If Dr Alfred Mutua was to reincarnate after this lifetime, he’d probably come back as an American since he holds few things dear like he does the American dream, embellished with Australian and United Arab Emirates sensibilities.
For the Machakos governor, not only is anything possible but when that particular anything is made to happen, it should be made to happen with as much pomp and colour as possible. It is a fast-world mentality, Mutua posits, where things move fast. And now he feels Kenya, just like Machakos, needs to play catch-up by moving chap chap to level up to the West.
It is why he built the largest office block occupied by a Kenyan governor, and why he isn't modest about it, like when President Uhuru Kenyatta visited the property, looked around and asked, “Is there another like this in Kenya?” And Mutua answered, “Yes, at State House.” Mutua may not want to build a new State House, but were he to become President, his mantra is simple. Nothing waits. Everything has to move chap chap, like in America and Dubai.
PART 1: FROM MAKINA TO THE WORLD
Dr Alfred Mutua’s welcome-to-America moment was one of him getting scammed by a New York cab driver. 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 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 Sh25,000.
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.
I dropped out of Dagoretti High School when I was in Form 2 in 1985. 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.
“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 shebang.
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.
And now here Mutua was, headed to the United States.
Much as he had never flown before, Mutua says he was pretty unfazed during the flight because “mimi nilikuwa nimesoma”. Having learnt early that through flipping pages one could go anywhere in the globe and even do the impossible, like sleep with beauty queens, Mutua says he’d amassed ideas about the world from the books his mother and his late aunty Milka bought him (biographies, fiction, poetry) and he now had to put them into use. He couldn't sleep for the entirety of the eight-hour flight to Frankfurt.
“I knew New York,” Mutua says with a straight face. “I knew the Brooklyn Bridge, I knew Harlem, I had watched videos of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. I knew Harlem! I had also watched tonnes of American comedy shows. I even knew places in New Jersey.”
DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
Mutua’s second-hand knowledge of America was about to prove useful and detrimental.
“When we arrived in New York, my friend Dorothy was a bit flustered, and so I offered to take her to New Jersey, which is where she was going to start school,” Mutua says. “She had about five suitcases. I had one brown one. It was a Sunday, not a busy day. And so I asked someone how to get to Edison in New Jersey. The person told us to take a bus from the John F Kennedy International Airport and alight at the Grand Central Station, from where to pick a train to New Jersey. Dorothy and I took the Manhattan-bound bus.”
On that bus ride, Mutua drove over one of his American landmarks, the Brooklyn Bridge, and so the man from Masii in Mwala constituency knew he was in familiar territory. But after being dropped off by the bus, Mutua looked around and couldn’t see the Grand Central Station, or what his idea of it was from the books and movies he’d read and watched.
Mutua decided that they had been dropped off at the wrong location, and so “because mimi najua mambo,” Mutua hailed a cab and asked the driver to drop them off at the Grand Central Station. The cab driver did his rounds and soon Mutua and Dorothy were at the train station. Mutua paid $11, leaving him with $189.
But on getting off the cab and pulling down their six suitcases, Mutua looked around, only to spot the corner where the bus had dropped them off, not too far away from where the cab had now brought them. All he had needed to do after alighting from the bus earlier on was to simply turn a corner, then he’d have seen the Grand Central Station. But because he thought he knew how to navigate America, taxi-hailing and all, he had just offered the cab driver free dollars for a fake trip.
“We had been conned,” Mutua says. He had officially arrived in real-world America.
But as if losing the $11 wasn’t enough, Mutua took the train to New Jersey with Dorothy, arrived there, realised she couldn’t get accommodation at her school that Sunday, and being the gentleman he’d read he needed to be, Mutua offered Dorothy some money to pay for a room at the holiday inn where she’d spend the night.
Mutua then took a cab from New Jersey to John F Kennedy, a ride that cost him $90. With less than $100 to his name, meaning he couldn’t afford a hotel room, Mutua passed out at the airport’s international lounge. To someone else, this may have been a catastrophic start to their stay in a foreign country. To Mutua, this was life as he knew it.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Growing up at Makina in Kibera, Alfred Mutua’s childhood was characterised 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 favourite 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 2 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 Kirui, the construction site owner who worked as an auditor, decided to pay Mutua’s school fees from that point onwards. Kirui 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.
And so after brushing aside his initial New York misadventures, Mutua settled in at Yellowstone Christian College in Billings, Montana, where he quickly realised it wouldn’t be the best fit for his journalistic pursuits. “Yellowstone College was more inclined towards training theologians, and I felt it didn’t cater for the sorts of aspirations I had,” Mutua says, as he boasts of how he doubled the Black population in the locale. There was only one other Black resident in the town in the middle of nowhere, Mutua says. Mutua bounced.
Mutua’s next stop was Spokane in Washington State. Considering a year had flown by at Yellowstone and he hadn’t made much academic headway, Mutua went for a bridging course at Spokane Community College, after which he was admitted to Wentworth University for a bachelor's degree in journalism. At this point, Mutua was staying with a missionary family whose matriarch, Marie Jones, had become his adopted grandma.
But considering that Mutua had left behind his full scholarship at Yellowstone College, he was now only able to get a new scholarship catering for part of his tuition fees, meaning he needed to find a way to pay up for the rest of his fees and leave something for his everyday sustenance. It was at this juncture that Mutua was to discover a skill that would carry him for the rest of his life. It was also around this time that Mutua realised much as he was in America, he wasn’t in a position to support his parents back home.
“My family got poorer while I was in America,” Mutua says. But still, Mutua persisted.
This article is in collaboration with Debunk Media, whose editor-in-chief is Isaac Otidi Amuke
