Dementia is quietly dismantling the minds of Kenyans, stealing memory, identity, and independence, while a healthcare system built for infectious disease is barely watching.
My uncle Matayo was the kind of man you didn’t just meet – you experienced him. He wasn’t loud, and he certainly wasn’t flashy. When he sat with you, the concept of multitasking seemed to vanish. He possessed a mind like a steel trap for the things that matter: names of your children, exact year you raised the walls of your house, specific melody of the song that played at your wedding while it rained.
He was the uncle who materialised on a random Wednesday afternoon, a bunch of bananas slung over his shoulder simply because he thought of you. He came carrying stories, the kind of oral history that kept you laughing past dinnertime.
Four years ago, Matayo left his house in the cool light of the morning. His wife, Gladys, assumed he had gone to the local shop. By noon, the chair where he usually rested his head remained empty. By evening, the family phone tree was buzzing with concern. By midnight, the torches were out, flashing across the hills, voices calling his name into the darkness.
In the weeks before his disappearance, the universe had scattered breadcrumbs that the family, in hindsight, now gathers with painful clarity. There were confusions about dates that had once been etched in his mind. Gladys had found him standing in the sitting room at 2am, fully dressed in his Sunday best, convinced he was late for a church meeting. She had laughed gently, the way one laughs at a harmless mistake, and guided him back to bed. They did not take him to a doctor.
In rural Kenya, there is often no vocabulary for what Matayo was experiencing that doesn’t sound either terrifyingly spiritual or dismissively biological. It was either chira – a curse – or just the inevitable sunset of a man’s years.
In high-income countries, there are GPS trackers sewn into waistbands; in Kenya, we have family, neighbours, WhatsApp groups
What happened to Matayo has a clinical name: wandering. It is one of the most dangerous symptoms of dementia, affecting an estimated six in ten people with the illness at some point in their trajectory. In high-income nations, there are GPS trackers sewn into waistbands, Silver Alert systems that flash across highway billboards, and trained search-and-rescue teams equipped with drones and thermal imaging.
In Kenya, we have family. We have neighbours. We have WhatsApp groups with a blurry, pixelated photograph and a desperate caption: Have you seen him?
Matayo’s photograph was shared. Thousands of thumbs scrolled past his face. No one called.
Our family has been suspended in purgatory ever since. Not quite mourning, because there is no body to bury; not quite hoping, because the logic of survival suggests that a man lost in the wilderness for four years cannot be found. It is the grief of watching someone you love disappear while they are still standing right in front of you – the quiet despair of a wife sitting across from a husband of two decades, watching his eyes scan her face with the polite, terrifying blankness one reserves for a stranger. The hollow cry of grown children kneeling before their mother, saying, Mama, it’s me, only to be met with a distant, polite nod.
This is the quiet devastation that dementia leaves in its wake. And here in Kenya, it is becoming a grief that more and more families know intimately. It moves silently, a thief in broad daylight, stealing the architecture of the minds we love, leaving behind a shell that looks like the person but lacks the navigator.
The message was brief and unsettling: Joseph was missing. His family was searching for him
If Matayo represents the rural mystery of this disease, Joseph – a former colleague whose name has been changed to protect his privacy – represents its urban, professional shock. Three years ago, when donor funding cuts swept through our organisation, Joseph lost his job. He seemed normal in the difficult aftermath – thoughtful, engaged, hopeful despite the setback.
Then, last month, I saw a photograph of him circulating in a WhatsApp group. The man in the image looked dishevelled and distant, carrying the unmistakable appearance of someone who had been living on the margins for some time. The message was brief and unsettling: Joseph was missing. His family was searching for him.
He was found two weeks later. He is now undergoing rehabilitative therapy. He can barely remember anything.
Joseph, 49 when he was diagnosed, represents the lesser-understood face of early-onset dementia – technically defined as a diagnosis before the age of 65. Globally, it accounts for roughly nine per cent of all dementia cases. With an estimated 55 million people worldwide living with dementia, that translates to millions of people in the prime of their working lives. In sub-Saharan Africa, numbers are rising sharply, driven by longevity gains from better malaria control, combined with a surge in lifestyle-related conditions – hypertension, diabetes, obesity – that are major risk factors for vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Joseph is, in a cruel twist of fate, one of the lucky ones. He was found. He was diagnosed correctly. He is receiving care. Watching him in that rehabilitation facility is nevertheless its own particular sorrow: a man who two years ago was debating policy in a conference room now often stares at the wall.
