Kimani Ng’ang’a Maruge was a Kenyan man who rose to fame in the early 2000s for being the oldest person to begin primary school at the age of 84.
Little is known about his childhood, even his actual birthdate, but Maruge believed he was born in 1920. Under British colonial rule, Maruge didn’t attend school, like many other Kenyan children at the time. Colonial policies limited education for Africans. It was often reserved for the elite and families who served colonial interests.
So as a child, Maruge likely worked as a herder or engaged in farm work. And as he grew up, conditions under colonial rule were brutal.
Similar to what Israel is doing to the indigenous Palestinians in Palestine, the British forcibly took vast tracts of fertile land from Africans and allocated them to European colonial-settlers. Africans were pushed into ‘native reserves’, which were overcrowded and had poor soil. Colonial authorities also forced Africans to work on European plantations and railway stations while levying high taxes that further pushed Africans into economic desperation.
The denial of African political representation in colonial governance, apartheid policies that favoured European colonial-settlers in education, healthcare and jobs, and continued repressive rule of the masses culminated in the Mau Mau Uprising, a violent struggle for Kenyan independence between 1952 and 1960.
Kimani Maruge took part in the fight for independence, conducting guerrilla warfare as a foot soldier in the forests of the Aberdare Mountains and Mount Kenya. During the uprising, he was caught, detained and tortured in a British concentration camp where thousands of Kenyans died from abuse, starvation and disease. He was then released, likely in 1960 when the uprising was crushed and the British gradually lifted the State of Emergency it had declared in 1952.
When Kenya finally gained independence on 12th December 1963, in large part due to the Mau Mau Uprising bringing global attention to the Kenyan liberation movement, Maruge continued to live in poverty. Instead of honouring Mau Mau fighters as national heroes, many were ignored and marginalized in the post-colonial Kenyan government.
After independence, Maruge worked as a subsistence farmer and a casual laborer in Eldoret for many years. It was in 2004 when his story came to the world’s attention. At the age of 84, he chose to get the education he had been denied as a child. His reasons? To learn to count money and to learn to read the Bible, encouraged by the Kenyan government’s announcement in 2003 to provide free universal primary school education.
He enrolled at Kapkenduiyo Primary School in Eldoret and was made head boy due to being a good student. And in September 2005, he had another ‘first’. He got on a plane for the first time in his life to speak on the importance of free primary school education at the 2005 United Nations Millennium Development Summit in New York.
Kimani Ng’ang’a Maruge passed away in 2009 and the film ‘The First Grader’, which depicts his life story, was released in 2011.
