TBT

Meria

Elder Lister
Staff member
As we check and learn the History of Africa, little is mentioned about Col Leut. Ojukwu.
In May 1967, Ojukwu declared secession of three states as independent to make Republic of Biafra.
It did not go well as the Nigerian army was arraigned to counter him.
Assuming his strength, The army sent few troops which were beaten left right and center.
Nigerian army later pwnetrated states of Enugu and Benin to counter with great offensive. The Biafrans were not that easy.
They fought to what was seen as a stalemate. Nigeria government called for negotiations through OAU, presently AU but did not bear fruit.
It happened that a full large scale was was declared to regain The Biafra states but in vain. Ojukwu men would not allow a counter offensive that left both parties with casualties and several dead.
The was escalated as the Igbo tribes claiming to be jews to date, fought tooth and nail, but found themselves sorrounded by Nigerian army in 1970,
Ojukwu fled to ivory coast and hundreds of his fighters surrender after being converted without food and water.
The Biafra state never got realized.
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Meria

Elder Lister
Staff member
Why a Kiambu village is known as Zambezi


Nothing fascinates me than the PCEA Training Centre in Zambezi Kikuyu. Not that it is an extra-ordinary building but because of the past history. Of course few Kenyans know about this building – and its colonial bunkers- but at least those who have used the Nairobi-Nakuru Road know of Zambezi.
Now for many years this was the Zambezi Motel and it gave name to this village in the outskirts of Nairobi. Before it was re-opened on November 30, 1963 as the new Zambezi Motel, it had been lying desolate after it was abandoned by its previous owner.
That time, according to records, a 24-year Mrs Josephine Aron and her husband Sigi had decided to rehabilitate the building as the “best gesture of our faith in this lovely country”.
Josephine’s husband, was a land and real estate agent. Having worked in both Rhodesia and Zambia, he had fallen in love with the Zambezi River and wanted to immortalize his love by naming the 65-bedroom business, Zambezi Motel. It was actually the only motel, worth its name in Kenya. They also named their two cats, Zam and Bezi.
Designed to be a stop-over for motorists, it was expensively furnished, and had a site for caravans. A single would cost Sh 25 while a double was Sh45 by 1963. And by 1969 this had climbed to Sh45 for single ands Sh 80 for double. Zambezi was actually a luxurious stop over but before it was renovated it was simply Njogu-Inn. Owned by Mrs Berkley Mathews, Njogu-Inn was perhaps the best known hotel on the Nairobi-Nakuru Road. Her Husband E.J.H Mathew used to own the Kikuyu Estates – a huge swath of land which was later sold to James Gichuru, the pioneer minister for finance.
Mathews was one of the settlers who did not want to sample life under an African government and in 1963 shortly before independence she had offered it for sale for £32,000 – the entire building and its contents. But there were few takers for this. As more property was thrown into the market and with the fear of an African-led government reaching crescendo, the value plummeted to £6,000 and that is when it was purchased.
In one of her last interviews with a Kenyan paper, Mrs Mathews remarked: “We are sorry of course, but it is one of those things. We have already got rid of everything else…”
Njogu-Inn had been completed in 1953 just as the Mau Mau war broke. It was a bad investment; a bad bet. The owners had started constructing it in 1947 – the year that Jomo Kenyatta took over leadership of Kenya African union and started agitating for change. But few foreign investors thought that the “white man’s country” – as they called Kenya – would end up with an African government. Certainly not the Njogu-inn proprietor. But to safeguard her clients she build some bunkers underneath the building that were furnished too. Here, nobody would reach the clients – and even today, few at this church building know of these dark corners.

