The colonial masters had dealt the entire country a blow with their “Divide and Conquer” strategy. Every tribe was made to fear, and be suspicious of the next tribe. Stereotypes were highlighted and promoted giving every tribe reason not to feel comfortable with other tribes. Among the Kikuyu, the colonial masters went a step further by making Kikuyus fear their fellow Kikuyus from the neighboring district. A Nyeri person was very uncomfortable with Kiambu Kikuyus and vice versa. Muranga Kikuyus were equally uncomfortable with both Nyeri and Kiambu people.
Yet, here now was a Settlement Scheme with Kikuyus from the three districts of Central Kenya, learning to live side by side and work towards similar goals to build their newly established community away from everything and everybody they knew “back home” in Gikuyu, wherever their Gikuyu was. And they did exactly that. They put their fears aside, learnt to trust each other, developed their land individually and collectively, built their towns and community centers including churches, and raised their children to adulthood.
They built Nyandarua from scratch with minimal resources, nonexistent infrastructure, limited assistance from the newly formed government, limited knowledge and information since they were mostly illiterate or semi illiterate, yet, they built the Nyandarua we know and admire today. Most of those pioneers who were the first generation Nyandaruans have taken their eternal rest leaving their children and grandchildren to continue the work they so passionately started.
We should be very grateful for the foundation our Pioneer Parents laid out for us in the toughest of circumstances, to give us our very own place to call home outside of the Gikuyu they grew up in somewhere in Central Kenya. Because of that, most of us in Nyandarua only think of Gikuyu as the place where distant relatives reside: relatives whose lives, values and goals in life seem very different from our own. We now have a different identity which is in line with the communities we have strongly built together as Nyandaruans. We respect our Gikuyu roots, but we no longer fit in the mold of their society, because we have our own identity now, which we are very proud of, now more than ever.
It is us, the second generation of Nyandaruans, who are now leading the charge, having been trained by our very able Pioneer Parents, majority of whom have taken their final bow from this life, and the remaining few are living out their golden years as they watch and guide us in their shaky but strong voices. We stand proudly on the broad shoulders of our Pioneer Parents, and now it is our honorable task to prepare the next generation to take the reigns and steer this vast, beautiful County with endless potential into greater heights that our Pioneer Parents could only have imagined.
