Celebrating the life of a ‘political giraffe’ with nostalgia, Daniel Toroitich arap Moi of Kenya

My PhD thesis was on former President Daniel arap Moi. After passing all the required core courses which took more than one year and gruelling five-hour exams, John Ostheimer, my chair of the dissertation committee, asked me to think of my topic for research.

It could have been the cool climes of Flagstaff Arizona, which hosted my alma mater Northern Arizona University, that made me long for Kenya. I remembered what my friend Richard Ndorongo had told me back in 1980 after finishing my Masters in Political Science at Illinois State University, when I told him I longed to go home. He dismissed the whole idea of going home because he knew that Moi, who had been in power then for less than two years, was a passing cloud and that Njoroge Mungai would soon take over, and then he would return to Kenya. Up to now, Ndorongo has never returned to Kenya-40 years later.