Khadija was the only woman to ever grace the cosmopolitan page

 

Hers was feminine magnificence made manifest. As Kenya@50 looms around the mid December corner, Khadija Adams remains the poster girl of Miss Kenya and all beauty pageant winners, dead, alive and the unborn.

Indeed, since winning the Miss World Kenya crown that November, 29 years ago and still counting, there has never been another like Khadija Adams.

The then 20-year-old represented Kenya during the 1984 Miss World contest in London’s Royal Albert Hall where Carolina Herrera from Venezuela won the overall crown.

And it was no fluke. ‘Kate’ was among the first 15 semi-finalists – from 72 beauty queens around the world – who became the first Kenyan to win the Miss Africa title, and with it, 275 free airline tickets to tour Mother Earth.

No other Kenyan model has ever graced the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine since Khadija Adams in 1986.

The daughter of Halima Gathoni became a professional supermodel of such sublime and surreal beauty that Time magazine took note in 1989 as Miss Adams sashayed in catwalks around Japan, Italy, US of A and Britain- where she got hitched. Just to purse you on what ‘supermodel’ means, in 1986, Khadija Adams signed with French leading fashion house Yves Saint Laurent for $1 million (Sh85 million at current exchange rates and paid as years rolled by) that included a lip gloss named after her – the first for a miro!

Things could not have turned out as they did for the woman Newsweek described as ‘the most beautiful African queen’ were it not for Alan Donovan, co-founder of the African Heritage Gallery. By the mid 1980s, the gallery had the African Heritage Night where the resident band played as male and female models showcased designs from its textile department. Khadija Adams Ismail was one of the models. English investment banker Jonathan Reid fell head over heels with the girl who was born in Nyeri but made modeling her career in Nairobi. Of course he married her.

What did ‘Kate’ do with the fortune coined from Yves Saint Laurent? She founded Madadier Investment in 2005 and has since engaged in mining gypsum in Tana River where Khadija Adams is the ‘Gypsum Queen’.