Stephen Mumbo mourned his mother for a year – cousin reveals

 Stephen Mumbo [Photo: Courtesy]

Friends, family and colleagues are painting different portraits of Stephen Mumbo, who was born in 1977, the last born of two girls and three boys in Kisumu Nyamasaria, a hot, dry and humid area where black cotton soil sucks life from a crop.

Only determined weeds survive.  In the absence of his father, Arthur Waore Mumbo, an administrator at Kemri Busia who died in 1992, it was his mother, Mrs Waore, a teacher at Nyamasaria Primary School, who had the most influence in his life.

But after his father’s death, Mumbo was brought up in Alupe, Busia, by his uncle Mzee Obura, a doctor at Kemri in Alupe.

Fred Obura, a cousin, recalls that the father died when Mumbo was joining form one and his family took him.

But “when his mother died five years ago,” recalls Fred “he snapped in the office and couldn’t work. He took a one-year unpaid sabbatical to mourn his mother.”

Indeed, that Friday morning when he committed suicide, it was the huge photo of his mother in his bedroom that he last saw when he slept, and the first he saw when he woke up.

 Fred attended St Paul’s Amukura with Mumbo who was ahead of him but he recalls that Mumbo was the class prefect in form one and two and by form three and four, he was the library prefect.

“Mumbo was deeply religious and never missed church,” says Fred. Other schoolmates, too, had their own recollections.

St Paul’s Amukura was an academic giant in Busia County where it was founded by Catholic priest Father Louis Okidoi in 1962. Mumbo was the shy brain box with an awkward gait. 

In the school’s achievement board, mounted proudly in the administration block, Mumbo narrowly missed being immortalised by one point. It was A- in one subject, Kiswahili, that did him in.  

Charles Ekirang, his classmate, says Mumbo was expected to succeed in life since “in an age where we chased girls we nicknamed Marios, from St Mary’s Amukura, Mumbo was chasing after whoever had the key to the library.”

Caleb Etyang, a year ahead of Mumbo, says the studious boy “wasn’t a guy to go for sports or drama outings, he was much more at home in the school and the library.”

He recounts a new, beautiful teacher who drove the boys crazy when she reported, but Mumbo was unmoved with her curves.

Odeo Sirari, a KTN news editor, was a mono when Mumbo was clearing, but he recalls that “Mumbo looked serious, a total bookworm. He had spectacles, and always looked like he was destined for greater things.”

Mumbo left St Paul’s Amukura, as class index one, but disappointed that he didn’t beat the record of Adiema Aura, a renowned educationist and alumnus of the 80s.

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