At Loreto-Limuru, I had a very good teacher, Mother Teresia. During breaks, she would ask me to come and help her wash petri dishes and test tubes in the lab. Through our many conversations, she aroused and encouraged my lifelong interest in science—at that time, chemistry; later, biology. We stayed friends until she died. I was also close to Mother Colombière, the headmistress. Now retired, she still lives in Nairobi, and we keep in touch. The Loreto Sisters also ran an all-white school close to ours. At that time, I did not find the racial segregation strange. Nobody, least of all the nuns, discussed it. If someone had come and told my classmates and me, “You are being discriminated against,” we would have been baffled. However, nobody ever did.
After my education by the nuns, I emerged as a person who believed that society is inherently good and that people generally act for the best. To me, a general orientation toward trusting people and a positive attitude toward life and fellow human beings is healthy— not only for one's peace of mind but also to bring about change. This belief came from a combination of my education and my Kikuyu heritage, which taught me a deep sense of justice.
When I was at Loreto-Limuru, I would go to Mass every Sunday, even during the holidays when I was visiting Ihithe or Nakuru. My father had a friend, an old man named Murango Kamau, who accompanied me to Nakuru town. On Sunday mornings, he would pick me up at four o'clock and two hours later we would arrive in Nakuru just as the sun was rising. Now, I don't care how much of an early riser you are, four o'clock is early for anyone! I was practically sleepwalking, so I would ask him to make sure I didn't walk into people. Sometimes, I would close my eyes as I walked and say to Murango, “Make sure I don't go into the bush.”
Finally, we would arrive at Nakuru Catholic Church, now called Christ the King. At that time, an Irish priest served at the church, and one day after Mass he invited me to his house for tea. I was very appreciative, because we were not supposed to eat before Holy Communion, so I had not eaten since I had gotten up that morning. If I hadn't gone to his house, my first meal of the day would have been when, well into the afternoon, I arrived back at the farm—famished.
From that single tea came something lasting. It seems I convinced the priest that a school was needed for the children of the workers on settlers’ farms around Nakuru, because my father's younger children and many other children of squatters on Mr. Neylan's farm were not in school because there were no schools in the area. I don't recall our conversation, but I must have been very bold! I later learned that the priest spoke to Mr. Neylan, who, I understand, was also a Catholic and attended church in Nakuru. When Mr. Neylan sold his farm in the early 1960s, he donated land so the church could establish a Catholic school, St. John's, where my younger half brothers and sisters were educated and which still operates today. It wasn't until a number of years later that friends reminded me of the impact my cup of tea with the local priest had had. “Not bad,” I thought. Many children otherwise would not have gone to school.
Education, of course, creates many opportunities. In Kenya, for most people of my generation and after, a high school education or a college degree is a guaranteed ticket out of the perceived drudgery of subsistence farming or the cultivation of cash crops for little return. I, too, got this ticket out, but I never severed my connection to the soil. Throughout my years in boarding school, I saw my mother only on school holidays. She did not have the means (cash or a vehicle) to visit me and also had my three younger siblings to take care of. But a gulf never developed between us.
When I went home to see my mother during my time at Loreto-Limuru, if I found that the mud walls of my mother's house needed plastering, I would go into the cowshed, collect the dung, mix it with ash, and then plaster the walls, all with my bare hands. I cannot remember whether my mother asked me to do this or I told myself, “Do it.” I never thought of not putting my hands in that dung just because I was a high school student. The results of my work looked good, and my mother was happy.
In the context of Ihithe, I was highly educated, one of the few girls in the area who had gone to high school. People never told me directly that they were pleased that I was educated and still helping my mother, and my mother never commented on it, either. Not giving compliments in public is common in Kikuyu culture. But later in life, I met women and men who would tell me, “When I was going to school my parents encouraged me to study hard and be like you.” How I wished they had told me so!
But at that time in Kenya, 1959, the number of women who had completed high school was very small and their options for careers or higher education were relatively few. Women could become teachers or nurses while men could be teachers or clerks in an office. Being a clerk was a well-paid and highly esteemed job, because you would be in the mainstream of British Kenyan civil life. You would work in an office! You would be a member of the new elite class.
Although the nuns did not provide us with any career counseling, as graduation neared many of my classmates were signing up for training in teaching or nursing. That was the end of education for them. I did not want to be a teacher then and I never tried to be a nurse. I wanted to go on with my studies, which for a girl was unusual. Back when I was at St. Cecilia's, neighbors would say to my mother about me: “There's no need to keep her in school. She cannot even become a clerk. She's a girl, after all.”
Even my teachers and friends asked me, “What are you going to do? Become a teacher or a nurse?” But my mind was focused elsewhere. “I am not going to be either of those. I'm going to Makerere University,” I replied. Makerere was in Kampala, Uganda, and was then the only university in East Africa. Anybody who passed their high school exams and could continue their studies went to Makerere, which was the epitome of education—the Oxford of East Africa. But aspiring to go there was very ambitious. Even though I was a good student, I was more hardworking than naturally bright, so my gaining admission to Makerere was still a gamble.
