I didn’t know what a profound legacy she had when I met her. The memory that is seared in my mind is visiting her in what felt like an overwhelmingly smoky little cottage in Rironi, on the outskirts of Nairobi. My most conscious memory must have been when I was about nine years old and she was not much taller than me. Time and circumstances had shrunk what was probably always a small frame. The urban kid in me was more focused on the smoke that made my eyes water and the pungent smell of sheep that filled the kitchen, than spending time learning.
I did not know her story then.
I didn’t know that as a child around 1911 she left her family and took the bold step of seeking help for a disease that was ravaging those around her, from the scariest looking strangers her community had ever seen, who had set up a health clinic at Tumu Tumu mission.
I didn’t know that for years she was the only girl in her class, and when the Church Missionary Society in Scotland sent a question to their station in Tumu Tumu about whether the missionaries were educating girls as well as boys, she wrote back a letter to them as proof of the expanded educational opportunities in place. A letter that still sits today in their archives in Edinburgh, a living testament to the brilliance of the African girl child.
I didn’t know that she was amongst the first female nurses in her area. Showing that as far back as the 1920s Kenyan women were part of a labour force that was beyond the farm. Even as her husband was employed as a cook for the British, she held her own as a working mother before the term double-income household was even coined.
I didn’t know that she was the force behind each and every one of her eleven children pursuing an education and in doing so, how she set in motion opportunity and prosperity for generations that she would never meet.
I didn’t know that when she and her family were forcefully removed from their land and forced into the indignity of living in the camps known as gicagi or the village, she chose to stand with her people by smuggling medication out of her work station at the mission for the freedom fighters in the forests, even though being caught would mean losing her life.
She was a shujaa in every sense of the word. Tenacious, ambitious, curious, family-focused, a professional, full of grit and quietly fierce beyond measure. She never let boundaries stand in her way of carving out a world of meaning for her and those around her.
She died in 1986 when I was only 12 years old, but for that small diminutive lady who was my great grandmother, maitu; Marion Ngima Wamuyu Nygathenya wa Macharia, the life I have had the privilege to live would never be.
Here’s to strong women. I’m blessed to know them, striving to be one, and working hard to raise them.
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This story was written by Paukwa’s principal mwihaki. She is an avid reader and wordsmith who believes in the power of stories. For her – Stories and storytellers have the power to bring about change individually, collectively and across the globe.
