Kisoi Munyao was an outdoors buff. He loved mountain climbing. That’s just how the singular honour of hoisting the Kenyan flag on Mt Kenya’s Lenana Point on the eve of December 12, 1963, fell on his 25-year- old shoulders carrying climbing gear weighing 50 kilos.
The date was to be Jamhuri Day, marking Kenya’s ascent to self-rule.
Kisoi died in 2007 aged 73. He was given a hero’s sendoff which was attended by former President Kibaki. The government erected a mausoleum in his rural village in Kisau, Mbooni, but the nabobs of the regime hardly bothered when he was admitted at Kenyatta National Hospital.
It was an ironic treatment of a man who spent his life in Nairobi’s Jericho estate. He had not much to show for who he was, besides a presidential medal.
The saving grace is that his other son, Michael Kisoi Munyao, is now Mbooni MP.
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The other was that 50 years since Kisio hoisted Kenya’s flag on Mt Kenya, his other son, Teddy Kisoi Mutuku, a trained mountain rescue officer, climbed Mt Kenya to mark the country’s Jubilee celebrations in 2013.
Teddy was accompanied by, among others, Robert Chambers and Dennis Rutovitz...who climbed Mt Kenya with his late father in 1963! The 80-something-year-old mountaineers had flown from Santiago for the historic repeat performance. Rutovitz - who owing to health issues did not reach the peak - had tagged along his two sons, both of whom finished the climb.
Did you know that the Anglican Church of Kenya changed the name of the Fort Hall Diocese (now Murang’a) to Mount Kenya Diocese in memory of Kisoi’s historic duty that Independence Day in ‘63?
Christians were also reminded by the late Bishop Obadiah Kariuki of the Anglican Church that in their lives, they were also called to hoist the flag of Jesus Christ in all communities around the Mt Kenya region.
This Jamhuri Day, remember Kisoi who sent a radio message to Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta saying: “Hello all citizens and our visitors. I am Kisoi Munyao, speaking to you from the peak of Mt Kenya. Kenya, Kenyatta, the flag is flying. All over Kenya, the light is shining” before he and his colleagues fired flares, with Rutovitz, then a university maths lecturer, fishing out a bottle of Cointreau from his backpack and toasting to a nation at the cusp of a new dawn.
