Dan Okwiri
Penning my journal. Stumbled in this pic of grandpa Ezekiel Omkhulu on my maternal side back taken in his sunset years in the 1970s’.
In the 1920s he worked in King George Hospital & did his medical training there, it later became known as Kenyatta Hospital, Tabitha my grandma a businesswoman. And a ACK church lay reader. Both were fiercely independent & go getters.
Grandma believed a woman should earn her own money & never depend on a man, & she sure lived it, & ventured into Kisumu real estate in the 1950s. She would also train as a nurse and built a hospital with 14 beds in Shianda, Butere in early 70s, where grandpa practiced in his sunset years.
Grandpa Luhya from Butere Kisa, & grandma Luo from Seme. Each insisted on speaking their own mother tongue to the other. Grandpa was great English speaker too. Their offspring became absolutely fluent in all languages.
Luo women are domineering, out of 5 daughters 4 would marry back to her Luo community, her 2 sons married in grandpas Luhya community. The Luo & Luhya communities are interwoven.
Grandpa was born 1900 and died 1980. He was poached by explorer Leakey in 1915 thereabouts, assembled 10 youths from western Kenya & forcibly took them to CMS Rabai Coast province where they did their schooling. He was the first crop of Luhya to receive a Western education.
The Rabai area (also called Rabai Mpya) in Kilifi County (north-west of Mombasa) is historically significant as the first Christian mission station and missionary school in Kenya.
It was established in 1846 by Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann. This site is widely recognised as where modern Western education in Kenya began for Africans.
There were few schools in western Kenya then. Grandpa was the 1st genre of Kenyans Africans to get a quintessential education, & pioneer the medical career in colonial era. Trim, fit & fussily neat, eloquent in speech & diction. Not easy for anyone to his standards.
He smoked in his younger years, & spoke slowly in precise with a baritone tilt oozing in classy finesse, wore arm braces, and cuff links always dressed to the tee. He strictly wore white shirts, & laced dazzling polished black shoes, in detail matching socks with tie.
Religiously had an English breakfast every dawn @ 6am. Exactly 4 pm bang on dot had his daily garden afternoon tea, frocked in white linen served with cake.
Till the day he died, daktari was the ultimate quintessential genteel. There are things that money can’t buy called style. My dressing vs grandpa a dichotomy between night & day. I promised him, would be a doctor, and it didn’t come to pass. RIP.
#okwiri my journal, my thoughts, my walk…
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