Wild life

Rift Valley

The patriarch Jacob Mukhamia Omanyo, grandfather of my friend Celestina, was born in 1888 in western Kenya. For 119 years he lived a healthy life, falling sick only once in 1964, after a spider bit him. He married five wives, the first in 1924, his last in 1975. At his death of typhoid two years ago he rejoiced in having 21 surviving sons and daughters; 217 grandchildren, 450 great grandchildren and 24 great, great grandchildren.

Omanyo fought for the British against von Lettow-Vorbeck in the first world war. But what made him special, back before the Versailles Armistice, was that he attended a Roman Catholic mission school when few others from his tribe believed in such things. Education helped him rise to become a senior chief, a magistrate and a landowner. In time he helped establish a new mission in the village of Amukura, where Celestina still has his home. I have visited, and it is set in a landscape of bananas, sugarcane, glinting tin roofs and distant volcanoes.

Celestina says, ‘Always when we visited him my grandfather talked about school. He loved education.’ Celestina’s father Sikuku Yakobo had 14 children. ‘He also loved education, but he had no money.’ From the age of 11, Celestina trekked barefoot to a mud-floored shack where he learnt to read and write. This was in the 1980s, when a vicious dictatorship impoverished Kenya’s people. At 16, his father could no longer pay the fees. The school chased him away.

Celestina yearned for better chances in life, but he drifted between hand-to-mouth jobs. He cut cane. He herded cattle in the Great Rift. He migrated to the city to labour on city building sites. In 1990 he turned up at my house in Nairobi without shoes on his feet, asking for a job.