A father’s ride to collect his salary ended in death by the roadside, and an 11-year-old boy took a phone call no child should answer.
Dr Ouma Oluga’s father was a primary school teacher, the kind who brought a newspaper home every evening and pressed it into his son’s small hands to read aloud. There were no bank accounts then, only queues: teachers lining up at month-end to be handed their salary in cash, coin by coin, note by note.
Their evenings had a ritual though. “He used to talk to me a lot,” Dr Oluga recalls. His father would buy the newspaper, sit and hand it over. “I’m the one reading the story with him listening. That’s how he used to read these newspapers. I think it was a way of also teaching me how to read.” The house filled with the political theatre of the 1990s: Attorney General Amos Wako’s name splashed across every front page alongside President Daniel arap Moi’s, the rumble of Kenya’s “second liberation” pressing against the constitution.
“Basically, I was exposed to the affairs of a country very early as a child, because you’re reading very serious issues,” he says. “I suppose those things sank in me.”
Young enough to confuse ambition with celebrity, young Oluga decided he wanted to be Amos Wako, not a doctor. “I wanted to be a Wako first… so that you are the news.” His father gently corrected him. “Amos Wako is a lawyer; I want you to be a doctor.” The conversation kept building, evening after evening, newspaper after newspaper, until it hardened into an expectation Dr Oluga would carry the rest of his life.
His father did not confine that closeness to the sitting room. He took his son along to school, even when it embarrassed him to. “I would accompany him when he was going to teach. I would play somewhere there,” Dr Oluga says. Headteachers occasionally objected: ‘what is wrong with you, bringing a child to school?’ His father brought him anyway. Decades later, in embassies and government offices, strangers who had once been his father’s pupils still place him instantly.
Newspapers and classrooms, not textbooks, were the diet he was fed, and it showed
The experience, in retrospect, taught him the only parenting lesson that ever stuck: “Kids do what they see. It’s not about what they are told.”
But newspapers and classrooms, not textbooks, were the diet he was fed, and it showed. “So most of my life, from lower primary, if you look at my report, I was always last, if not near last.” In a class of 36 pupils, he was frequently at the very bottom. The report cards still exist; his mother, he says, kept every single one.
Then, on an ordinary day, his father rode his bicycle out to collect his salary in cash, as teachers always did, and collapsed by the roadside. He was rushed to Siaya District Hospital. By the next day, he was dead.
The task of telling the family fell to his mother, who had sat with her husband through his last night at Siaya District Hospital. There was no mobile phone to call from home, only a single telephone booth near the local posho mill. As chance, or cruelty, would have it, her son had been sent there that same day by his grandmother, and it was he who happened to be standing beside it when the phone rang.
Curious, as children are, 11-year-old Oluga picked it up. He heard his mother’s voice ask, in Dholuo, who was on the line. He said nothing. Then came the words meant for someone else entirely: go to our home, tell the people of Ngudi, that we’ve lost Japuonj, our teacher.
“It was very clear it was her voice. So I didn’t respond. In fact, I didn’t return there. I just left it hanging.” He walked home, ate the meal his grandmother had prepared, and told absolutely no one, not that night, not the next morning, until two women arrived at the gate screaming, in the way devastating news has always been broken in Kenyan villages. Only then did the rest of the family learn that Mwalimu was dead. Oluga had already known, alone, for hours.
Oluga’s mum eventually pieced together whose voice had gone quiet on the line, two weeks into the funeral
“I knew for the entire night. I didn’t sleep that night. It was a very heavy night.” Asked, decades later, whether he regrets the silence, he doesn’t flinch. “I have never reflected on whether I should have broken that news. I don’t think it was in my place to say it. Maybe it was my way of grieving.” His mother eventually pieced together whose voice had gone quiet on the line, two weeks into the funeral rites that followed. “She knew. And I never said anything. I don’t think anyone has ever condemned me for that.”
What came after was harder than the death itself. Home was a thatch-roofed hut, and even while her husband was alive, the picture had never been as comfortable as a teacher’s salary suggested. “There was still a lot of poverty,” Dr Oluga says. Once he was gone, poverty turned into something closer to siege: eight children, no income, a widow bending over other people’s farms for less than Ksh50 a day, the equivalent, he says, of a single gorogoro (2 kilogramme tin) of maize.
“She had to work on farms all her life. And they don’t pay much.” Relatives circled, offering to raise the children for her. She refused. “She said, ‘I’ll take care of my children,’” Dr Oluga recalls. “Whether we were sleeping hungry, and we slept hungry many days, irrespective of what happened, she would do it.”
Asked what he carried out of that season, one word arrives before any other: “Endurance. Or what we may call resilience. Never losing hope. You’ve got to show up and do something, regardless of the circumstance.”
The death did something to his son, lighting a fire under him. Something shifted, and the boy who had spent years at the bottom of his class began climbing, position by position, from 36th to 12th, from 12th to number two, and finally to number one. “And then I never got back anywhere else.”
Every significant threshold of his life has come with his mother on the other end of a phone call, praying
It is the kind of turnaround that begs an impossible question: would he trade the doctor he became for the father he lost? Dr Oluga answers without hesitation. “I don’t think I would be a failure. But perhaps I wouldn’t have been the doctor, because then I needed to work hard.” A pause. “He would have been very proud of me. It’s like he should have been alive to see me now, fulfilling some of those dreams. Perhaps being more than a doctor.”
That endurance became a lifelong presence, most often expressed as prayer. Every significant threshold of his life, from university exams to his interview for Principal Secretary, has come with his mother on the other end of a phone call, praying for him for minutes at a stretch. “There’s no day that my mother has never prayed. Even when I was going for my quota,” he says. “I think it’s a powerful expression of ‘I wish you well’.”
That voice reached him again at the moment he was closest to giving up entirely. In August 2015, a first-year master’s student in internal medicine at the University of Nairobi while simultaneously running the doctors’ union, he found himself pulled apart by two full-time jobs and came within a month of deferring his studies altogether. His mother, who has little formal education herself, cut through weeks of agonising with a single question: “What took you to Nairobi?” He had come for school. Everything else, she told him, was noise. He stayed.
