Curtain falls on Kenya’s oldest woman

• Year of birth based on information she gave about her ‘riika’ and on childhood events

On the morning of July 11, Rahab Wangui Ng’ang’a died peacefully in her bedroom at her son’s house at Thakwa in Githunguri.

Neither her birth nor her death on that cold morning would be considered significant until one realises that the two events were at least 125 years apart.

Her year of birth in the first-generation identification card issued in 1979 is given as 1884 —with no specific day or month—and church records show as much.

Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, was born in 1889.

Her year of birth was based on information she gave then about her riika (age group) and on the events of her childhood she could speak clearly about.

Grazing field

Among these was the arrival of some porters from the Kenyan coast at a grazing field she knew then as Kinuini, present-day Pangani, in Nairobi.

Pangani was so named because it was the point at which the Swahili-speaking porters would tell the rest to arrange their loads on arrival in Nairobi. It is derived from “Pangeni” and Nairobi was only a stop on the railway line that would later inadvertently grow into a city.

The longest documented lifespan by information website Wikipedia, is that of Jeanne Calment of France (1875–1997), who died aged 122 years and 164 days.

With verification, Mrs Ng’ang’a, at 125, could easily have been the oldest living person alive. In Kenya, women were first issued with IDs in 1978 when she was 94.

Mrs Ng’ang’a is said to have had her first-born, Gladys Wambui, in 1917. Her husband Joseph Ng’ang’a had just returned from Burma where he had fought on behalf of the British in World War I.

Five more were to follow, with the last-born being born in 1936.

Not that nobody has ever taken notice of the fact that Mrs Ng’ang’a could have been one of the oldest people alive.

“Her grandchildren have often gone back to their universities in the US and come back with people who wanted to interview her but I refused. I did not want her to be disturbed, but now that she is dead, we might as well talk about it,” said her last-born son, Mr Stephenson King’ara when the Nation visited their home.

One of the people who wanted to tell Mrs Ng’ang’a’s story was a grandson who had studied Mass Communication, and eagerly brought his friends home to talk to his grandmother. The watchful son blocked the attempt.

Mrs Ng’ang’a has lived through two world wars, the laying of the railway through Kenya, the arrival of the British and their colonisation of Kenya and their subsequent departure.

By the time the Emergency was being declared by Governor Evelyn Baring in 1952, she had settled on her own farm at Githunguri.

They were not good times for her, though, as her son, Simon Ngugi, was being harassed for his association with the Githunguri Teachers College, where Mzee Kenyatta had been teaching.