I seriously took my father’s counsel that the best place to raise my children was on a farm, not in the town, Nakuru. My family lived well on the farm and flourished. When the drought-hit Kenya in the 1980s, things went wrong, and it was hard to continue life on the farm. Most families were forced to rely on the yellow corn donated by foreign countries. Many believed that the yellow corn was grown to feed animals, but there was no truth to these claims. Many of the Kenyan citizens preferred the white maize over the yellow corn. As the drought raged on, it became difficult for me to support three homes – my home in Nakuru, my wife and children’s home in Nanyuki, and my parent’s home. I had to come up with a workable solution to help myself and my family. In the cold climate, crops in Nanyuki grew slowly. However, Nakuru’s warm weather meant that the food grew faster, and there was rainfall now and then. I managed to harvest a small bounty from the land I had near my Kivumbini home, maize, beans, and pumpkins. Transporting the produce to Nanyuki was an expensive feat, and the food I harvested in Nakuru was only for me and some of my friends.
I decided to ask my wife to transfer our three kids from Nyarīgīnū Primary School in George farm to Langalanga Primary School in Nakuru. When the transfer was secured, my wife and our four kids moved in with me in Nakuru. I relocated from my house in Abongoloweya Estate 4 to Paul Machanga Estate, a quiet place that was fit for raising kids. I feared that the previous neighborhood, populated mainly by individuals from the Turkana tribe, would be distracting because of the dances they held every evening. I had gotten used to their dancing, and they were friendly people who didn’t interfere with others’ affairs and would always greet everyone they came across. However, as a young father, I believed that it would be harder to control my children if they stayed in the same environment.
While the Gīkũyũ engaged in the Mau Mau War, the Mzungu had collected many Turkana people from their rural areas to fill landscape jobs left vacant in the municipal council of Nakuru after some of the workers were detained.