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It might sound strange that founding President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta hated sukuma wiki and githeri, the maize and beans mixture that’s the staple diet of his community.
Elizabeth Madoka, the president’s Social Secretary after independence in 1963, notes in her memoirs, Miss Uhuru 1963: Working for Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, that Jomo had no palate for sukuma and githeri, but loved nyama choma despite health warnings, putting his two physicians at loggerheads.
Jomo often told Dr Eric Mngola, a specialist in general internal medicine: “I have never seen a lion with gout”, upon which Mngola would encourage ‘Burning Spear’ that, “You are head of state, eat what you want”, to the chagrin of Dr Njoroge Mungai who would lament that, “You are slowly killing the old man!”
Dr Mngola succumbed to cancer in 2007 at 74, while Dr Mungai, the former Foreign Affairs minister, died in 2014 at 88.
Jomo loved mixing herbal broth with roast goat ribs, worsening his gout which coupled with his eczema (a skin disease) that permanently condemned him to open leather sandals.
Roast ribs went well with VAT 69 whisky bottles, which Jomo stocked in his limo and drank from a special elongated glass before switching to muratina enroute to quitting alcohol.
Did you know Jomo’s aversion for sukuma wiki and githeri was from the seven years of hard labour suffered at Lokitaung Prison from April 1953 alongside Fred Kubai, Kung’u Karumba, Paul Ngei and Bildad Kaggia?
Achieng Oneko, the other member of the ‘Kapenguria Six’ pleaded “not guilty”, and demanded “an attorney” and “appealed his sentence” and was exiled to Manda Island in Lamu.
In her 1993 book, Jomo’s Jailer: The Grand Warrior of Kenya, Elizabeth Watkins writes that President Uhuru’s dad was accorded special treatment owing to his age: Kubai was 35; Karumba 32; Oneko 32; Kaggia 30 and Ngei 29. Kenyatta was bending his 60s.
While all inmates left their 12-by-20-feet cells of bare stone floor, with a sisal mat and single blanket to crush boulders and dig own graves on rocky ground with blunt mattocks under sandstorms and hellish heat, Jomo was the camp cook as “there was no other light work for him to do.”
In his 1954 report, North Eastern DO, J.R.M. Tennet noted that “Kenyatta is old and mellowing. Cooking only aggravates his eczema” and to make matters worse, Ngei once almost pushed him into a furnace to protest “Kenyatta’s cooking”, forcing authorities to isolate him after accusing Uhuru’s dad of selling food rations to mzungu warders!
He continued cooking even after two younger jailbirds Kariuki Chotara, 16 and General China, 32, later joined Lokitaung- which Ngei christened “St Lucifer’s Monastery of Lokitaung” due to the absence of “women, alcohol and cigarettes”.
The seven years of githeri, government posho and sukuma wiki which aggravated stomach problems, were enough at Lokitaung of which he said “there was nothing green, nothing cool, nothing creative, nothing demanding, nothing at all.”
As president, the 15 years spent in England influenced his cuisine: cream of tomato soup, fish and sirloin steak cooked medium with English potatoes, vegetables and Yorkshire pudding with gravy as accompaniments. No pork please!
He also loved cheese after meals and often ate them as a snack in his official limo!
President Daniel Moi, a teetotaller, didn’t follow Kenyatta’s nyayo in cuisine when he took over in 1978: Proteins were never mixed with starch.
Moi’s ugali was served kavu with sukuma wiki. In case of meat- lean lamb- sukuma was sacrificed. He also disliked spices. Andrew Morton notes in Moi: The Making of an African Statesman published in 1998, that once when sharing a single room in Nairobi’s Ziwani estate with Ronald Ngala and Jean Marie-Seroney in the early 1950s, he often protested while sneezing after taking Seroney’s meat that was spiced with too much pepper.
Once, after presiding over a church fundraiser in Ngarariga, Limuru in 2002, a local Kanu influence peddler hosted him, but alas!
His wife spiced the lunch: Dusty rural roads were watered, highways cleared and unspiced food ferried from State House to Limuru, before Moi reached his host’s house from the church just a saliva spit away!
While President Mwai Kibaki loved Weetabix, croissants, tea and fruits for breakfast and chicken or fish for lunch, he also didn’t mind broccoli, lamb chops, mukimo and grilled salmon for supper in between samosas and muteta soup before cold Whitecaps.
President Uhuru, on the other hand, dispenses with white meat and is a sucker for lamb chops, beef steak and fish served with mukimo, roast warus or rice and Fanta Orange before rediscovering the virtues of a Glenlivet Scotch Whisky!
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