“What if you don't pass?” my teachers and friends asked. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Of course I will pass!” As it turned out, an opportunity arose that was to take me much farther west than Makerere—in fact, all the way to the United States of America.
4
American Dream
By the time I graduated from high school in 1959, the colonial era for most of Africa was coming to an end: Ghana had become a sovereign nation in 1957 and three years later many French and Belgian colonies in West and Central Africa achieved their independence. In Kenya, too, freedom was in the air. Although Jomo Kenyatta was in internal exile and political activity was still limited, the “winds of change” that British prime minister Harold Macmillan said were blowing across Africa made Kenya's independence inevitable. In 1957, black Kenyans were allowed to vote in elections for the first time, and in 1959 the British government invited Kenyan politicians to London to negotiate over a new political order. In 1960, preparations for Kenya's independence had begun.
A newly independent Kenya would need educated men and women ready to fill key positions in the government and society once the British administrators departed. To that end, in the late 1950s the Kenyan politicians of the day, led by Tom Mboya, Gikonyo Kiano, and others initiated and encouraged contacts with political and cultural figures in the United States, led by then-senator John F. Kennedy, Andrew Young, and others. The aim was to provide scholarships for promising students from emerging African states to receive higher education in the United States. This would also open up the United States to these former European colonies, hitherto closed from the rest of the world.
Senator Kennedy agreed not only to fund the program through the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation but also to fly all the students to the United States at the foundation's expense. Kennedy also pushed the U.S. State Department to expand its Africa scholarship program and make it possible to receive the African students (the State Department initially had turned down Mboya's request). So began what became known as the Kennedy Airlift, which eventually saw nearly six hundr
ed Kenyans airlifted to study in different colleges and universities throughout the United States.
When the Catholic bishop in the Nairobi diocese learned about the proposed venture, he decided to have students from Catholic schools in his area join in. As fate would have it, I had just completed my education at Loreto-Limuru at the top of the class and was a favorite candidate for the bishop's proposal. I was in the right place at the right time. When I was informed of the opportunity to go to study in America, I did not hesitate: “Yes!” I said.
Thanks to the bishop and the nuns, I became one of about three hundred Kenyans selected for the “Lift” of September 1960. That was the fourth time my educational destination had been chosen for me and, as at my last two schools, I was to attend a Catholic institution: Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, which was under the management of Benedictine nuns.
I was very excited about this new development: It would be so much fun to go to America. It was a great honor and privilege that people in both countries had such trust in me and had made this great opportunity possible. My parents supported me and were happy to hear that I had received a scholarship for further education in the United States. It was quite astonishing news, especially in my village, where girls’ education was still not fully appreciated.
As had happened on my return to Nyeri in 1947, in September 1960a whole new world opened up, one that reached for the first time beyond the borders of my own country. You can imagine what it must have been like when I, twenty years old, boarded a plane for the very first time. Indeed, everything I saw or did for the next few days was for the very first time. The propeller-driven aircraft took off at midnight and flew for days, crawling across the sky: northward to Benghazi in Libya, then on to Luxembourg, Reykjavik in Iceland, Newfoundland in Canada, and finally New York City.
As the Sahara Desert unfolded beneath me, I could not believe my eyes. You can look at an atlas or read about how large the Sahara is, but you don't realize its vastness until you have flown over it. I looked at the desert as dawn rose, fell asleep, and woke up hours later to see still nothing but sand. We were flying too high to make out people or animals or individual dunes. Instead, below were massive, fantastical formations of sand and the occasional green dot of an oasis.
It was fascinating to be in Luxembourg, because I had only read about Europe in books. I had never heard of this small country, whose name sounded so beautiful and memorable. Why we stopped in Luxembourg of all places is a mystery, but I loved feeling that the geography I had learned in school was coming alive with the names of places we arrived at or were near. All three hundred of us drove through the winding streets from the airport to town for dinner.
In Newfoundland, a name I fondly remembered from my geography class, we stopped for dinner, which consisted, so some students told me on the plane, of frogs’ legs. I thought I'd eaten chicken and was shocked that it could have been frogs, since I'd never considered frogs edible before. Even before I had time to digest that piece of information, the pilot informed us that we were about to land in New York. Buses picked us up from New York International Airport (later renamed for President Kennedy) and took us to various hotels in Manhattan. As part of our orientation, we toured the United Nations, where dignitaries welcomed us to the United States, and we met other young Africans who had also just arrived to study.
Coming to New York City was like landing on the moon. Fortunately, I was constantly in the company of my friend Agatha Wangeci, with whom I had studied at St. Cecilia's and Loreto-Limuru. Both of us were to attend Mount St. Scholastica. Together we figured out this strange city and shared our experiences. As we walked the busy streets of New York, we were lucky not to be knocked over, since we spent most of the time staring up at the skyscrapers, which seemed to sway in the wind and touch the clouds.