I recently came across an old review of Zambezi and the owner was grumbling that because it was far from the City, it was putting people off. Although she at one point dropped the cost of a double from Shs 80 to Sh 35. It failed to make economic sense. As the dollar crisis began in 1970s throwing the tourism industry into a spin. She sold it to PCEA Church as their training centre.
But the name she had abandoned Njogu-Inn for Zambezi had been picked a River Road trader who opened a hotel known as Njogu-Ini. It had the Njogu-Inn logo of an elephant although it means the place of elephants. How a place of worship was a beer hole is the untold story of Zambezi. Njogu-ini, the River Road bar, has survived ever since and Zambezi, the name, is now a village in Kikuyu. History continues…
 

Meria

Elder Lister
Staff member
THE MAN WHO GAVE MARTIN LUTHER KING JNR A WIFE...PRT2
Julius Gikonyo's brains gave Martin Luther King Jr a wife
Dr Julius Gikonyo Kiano dated future wife of Dr Martin Luther King Jr
Dr. Julius Gikonyo Kiano dated Coretta Scott, the future wife of American civil rights crusader Dr Martin Luther King Jr
By now you know that Dr. Julius Gikonyo Kiano was the first Kenyan to earn a PhD.
This is not surprising since one of his supervisors said of him: “He is the brightest foreign student California University ever had.”
At California, the bespectacled brainbox with an “intelligent” face dated Coretta Scott, the future wife of American civil rights crusader Dr Martin Luther King Jr, as Dorothy Stephens informs us in her 2006 memoir, Kwa Heri Means Goodbye: Memories of Kenya 1957-1959.
But Coretta ended the relationship after five years, since Gikonyo was “too bright” and “too political” and would return to his country after graduation.
That was how Martin Luther King Jr, later a Nobel Peace laureate and the most significant African-American, saw his chance to tell Coretta, “I love your hair.”
But returning with a doctorate proved challenging in 1956. Dr Kiano couldn’t get a decent job besides marking time at Shell prompting his uncle, Muchoki Gikonyo, to confront Sir Evelyn Baring, the Governor, about the irony of Kiano’s education and “pumping petrol!”
Did you know that was how, at his uncle’s intervention, Dr Kiano became the first African lecturer, teaching political science, at what later became the University of Nairobi?
Racial segregation was rife. Staff quarters were reserved for wazungus, but Dr Kiano and his then African-American wife, Ernestine Hammond, stayed put.
Stephens describes Ernestine as ”outspoken, determined woman who took no nonsense from any one. Tall, heavy-browed, sometimes fierce in her approach to people and problems, she chaffed at the political and social restrictions under which she lived.”
Ernestine also complained about their then low economic status and how Dr Kiano’s extended blood relations sponged on them by way of trying to benefit from his advanced education, visiting their college flat and overstaying their welcome and “Kiano couldn’t chase them.”
Did you also know they couldn’t get an African school for their children, which was how Hospital Hill Primary was founded by the Kianos and uncategorised college staffers for their kids?
African scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. Kiano first dated Coretta Scott, the future wife of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. But the two went separate ways after five years since Gikonyo was “too bright” and “too political” and would return to his country after graduation, according to Dorothy Stephens in her 2006 memoir, Kwa Heri Means Goodbye: Memories of Kenya 1957-1959.
Dr Kiano later settled for Ernestine Hammond, an African American public health nurse in a marriage that would test the limits of patriarchy against feminism. Kenya at independence was fighting three enemies: poverty, ignorance and disease.
Over 50 year later, those enemies still stand. But there is a fourth enemy — unemployment. Just imagine despite his PhD, Dr Kiano wouldn’t get a job. Ernestine wouldn’t understand why a PhD holder was working as a petrol station attendant at Esso!
When he finally became the first African Kenyan lecturer at Royal Technical College, today the University of Nairobi, the couple would quarrel endlessly over Dr Kiano’s many relatives. Ernestine was coming face to face with ‘African Socialism.’ After all, Dr Kiano’s air ticket was sourced through a village harambee!
The Kianos quickly sired four kids. Ernestine even renounced her American citizenship in 1964. But there was no school for black Africans. Dr Kiano and other elite Africans at Royal Technical College founded Hospital Hill Primary school for their children.
