My father will die tonight at 11 pm.
One minute he will be strong, with his thunderous voice speaking in bravado against the scum of the earth. And the next moment, he will be lying knocked out cold against the ugly stones that are the road that politicians have refused to complete for some reason.
Minutes later, after a long torturous drive (again, the freaking road), he will be at the hospital. But he will be too late. Despite fighting hard, as he has done all his life, he will lose this time and will breathe his last in the hands of his sons and doctors, all trying their best. Hemorrhage in the brain is no easy fight, they will say. And he will be left in the cold slabs of a morgue.
This will happen exactly two months ago tonight…
June 25, 2024, a few minutes to midnight
I’m working at the dining table, and my phone is charging in the bedroom. I get an urge to look at my phone, and I find multiple missed calls, in their tens, from someone who wouldn’t call me that much at that time of the night.
Alarm bells ring in my stomach.
I see his text message asking me to call his father. Apparently, his father, a very dear friend of my dad, wants to tell me something very urgently.
I’m an escapist, I think. I sense the old man wouldn’t be calling me with good news. More calls from strange numbers come in. I switch off my phone and don’t talk to anyone in the house about what’s happening. I go and sleep, albeit mang’amung’amu.
The following morning, very early.
I wake up quite early. I hate mornings, and especially this one. This time, I don’t go for my phone first because I’m afraid of my own phone. I eventually work up the courage to take it and the first person I try call is my dad. He doesn’t pick, which is very, very rare, yet somehow expected this morning. I don’t remember a time my father ever missed my call. If he did, he would call back in less than five minutes and say he was bathing. That was his only reason for not picking up his phone – he always kept two phones so that “phone ilizima” didn’t become a reason. So different to me because I miss calls.
My mind tells me that’s a confirmation that all is not well.
I call his old friend next. He picks up and I tell him straight away that I was told he was looking for me late in the night. He tells me:
“It sounds like you haven’t heard the very bad things that happened last night.”
“What bad things?”
“Please just come today. And don’t call other people or pick up any calls from this side. Just come.”
A few minutes later, my brother Kabuuno calls me and tells me similar things. He tells me bad things have happened. When I ask him what, he tells me to talk to Alex. At this point I’m mad at Alex, my best buddy since childhood, for knowing something I don’t know that seems so important. But I don’t call him because by now I know with certainty that shit has dropped. Escapist.
My brother Evans calls me and asks me what’s wrong at home. I tell him I also don’t know; all I know is that there’s something terribly wrong. He disconnects and calls me a minute later.
“It’s like mzee is no more.” And disconnects.
I sit, dazed. Like I’m in a bad dream. I don’t talk for a long time, and I’m not even thinking about anything. My mind is totally blank. I have forgotten how to talk or think.
—
That’s how I learned about the unbelievably sudden, disheartening death of a seemingly immortal man – my father. The original Kibuacha.
The Original Kibuacha – v1.0
My father was unique in many ways. First, his name. The night he was born, a random stranger had sought accommodation at my grandfather Maabi’s home. They didn’t know where he had come from. He had just showed up and asked them to accommodate him. Apparently, people used to do that in the olden days. You’re traveling, it becomes late, and you pop into the nearest free Airbnb – someone’s home – and ask for a place to sleep through the night, and you get it. No questions asked.
This stranger chose the home of a heavily pregnant young woman – pregnant with her firstborn. Baby gets born that night, and they attribute the safe delivery to their stranger guest. Might as well have been an angel. So they give him the honour of naming their bouncing baby boy. The guy names him Kibuacha – a nonexistent name among our people. You would think a small baby would at least be called Kabuacha.
So, if you ever hear anyone called Kibuacha, know he is either a direct descendant of the Original Kibuacha, or is named after him. I have now met at least three children bearing my father’s name because of how their parents revered my father. Naming a child after someone is Kimeru’s ultimate honour.
It’s a name I wear with pride.
Drinker, who loved his kids more than the bottle
He grew up to be a pretty remarkable person. I remember as a child, he was a heavy drinker. Not a drunkard because he wasn’t rowdy. Just a heavy drinker with the money to drink. His friend Kiumbe narrated to me how they had a drinking competition, and my dad drank 53 bottles of Guinness, beating him by just one. There’s a time my dad bid us farewell to go to Mombasa to buy a Landcruiser, and he returned two weeks later with the Kumanyoko bread. He had drunk all the money. 😃 I remember my excitement when I ran to meet him at the door, zooming past him to see our new car. He called me back to give me the bread. How thoughtful, though, carrying the long loaf of bread all the way from Nairobi.
Being a clinician, he used to work far from home and would come on some weekends. To make up for lost time, he would take me to the most fun place he knew – the bar. By age 10 in Class 5, I used to drink up to 2 beers, and we would go home, happy and bonded, to entertain mom.