She asked her youngest daughter what time her husband was coming home -the husband who had died many years ago
My mother-in-law, Florence, was the centre of our family’s universe. She raised nine children in a rural setting in Uasin Gishu – a logistical feat that required the precision of a general and the endurance of a marathon runner. She could recite the birthday of every grandchild, a host of them, without pausing to think.
The erosion began quietly. She forgot the name of a neighbour she had known all her life, covering the slip so smoothly with a generic greeting that no one noticed. She asked her youngest daughter what time her husband was coming home -the husband who had died many years ago.
Then the signs grew larger. She stopped recognising the grandchildren. Then her own children.
My wife came home from a visit last year and sat in the car outside our gate for a long time. The engine was off, but she didn’t move. When she finally came through the door, her eyes were red, and her voice was very controlled, the way it gets when she is holding something enormous together by sheer will. “She looked at me,” my wife said. “She looked right at me. And she asked me who I was.”
There is no adequate response to that sentence. You can offer facts – it’s the disease, it’s the plaques and tangles in the hippocampus, it’s not her – and all of those facts are true. And none of them touches the wound.
Florence now has moments of startling clarity – lucid intervals – where she will look at a grandchild and say their name with such warmth and certainty that the whole room holds its breath. And then the window closes again, as suddenly as it opened.
Many families have never heard of dementia until a doctor says it in a sterile consulting room
Kenya faces a severe shortage of neurologists – fewer than 50 serve a country of over 50 million people. Geriatric psychiatry is almost non-existent as a specialty. The Alzheimer’s Society of Kenya exists and does heroic work, but awareness remains startlingly low. Many families – educated, urban families with access to private healthcare – have never heard the word “dementia” used in the context of a family member until a doctor says it to them in a sterile consulting room.
The burden of care falls almost entirely on families, and within families, disproportionately on women. Daughters, daughters-in-law, wives -women who quietly absorb the full weight of a disease the healthcare system has not yet built sufficient infrastructure to share. Many leave work entirely, silently disappearing from professional life to manage a crisis that nobody outside the household fully sees. They become simply “the caregiver”, their own health and identity erased from the equation.
Kenya needs to talk about dementia – loudly, in public, in clinics and community health programmes and schools and churches and offices. We need to retrain our community health volunteers to recognise the signs rather than attribute confusion to age or spiritual causes. We need more neurologists, more geriatric specialists, and support groups where caregivers can sit and say, I am tired and have everyone in the room understand exactly what they mean. We need wandering protocols that activate faster than a WhatsApp group.
Memory, in the end, is an act of love – the tether that binds us to one another
Florence loves a specific hymn, old, one they haven’t sung in churches for decades. When her grandchildren sing it to her, her posture changes. She closes her eyes and moves her lips. For those few minutes, she is somewhere that dementia has not yet reached.
Gladys, Matayo’s wife, still keeps his photograph on the wall. Not as a memorial – there is no mourning cloth on the frame. It is a placeholder. A declaration that he existed, that he was loved, that he is still loved. She speaks about him in the present tense.
“Matayo is a man who loves his family,” she says, her voice firm. “Somewhere, he is trying to find his way home. I think he is always trying to find his way home.”
Dementia stole his map. It stole his compass. But Gladys remembers him. Florence’s children remember the matriarch who knew every birthday. Memory, in the end, is an act of love – the tether that binds us to one another. When the person can no longer hold the memories themselves, those who love them carry the memories forward.
We hold the line until the very end. And then we hold the line a little longer.
Obwiri Kenyatta is a global health and development expert on health and gender equity, HIV, community health and climate justice.
Editor’s Note:
If your family is navigating the storm of dementia, you do not have to sail alone. The Alzheimer’s Dementia Organization Kenya (ADOK) can be reached through +254 (0)787 111 808/+254 (0) 757 701 170 or info@alzkenya.org. There is support. There is understanding. There is hope.
