School.

I came to know Joyce in mid-2004 when I joined the MCL as a subeditor for the company’s newly established English daily, The Citizen. The infrastructural challenges that MCL faced in those nascent days forced Mwananchi and The Citizen scribes to share equipment, and that’s how I found myself getting closer to our Kiswahili counterparts, such as the soft-spoken (then) sports writer Frank Sanga, the ever-smiling, gifted story teller Absalom Kibanda, humourous Hawra Shamte and the amiable, baby-faced Joyce Mmasi.

I particularly remember how Joyce would assist me as I struggled to pick foreign stories from the Internet at the dingy, Mwananchi newsroom, then located above the printing plant, while The Citizen team operated from a few rooms in the building that currently houses the administration offices.

I could say Joyce was among those who inducted me to the MCL after decamping from the Daily News. A few months later, she was to leave for Uganda for a three-year degree course in Mass Communication at the Kampala International University (KIU). She rejoined MCL upon her graduation towards the end of 2007.

The amazing thing about Joyce is, she interacted with virtually everybody at our workplace. Were it not for her incredible energy, it would have been impossible for her to perform her primary duty at the newsroom—writing stories—for there were all these people “fighting” to share a word with her—for no good reason.  

Why, Joyce had this magnetic personality that seemed to pull everybody to her, be they elderly like this writer, or youngsters like Julie Kulangwa and Freddy Azzah.

Ms Hawra Shamte, a former Mwananchi Jumapili managing editor, now a senior official with Tamwa, Zanzibar branch, says: “Joyce was my key advisor in many personal matters; I used to open up to her more than I  would to anybody else.” But mark you, Joyce was several years younger than Hawra.

I personally benefitted, in numerous cases, from some sound advice or criticism from Joyce, much as she was young enough to be my child. Not to mention the “cruel” jokes we shared as watani, she being a Mchagga and I, a Mwasu from the Pare Mountains.

We’ve lost a dear person, a sociable human resource, who was set to complete her Master’s degree programme at SAUT in June.

My heart goes to her husband Andrew Kamugisha, sons Rawlings, 18, Kelvin, 9,  two and Alvin, 2.5, as well as her siblings and 80-year-old mother. Plus the many of us, who will find the gap she leaves behind virtually impossible to fill. Oh, yes!  May the Lord rest in eternal peace the soul of Joyce, whose body we lay to rest at her parent’s farm in Old Moshi, tomorrow.

Mr Sultani is a former editor with The Citizen. Email: [email protected]