Strange revearsal in Kogelo

When we students fell ill at Mbeji, a new school 15 minutes’ walk from Ng’iya market, we would be sent to the dispensary and the clinical officer.

He was ancient, his face an old map of frustration, illuminated by a magnified set of eyes behind a pair of oversized glasses, and armed with a stethoscope.

He would tap us around the liver and then announce in a deep voice, educated elsewhere and obviously not designed for the humble restrictions of a rural market dispensary, that our spleens were enlarged. It was a standard diagnosis.

He would then reach for a huge syringe from a small tub of water, the only assurance of sterilisation, turn us over, mercilessly deliver quinine to an exposed buttock and send us off with a packet of Paracetamols for pain.

Mbeji Academy was a new school, the brainchild of Prof Thomas Odhiambo, the founder of ICIPE, the insect research centre, and one of the greatest scientists Africa has produced in the last century.

He had started ICIPE at the back of his office at the Chiromo Campus of the Nairobi University and single-handedly built it into one of the main centres for insect research in the world.

At Mbita Point on Rusinga Island on the shores of Lake Victoria, he had set up a field research station that was frequented by researchers from all over the world. Pioneering breakthroughs had been made there, notably in the study of the tse-tse fly, others.

The field station at Mbita was a magnificent centre, able to house scores of researchers for months at a time.

Situated at the end of the Homa Bay-Mbita Road, a bone-rattling 64km drive past villages much like Kogelo, bearing little evidence that they were connected in any way to the 20th century, you arrived at the ICIPE centre with its blazing floodlights at the end of a long, old darkness. It felt like a grounded spaceship.

Mbeji Academy was Prof Odhiambo’s dream for the next generation of scientists. It was an idea to be enacted in three phases, culminating in a centre dedicated to science and research.

He intended for it to become an international school, attracting the brightest young scientific minds in the region.

The school was still in development when I arrived, student No 48, and the workshops and lab were rudimentary. But the teachers were committed; the first graduating class managed a more than respectable 17th place in the national KCSE exams.

But things began to fall apart at Mbeji. Teachers as well as parents had been assured that what existed — the simple structures brightly painted to mask the fact of the lack of proper facilities — was temporary.

That soon, real investment in the school would be made (partly as well to justify the huge fees parents were paying). And going by the professor’s unimpeachable reputation, his track record, there was no reason to doubt it.

Four years down the line, however, nothing had changed. There was talk of misappropriation, school development funds being diverted. Students became restive. Teachers began to leave. There was a strike. Performance plummeted. The professor’s fortunes, it was said, had taken a nosedive. He was no longer the man he used to be.