I had been out of journalism school for barely two weeks when Julia Opoti, a friend and an editor at Kenya Imagine, a popular online discussion forum for Kenyans, sent a text message to my cell phone. My name, she wrote, had been the subject of another online forum.

"Hey, did you know that there is a whole thread about you on Mashada?" the message read.

"Really? What are they saying?" I asked, thinking that forum members were probably discussing my recent writing on Kenya Imagine, to which I had been contributing over the last four months.

"Lol! That you are Man R," she replied.

I will get to who Man R is shortly, but first a little about Mashada.com. The site is perhaps the first and most popular online discussion forum for Kenyans. It went live in 1999 and now has nearly 50,000 registered users -- a significant number for a country where less than 10 percent of its 37 million population has access to the Internet.

I rushed to Mashada.com, typed my name in the search field and hit "Enter." What I saw left me wondering if my journalism career was over.

There, on a website that I had visited only once or twice in my life, was my name attached to some of most defamatory comments I had ever read. They called me a liar, a hatemonger, a bigot, and a tribalist comparable to the media propagandists who triggered the 1994 Rwandan genocide that left nearly a million people dead.