Dr Kiano shortly got engrossed in the Kennedy Air Lifts, a scholarship programme to America where it was funded by among others, President John F Kennedy’s family. These graduates would later play a crucial role as technocrats who galloped Kenya’s economy in the first decades of independence.
Before the Kennedy airlifts, most of the top Kenyan students attended Makerere University College in Uganda. This group included retired President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, which explains why they never returned with mzungu wives!
Some airlift beneficiaries were even helped to fill in forms in the sitting room of the Kianos. One boy, George Kinuthia, went on attain a PhD in algebra. He later became Kenya’s vice president, Prof George Saitoti, who died in a plane crash in 2008.
Ruth Njiiri widowed in 1975
Dr Kiano was helped out by nationalist Tom Mboya and Kariuki Njiiri in sorting out the scholarships.
Njiiri had attended Lincoln University where fellow students included later presidents Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Njiiri returned with an African-American wife, Ruth Stutts Njiiri in 1958.
During a 2005 interview, Ruth recounted how new foreign wives were settling down: “The first place we lived was with Duncan Ndegwa who had a flat in Parklands near the Hospital Hill School before we moved to Nairobi West. While in Nairobi West, my husband built a house in Riruta near Dr Gikonyo Kiano and Mareka Gecaga. That was where we eventually lived while in Kenya.”
Kariuki Njiiri after whose father Njiiri School in Murang’a is named, later gave up his (Fort Hall) Murang’a seat in the Legco for Jomo Kenyatta, allowing him to attend the Lancaster II Constitutional conference that paved the way for Kenya’s independence.
Ruth became one of President Kenyatta’s personal secretaries in between running the family’s high end Njiiris clothing store. Njiiri later became Kigumo MP and Assistant Minister for Local Government.
Ruth also helped in the Kennedy airlifts before being widowed when Njiiri died in a road accident in 1975.
In the 2005 interview, Ruth explained that she accompanied Kenyan students and helped them settle in the US.
One beneficiary, Pamela Odede got married Tom Mboya — a friend of the Kianos — and became Pamela Mboya. Indeed, it was in Kiano’s sitting room where Mboya and Kiano played with colours to create our current national flag colours!
Ernestine anger issues led to deportation
Ruth and Ernestine, being African-Americans were very close, but with dissimilar temperaments. Ernestine had anger management issues aggravated by her feminist streak.
She had open disdain for social restrictions and her conduct that was judged ‘unseemly’ for a politician’s wife. Like having no qualms throwing her stilettos at Dr Kiano during drinking sessions at the United Kenya Club, which was among the first to admit elite Africans.
Her dramas became common fodder but when she pulled her tantrums in the presence of founding President Kenyatta, she found herself at the then Nairobi International Airport on a one-way ticket back to America.
The-then vice president and Minister for Home Affairs, Daniel arap Moi signed Ernestine’s deportation orders in 1966, making her a ‘prohibited immigrant.’
Six months later, Dr Kiano wed Jane Mumbi Kiano, a receptionist at the Panafric Hotel in a Kikuyu traditional wedding. Dr Kiano, one-time Minister for Commerce and Industry, died aged 77 in 2003
Duncan Ndegwa, in Walking in Kenyatta Struggles: My Story, recalls Ernestine embarrassing Dr Kiano after having one too many at the United Kenya Club-where they were the earliest African members.
President Kenyatta couldn’t tolerate her drama queen’s tendencies and got her deported for having “shown herself by act and speech to be disloyal and disaffected toward Kenya” in 1966.
Dr Kiano was the labour minister. Cabinet colleague, Daniel arap Moi, had to sign Ernestine’s deportation orders as Minister for Home Affairs with Parliament even debating the issue of inter-racial marriages!
Dr Kiano later married Jane Mumbi in June 1966. Both were a power couple until he succumbed to heart attack in 2003 aged 77. He was buried at Muranga’s Weithaga ACK Church, where the harambee for his journey to earn the acclaimed PhD had been held when he was a young man.
Ernestine died in California in 2010 aged 84.
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Meria

Elder Lister
Staff member
Jan. 1960: Construction in Nairobi of Harambee House along Coronation Avenue (later renamed Harambee Avenue).
The first dressed stone buildings in Nairobi were Bank of India building and Holy Family Basillica Cathedral, which were both completed in 1906.
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Meria

