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ELDORET, Kenya: Kimani Nganga sat in a classroom for the first time
when he was 84. Four years later, the world’s oldest person ever
to start school is stranded in one of Kenya’s camps for the
displaced, with no classes to go to.
Surrounded by some 300 other people displaced by
post-election violence in the Langas camp near Eldoret, Nganga lives
in a large tent packed with mattresses, white metal basins teeming
with ants, and bundles of clothes.
Stashed away in a safe corner are the most
precious items he still owns: his school books and an album with
photographs of his September 2005 visit to New York, where he took
part in a UN campaign promoting access to education.
He then entered the Guinness Book of World
Records as the world’s oldest person to start school.
“It’s the first time I’m displaced in my
life,” says the old man.
“The Luos came together and decided to chase
me” on the night of December 28, a day after the presidential
election, when suspicion was already growing that incumbent
President Mwai Kibaki would come out on top of the poll.
The Orange Democratic Movement of opposition
candidate Raila Odinga, from the Luo tribe, charged that the
tallying process was rigged, sparking a wave of nationwide riots and
revenge killings.
Born on January 5, 1920, the mzee, a Swahili
word reserved for respected elders—had not anticipated he would
spend his 88th birthday under a tent.
Nganga was a former Mau Mau rebel who fought
British settlers between 1952 and 1959. He became a farmer then a
trader before finally deciding to start school as an octogenarian.
His witty remarks and deft body language draw
the admiration and amusement of the people around him, including the
oldest of his 15 children.
Despite the hardships he and his family have
experienced since Kenya’s polls sparked chaos, Nganga’s eyes
never lose their twinkle and the old man says he suffers less from
cold than from being prevented from attending classes.
“We were told schools would reopen on January
17 but they didn’t,” he says.
“The desire of my heart is to go to school. If
peace is not going to prevail, the government has to take me to
another place to go to school.”
Most of the schools in the Eldoret region, among
the worst hit by the cycle of tit-for-tat tribal clashes in recent
weeks, have remained closed. Some of them were destroyed.
Kenya had been relatively spared by the kind of
deadly ethnic violence that has plagued other nations in the region
for years, but the poll dispute has reopened old wounds and the
Kikuyu tribe, to which Kibaki and Nganga belong, has been
increasingly targeted.
Nganga was one of the many beneficiaries of
Kibaki’s 2003 decision to make primary education free.
He says his greatest joy was to learn kiswahili,
or Swahili, after spending the first 84 years of his life speaking
only Kikuyu.
“I’m going to live 300 years to go to
school, that is the agreement I have between me and my God.”
-- AFP
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