Then there were the elevators! I had been in an elevator in Nairobi when I had received instructions on how to get a visa for the United States. But that elevator went only to the fourth floor. In New York I rode in elevators to the twentieth and thirtieth floors at lightning speed. I was convinced my stomach and heart would not arrive at the same time as the rest of me. How relieved I was when I reached the ground floor again and got out!
One of the things we had to do in New York was go shopping, of course. This led to my first encounter with an escalator. My initial reaction was to think of the irimu—powerful and noisy, slithering between floors, coming from nowhere and returning to nowhere. “Well,” I thought, sizing up the escalator, “everybody else is stepping on it, so I'd better do the same.” While I made it safely to the next floor, one of my shoes didn't and I looked back wondering how I would recover it. I had no idea that there was another escalator going down on the other side. Luckily, a good old New Yorker realized my predicament and brought my shoe to me with a smile on his face. I have never forgotten that man's generosity and his warm welcome to the magic city. Neither have I forgotten that first encounter with a moving staircase. Even today, I'm a little circumspect when I get on an escalator.
Another aspect that amazed Agatha and me about New York was the presence of black Americans. We could not believe that these were Americans and that they were as dark as we were and didn't speak English with Kenyan accents! As a child in Kenya, I grew up thinking there were only three types of people in the world: black people, like me, pink people such as Europeans, and brown people such as Indians, Goans, and those from the Seychelles. I had assumed that all American Negroes, as we were taught to call them, were light-skinned. Therefore, to arrive in New York and see people as black as me going about their business was a shock. Agatha and I kept comparing some of them with people we knew at home: “Doesn't he remind you of so and so?” We smiled as we compared the likenesses.
How little I knew about the Americas apart from what I learned from my geography class: the Appalachians, the Rocky Mountains, and the Andes; the Amazon rainforest, the prairies and the pampas and the Great Lakes. I had also learned about the Mayflower, the Civil War, and the Indians (although probably more from the cowboys’ point of view than theirs), and I knew that the Americans had fought a war for independence from the British in 1776. In those days in Kenya, there were few radios, no television, and very few films and little pop music to take America to every village. I found myself ignorant about simple things, such as knowing that Coca-Cola was an American drink and that Indians in Kenya and those in America are different.
We didn't spend long in New York City. Myself, Agatha, and a young Kenyan man called Joseph Kang'atu boarded a Greyhound bus with other students for our long journey to the Midwest, where we would spend the next four years studying. It would take us two days to get to Atchison on our bus, which was specially chartered to transport us to various colleges. We traveled through New Jersey to Pennsylvania and then to Ohio and Indiana. In the Midwest we began to pass miles and miles of flat land full of corn that was perfectly proportioned and ready for harvesting. I thought to myself, “Lord, have mercy! Where did they get all this corn?” When I found out that corn had come from the Americas and was not native to Kenya, I was stunned.
At each stop a few more students left the bus, and by the time we reached Indiana there were ten of us left. At one stop, we decided to get a drink at a local café. We saw a big sign for Coca-Cola, which, along with Fanta, was a very popular drink in Kenya—in fact, they were the only drinks we recognized. While we girls looked around the café for a place to sit, the boys went up to the counter to order the drinks. A few moments later, however, they returned, empty-handed.
“We can't sit down and have a drink,” they told us.
“Why not?” we asked.
“Because we're black,” they replied.
A lightbulb went on in my head. “Even here in America and even in a small, open café!?”
It was explained to us that we could have a drink but only outside. “Why should we drink outside?” we said, outraged. “Let's go. Let's get back on the bus.” So we
did—without a drink. That was my first encounter with racial discrimination in America. It was so shocking because it was unexpected in my newfound home.
Years of colonial education on the subject of America had somehow kept the African American part hidden from us. Even though we studied the slave trade, the subject was taught in a way that did not leave us appreciating its inhumanity. An African has to go to America to understand slavery and its impact on black people—not only in Africa but also in the diaspora. It is in America that words such as “black,” “white,” “Negro,” “mulatto,” “skin color,” “segregation,” “discrimination,” and “the ghetto” take on lives of their own.
The Greyhound bus finally rumbled into Atchison, which is in the northeastern corner of Kansas. When we arrived we found a small town along the Missouri River, best known as the birthplace of America's pioneering female aviator, Amelia Earhart, and a one-time hub of several railroads, including the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe line. Benedictines were among Atchison's first settlers, establishing St. Benedict's College for men in 1858 and its sister college, which became known as Mount St. Scholastica, for women in 1863. The women's college was popularly known as the Mount and the students proudly referred to themselves as Mounties. The emblem for both colleges was the raven, which I used to see everywhere I turned.
The reception we received at Mount St. Scholastica was wonderful: nothing to compare with the one we had gotten at the café in Indiana. The other students had obviously been told that Agatha and I were coming. They were very welcoming, exhibiting the overflowing enthusiasm typical of Americans. Throughout our stay, the girls embraced us so warmly that I do not remember ever being homesick or lonely. They truly made us feel at home.
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