As a Form Five student at Jamhuri High School in Nairobi in 1988, Mutua had remained loyal to his Riruta Satellite Baptist Church, from where a group of American missionaries who used him as a translator identified him as someone they’d want to assist pursue further education. And so once the missionaries were back in the United States, they wrote Mutua a letter informing him they’d found a suitable college for him to study journalism, as well as secured a scholarship for him.
All Mutua had to do was clear his A Levels, buy an air ticket and make his way to the United States.
And so upon completion of his A Levels in 1989, Mutua embarked on finding ways to ready himself for America. But being the pauper that he was, it took Mutua a whole year to get his act together, culminating in what he calls a poor man’s harambee for the air ticket, which yielded 12,000 bob of the required 25,000 shillings. Luckily for Mutua, a good samaritan named Kavua wa Kathuku who worked for a travel agency in town heard of Mutua’s predicament and reached out to his employers, who donated air miles to Mutua, so that combined with whatever Mutua had raised, he could afford the ticket.
‘‘My father took me to Gikomba Market, where I bought mitumba shoes, trousers, an African prints shirt – I was told when you go to the West you must dress like an African, a jacket, underwear and socks,’’ Mutua says when we speak at the sprawling Machakos County headquarters, the infamous White House. ‘‘I was taking the mitumba clothes back to where they had come from, America, only that now they were on my body.’’
After buying the air ticket and the mitumba clothes, Mutua was left with $200.
‘‘On 11 August 1991, I left Kenya on the last Pan Am flight, a Frankfurt bound Airbus,’’ Mutua says. Pan American Airways, the American aviation behemoth, was just about to fold its operations. ‘‘Once at Frankfurt, we then took a Boeing 747 to New York City.
’’Mutua is huge on detail – dates and days, aircraft models, the whole shabang.
On that particular Nairobi-Frankfurt flight, Mutua happened upon Dorothy Malinga, a former classmate of his at Jamhuri (back in the day, the school’s A Level class was mixed), who was also America bound. During the flight, Mutua had flashbacks of when as a child he was once seated outside the wooden shack they called home in Riruta, with little outdoor structures made of sacks standing in for a toilet and bathroom. With Mutua was his maternal grandfather, who Mutua says he takes a lot after, especially his chap chap ways. An aeroplane was passing overhead, and so Mutua pointed at it and told his grandpa that he’d grow up to board an aircraft someday. His grandad agreed, telling him he’d board one and travel far………cont in another storyline.
Growing up in Makina in Kibera, Alfred Mutua’s childhood was characterized by the mud house his family shared, an environment Mutua says was infested with rats and night runners – you’re mistaken if you thought this was a village phenomenon. But much as things looked gloomy, Mutua’s parents, who were low cadre civil servants, maintained some form of good cheer in the home. There was always hope that things would get better one way or another, if not for the parents then at least for Mutua and his sister.
‘‘One of my fondest childhood memories was when my dad brought home fish,’’ Mutua says of life in Makina. ‘‘To my family, eating fish was a whole event because my dad would bring a single tilapia which my mum would fry, then the whole family – myself, my sister Anne and my parents – would sit around the table and watch my father, who was a comedian, debone the fish bit by bit before he distributed the fillet to each one of us.’’
Mutua says other times the feast would get more meaningful when his dad brought home mbuta, the Nile Perch, which had thicker chunks of flesh. The family had fish say once a fortnight, but mostly Mutua says the family was vegan, not because of choice but out of circumstance. If not fish then Mutua’s present day favorite of matumbo sufficed. It was these simple pleasures that made an otherwise deprived life bearable.
It is while living in Makina that Mutua started school at Karanja Nursery School, before proceeding to Toi Primary School. As Mutua attended Toi, the family felt it had had enough of Kibera, opting instead for a wooden shack with an earthen floor in Riruta Satellite. The one thing this move did was it made Mutua a member of the Riruta Satellite Baptist Church, which is where the Americans discovered him. But even before the Americans, it was through a connection from that church that Mutua managed to pull through his O and A Levels, because his parents couldn’t afford to educate him.
‘‘I dropped out of Dagoretti High School when I was in form two in 1985,’’ Mutua says. ‘‘And so I went and got a mjengo job from the site of one of our church members, a man called Stephen Kirui. I would be given a wheelbarrow to fetch water for the fundis.’’
But even as this was happening, Mutua was keeping busy at the church, where he was an outstanding actor and Sunday school teacher. It was through watching Mutua’s roles in plays at the Baptist Church that yet another member of the church, Hezron Waithaka, who worked as an auditor, decided to pay Mutua’s school fees from that point onwards. Waithaka would send his driver with a cheque for Mutua every opening day until Mutua was done with his O Levels at Dagoretti High School and proceeded to the better performing Jamhuri High School for A Levels, where Mutua’s benefactor continued catering for his school fees. It is this school of hard knocks background that prepared Mutua for America.
Alfred Mutua the incumbent machakos governor in his teen years growing up in makina Kibera Nairobi in the early 1980s
