I lost my cousin Wairimu, this week on Tuesday. She had had a long struggle with cancer and she died a real warrior. Her brothers and sisters, needless to say, were heroes and heroines in their own right, and as we sat in My aunt Milka’s house recounting the last days of her daughter Wairimu,  every one seemed to agree just how strong willed the deceased was, up to her last breath. Wairimu never got married, and in the Kikuyu custom, she will be buried in her parent’s compound. Her grave had already been dug, next to her father’s.

After the somber discussion on the person of Wairimu, the funeral plans, my aunt Milkah and how she had taken the loss of her daughter, I had to leave in order to avoid the late night drive. My cousin Njenga, Wairimu’s brother, saw me off.  He is a senior lecturer at the university of Nairobi and a very successful consultant  and supervisor of doctoral students’ work. In all our years of cousinship, Njenga and I had never really discussed my doctoral research, my education or any such matters. He is the sweet older cousin who cares about you as a person and takes you on a guilt trip of how we must meet more often and be more in each other’s lives. And so out of the blues he asked: what are you doing about publishing?

That question threw me off. I had thought that I would first analyse ALL my data then seek to publish. But Njenga, un-apologetically, but ever so helpfully, told me to simply publish based on my objectives. “Take each objective and make it a paper. Should take you no more than 2 hours. Simple!” He said.

I was even more blank. Not because publishing is strange, but because he had made it sound doable. Possible. And even easy. But I also critiqued him mentally as a quantitative researcher who probably only has to negate a hypothesis using the numbers he already has and offering it a “twist”. It doesn’t work that way for purist qualitative researchers, my mind consoled.

But he planted a seed in me. And I am going to try. So at 5:30 this morning, I sat on my computer, looked at my objectives, and there was not a single one that I could turn into a title for a paper! Ah this quantitative thinkers!

However, I thought to myself that since the theory I am using has 4 presentations of how communication constitutes organisation, and my supervisor Paul recently threw a call for papers my way, I was going to try. Take each presentation and discuss it as an independent paper. Let’s see how this goes!