Elder Lister
Staff member
Do you know that turkwel river was once the Kenyan border to the west and jubba and shebele river to the east ...that was in 1918 before the maps were redrawn again.
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Meria

Elder Lister
Staff member
This 1979 photograph shows a member of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory opening the world's heaviest hinged door, 244 cm thick, almost 365 cm wide and weighing 44 tons. A special bearing in the hinge allowed one person to open and close a concrete-filled door used to protect the Rotary Target Neutron Source-II (RTNS-II), the world's most powerful source of continuous fusion neutrons.
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Meria

Elder Lister
Staff member
Argwings Kodhek was born in 1923, shortly after Kenya became a British colony, in present day Siaya County, Gem constituency in Malanga, Gem location. He hailed from Kogolo-ojuodhi clan which is one of the most influential in the region. His baptismal name was Clement Michael George which was localized to ‘Chiedo Mor Gem’ which means ‘cooked/fried in Gem’. He attended a local missionary school and later joined St. Mary Yala for his Cambridge certificate before proceeding to St Mary Kisubi College and then Makerere. He returned to Kenya where he taught at Kapsabet boys which was then in Rift Valley province until 1947. While in Kapsabet, he met Daniel Moi who later became a member of legislative council, vice president and president of independent Kenya. Kodhek then became the first Kenyan to open a private law firm in 1957 at the height of Mau Mau resistance. He married a white woman, Mavis Tate, despite the prohibition of mixed-race marriages by colonial legislation, which he successfully battled in court. However, they could not live together in certain areas due to segregation laws which prohibited Africans from settling in the white neighbourhoods of Lavington, Karen and Muthaiga, hence they settled at Ruaraka. Later he divorced his Irish wife and married Joan Omondo, who died in 2013.
Yesterday marked 53 years since *Clementine Michael George Argwings kodhek (CMG)* The first Kenyan to become a barrister died in a Road Accident.
His car rolled several times at the Junction of Wood avenue and Ngong Road.
Wood Avenue would later change the name to Argwings kodhek Road in his honour.
Argwings kodhek represented Gem constituency before he died.
The second Kenyan barrister was *Jean Marie seroney* from Tinderet in modern day Nandi county.
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Meria

Elder Lister
Staff member
Major General Joseph Lagu (b.1931) photographed in the early 1970s after the ending of the First Sudanese Civil War.
Lagu had been the Commander-in-Chief of the Anya-nya forces and leader of the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement.
As part of the peace agreement between North and South, Lagu and other secessionist soldiers, were either absorbed or reabsorbed into the national army of Sudan.
He had defected from the national army in 1963, but after the agreement signd in Addis Ababa, he was reabsorbed into the Sudanese Army at the rank of major general and given the post of Commander of the South Command of Sudanese Army based in the southern city of Juba.
He retired from the military in the late 1970s.
One of South Sudan officers recruited into the secessionist army in October 1970 was John Garang. Garang would later lead the South Sudanese in a second civil war.
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Ekiarambe

Lister
Argwings Kodhek was born in 1923, shortly after Kenya became a British colony, in present day Siaya County, Gem constituency in Malanga, Gem location. He hailed from Kogolo-ojuodhi clan which is one of the most influential in the region. His baptismal name was Clement Michael George which was localized to ‘Chiedo Mor Gem’ which means ‘cooked/fried in Gem’. He attended a local missionary school and later joined St. Mary Yala for his Cambridge certificate before proceeding to St Mary Kisubi College and then Makerere. He returned to Kenya where he taught at Kapsabet boys which was then in Rift Valley province until 1947. While in Kapsabet, he met Daniel Moi who later became a member of legislative council, vice president and president of independent Kenya. Kodhek then became the first Kenyan to open a private law firm in 1957 at the height of Mau Mau resistance. He married a white woman, Mavis Tate, despite the prohibition of mixed-race marriages by colonial legislation, which he successfully battled in court. However, they could not live together in certain areas due to segregation laws which prohibited Africans from settling in the white neighbourhoods of Lavington, Karen and Muthaiga, hence they settled at Ruaraka. Later he divorced his Irish wife and married Joan Omondo, who died in 2013.
Yesterday marked 53 years since *Clementine Michael George Argwings kodhek (CMG)* The first Kenyan to become a barrister died in a Road Accident.
His car rolled several times at the Junction of Wood avenue and Ngong Road.
Wood Avenue would later change the name to Argwings kodhek Road in his honour.
Argwings kodhek represented Gem constituency before he died.
The second Kenyan barrister was *Jean Marie seroney* from Tinderet in modern day Nandi county.
View attachment 53249
Hii mbisha ime stray
 