You see, my dad loved his children. All of them. He was a father of many children. Everywhere he went, he got himself a child, and when he left, he would bring the children to my everloving, long-suffering mum. And mum would receive them with both hands and raise them like her own because they were all hers. And we were all siblings of the same father and mother. Never have we considered ourselves half-siblings because what is that?
Actually, my dad stopped drinking a month before me, and my brother Bundi joined high school. So that he could get money to take me and my siblings through school. I came to learn later that he had forced his circle of friends into a pact – that they would all stop drinking when their children joined high school. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have gotten educated.
The first time I saw my dad cry was when he was taking me to college. We used a matatu and were buying books next to the Meru Bus Terminus when I caught him wiping a tear. When I bewilderedly asked him, he told me:
“If it weren’t for alcohol, I’d have many such buses in this Stage.”
And he was pretty badass. You should have listened to him tell stories of his conquests and adventures. Things he had done, placed he had been to. People he had met. Boys he had circumcised. Battles he had fought – even with the dreaded shifta. I mean, look at him this ninja!
Present, Proud Father
Yes. That was my father. He sacrificed a lot for his children’s welfare. He went out of his way to give us the life he never had. Very intentional for men of his age.
Dad attended and participated, in person, all his children’s events.
He went to all Visiting Days. He would sometimes come to visit me in school, alone, but carrying food for me when other fathers brought their sons newspapers.
He personally planned and brought buses of friends and family to graduations and ruracios for his children. I remember my first graduation. It was in a hall. As the speeches went on, we were interrupted by a group of about five people walking around, carrying jackets, looking across every row intently. It was my father and his friends. I was embarrassed when they found me and came to me, first hugging me and then posing in a line for a picture – he had hired a photographer for the day – as the entire hall came to a standstill. 😃
But such was his pride in us. I once overheard him narrate to his friends how educated I was and how much I had traveled the world. Massively exaggerating, of course. He said I had gone to as far as Russia and Australia when I had only ever traveled to India.
There’s also the time I broke the news that I had gotten a baby – yes, I kept Calla’s pregnancy a secret until the night she was born. It was breaking news. The following morning, dad came all the way to Nairobi, went to the hospital to see his granddaughter and went back home. I didn’t even meet him that day. He ‘donated’ mum to us to help us with the baby for a month.

Fast forward to July 6th 2024, and my father is lifeless in a coffin
My dad’s story won’t fit a blog post. It’s a book. His stories, his adventures, his friendships, his conquests, his work, his interaction with us, his love and his life is the stuff of legends – and I’m not kidding.
He was the tallest person I know, strong and the dream of every man – confidently owning all the spaces he was in.
This is the father I expected to see when we went to view him his body. I viewed him last and I spent a long time – several minutes – just looking at the man in the coffin. I was searching for the patriarch I called my father. I looked and looked and I couldn’t find him. I didn’t find him. I was looking for tears to finally mourn him after several days of busy preparations but I couldn’t even cry. Because that man in that box, wasn’t my father. My father would have woken up smiling and asked me why I was looking so intently at him while he slept. No, I don’t remember that image of him. I only remember his happy face as he bid me farewell just two months prior.
The only memories I have of that day are the smell of the hearse perfume (I traveled with him in the hearse and I can still catch a random whiff of that wretched perfume) and the great send off we have my father.
For me and for everyone I spoke to, it was the biggest, most elegant funeral we have ever attended. Food was in plenty, and eaters were in plenty. My father was an overly generous man (I remember that time he was in hospital with a clot in his brain and he was sending perfectly healthy people money for food because they told him they were hungry and we had an argument) and he continued feeding his people even from the other world.
It was a fitting burial for the great man he is…was.
And I want to say, thank you!
Friends came through for us. A lot. There was no single moment my siblings, mum and I were alone during that very difficult time. On that day, friends who knew about my dad’s demise even before I knew about it came to my home and we stayed together until they took me home the next day. At home I met my mum and my sisters surrounded by true love. The first purchase we made was for mattresses so that people would find a place to sleep. This kept on until way after the funeral. We…I never felt lonely. People dropped everything to be with me.
No one in the family spent their own money. People formed random committees that we weren’t even aware of and brought the money when it was needed the most. We set a high budget, you helped us exceed it. My dad’s friends came through for him, his children’s friends came through to show him that his legacy continues. My friends (some who I have never met, you people!), my colleagues, and ex-colleagues contributed, a lot of money… and a lot of encouraging messages and company to accompany it. Those are the things that made me cry – not even the sorrow. His burial was on a Tuesday, yet everything came to a standstill, with people from all over filling up Gitura Primary School grounds. For dad. For us. For me.

Thank you very much. I experienced true love and I love you back. A lot.
—
Finally, to my father’s killer: May you die the most gruesome death anything can die. And when you die, you know what the Original Kibuacha will do to you on the other side. On your way to hell.
Wow. Speechless. Angry. Love.
Rage. Nostalgia. Happiness. Sadness
He continues to watch over you. The Lord’s grace and mercies enabling you to move from the trauma it comes with.
Amen, James. Amen.
What a read! I don’t even know why my heart is racing! Continue resting Original Kibuacha!
Thanks, Milli. I was with your dad at the funeral. I hadn’t seen him in many years and it was great to reconnect.
Great tribute to your hero. My his soul continue resting in eternal peace 🕊️
Amen!
Eloquent. Simple. Relatable.
Thanks for reading, Njeri.
Oh my God!
U had to put sence of humour in the whole eulogy story I even forgot mzae if forever sleeping. I had never met him in person but his name was huge. May his soul rest in perfect peace 🕊️
He’s a name you would know. Now you have to know it more as it continues with me and my people. Thanks for reading my story.
We find happiness in our memories
Not me crying while supervising exams. Reality hits us of my kind months later. Hugs bro
May you always find peace whenever you feel down Frank. You’re so good with words, amazingly powerful. He sure is….. Was proud of you
Thank you, Marie. Peace!