Listen Before it opened in January 1926, Alliance High School was supposed to be a medical college. But how the failure to build the college would later transform both the political landscape and shape a new elite that would rule Kenya for ages is the epic story of the institution at Kikuyu. Alliance alumni dominated […]
Listen Kenyatta’s prison term at Lokitaung ended on April 14, 1959, and the restriction order passed by Thacker and confirmed by Baring in September 1954 was immediately applied. He was moved to Lodwar, in Turkana, the administrative centre for the Northern Frontier District, some 90 miles ( 144km)from Lokitaung, where some bungalows had been built […]
Listen The declaration of a state of emergency gave the Government the perfect excuse it had been seeking to not only round up all “the political undesirables”, but also start executing a system of disinheriting the seized leaders of their land. When the issue of political repression arose in Britain days before declaration of the State […]
Listen Oginga Odinga was, undoubtedly, the doyen of opposition politics in the colonial and the post-independence eras. Since the colonial times, he was known for his political and ideological consistency. Odinga was a fearless leader. Unlike many politicians, Jaramogi, as his admirers fondly referred to him, would not compromise his ideals, notwithstanding the consequences. He […]
Listen Joseph Zuzarte Murumbi was appointed second Vice-President in May, 1966, following the fallout between President Kenyatta and Vice-President Odinga. Earlier, Murumbi had been independent Kenya’s first Foreign Affairs Minister. Murumbi was born in 1911 at Londiani, Kericho, to a Goan trader and a Maasai woman. In a media interview, he remembered his mother as […]
Listen The son of the Senior Chief Josiah Njonjo, Charles Mugane Njonjo was born at Kabete, Kiambu, on January 23, 1920, in a family of four brothers and four sisters. Three of the sisters are alive. While his detractors have always spoken of Njonjo as the man with the colonial hangover and hates everything African, […]
Listen Roy Bruce McKenzie earned the distinction of being the only minister in the colonial government who retained his position upon Independence and held the portfolio until 1969, when he resigned on health grounds. He was the Minister for Agriculture. The South African-born politician is credited with steering Kenya’s agricultural economy through its worst period […]
Listen Suave, witty and distinguished even into his sunset years, over the course of his colourful life Frederick Lawrence Munyua Waiyaki cultivated an enduring international reputation as a man who could hold his own in the highest echelons of power; one who demonstrated uncommon courage in a sycophantic era and could be trusted to think […]