Ngimanene na Muchere

Elder Lister
Why a Kiambu village is known as Zambezi


Nothing fascinates me than the PCEA Training Centre in Zambezi Kikuyu. Not that it is an extra-ordinary building but because of the past history. Of course few Kenyans know about this building – and its colonial bunkers- but at least those who have used the Nairobi-Nakuru Road know of Zambezi.
Now for many years this was the Zambezi Motel and it gave name to this village in the outskirts of Nairobi. Before it was re-opened on November 30, 1963 as the new Zambezi Motel, it had been lying desolate after it was abandoned by its previous owner.
That time, according to records, a 24-year Mrs Josephine Aron and her husband Sigi had decided to rehabilitate the building as the “best gesture of our faith in this lovely country”.
Josephine’s husband, was a land and real estate agent. Having worked in both Rhodesia and Zambia, he had fallen in love with the Zambezi River and wanted to immortalize his love by naming the 65-bedroom business, Zambezi Motel. It was actually the only motel, worth its name in Kenya. They also named their two cats, Zam and Bezi.
Designed to be a stop-over for motorists, it was expensively furnished, and had a site for caravans. A single would cost Sh 25 while a double was Sh45 by 1963. And by 1969 this had climbed to Sh45 for single ands Sh 80 for double. Zambezi was actually a luxurious stop over but before it was renovated it was simply Njogu-Inn. Owned by Mrs Berkley Mathews, Njogu-Inn was perhaps the best known hotel on the Nairobi-Nakuru Road. Her Husband E.J.H Mathew used to own the Kikuyu Estates – a huge swath of land which was later sold to James Gichuru, the pioneer minister for finance.
Mathews was one of the settlers who did not want to sample life under an African government and in 1963 shortly before independence she had offered it for sale for £32,000 – the entire building and its contents. But there were few takers for this. As more property was thrown into the market and with the fear of an African-led government reaching crescendo, the value plummeted to £6,000 and that is when it was purchased.
In one of her last interviews with a Kenyan paper, Mrs Mathews remarked: “We are sorry of course, but it is one of those things. We have already got rid of everything else…”
Njogu-Inn had been completed in 1953 just as the Mau Mau war broke. It was a bad investment; a bad bet. The owners had started constructing it in 1947 – the year that Jomo Kenyatta took over leadership of Kenya African union and started agitating for change. But few foreign investors thought that the “white man’s country” – as they called Kenya – would end up with an African government. Certainly not the Njogu-inn proprietor. But to safeguard her clients she build some bunkers underneath the building that were furnished too. Here, nobody would reach the clients – and even today, few at this church building know of these dark corners.

I recently came across an old review of Zambezi and the owner was grumbling that because it was far from the City, it was putting people off. Although she at one point dropped the cost of a double from Shs 80 to Sh 35. It failed to make economic sense. As the dollar crisis began in 1970s throwing the tourism industry into a spin. She sold it to PCEA Church as their training centre.
But the name she had abandoned Njogu-Inn for Zambezi had been picked a River Road trader who opened a hotel known as Njogu-Ini. It had the Njogu-Inn logo of an elephant although it means the place of elephants. How a place of worship was a beer hole is the untold story of Zambezi. Njogu-ini, the River Road bar, has survived ever since and Zambezi, the name, is now a village in Kikuyu. History continues…
Ndio nimejua where the name came from
 
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