The King & I: The Most Interesting Man in the World
Over the next 6 weeks, our Regional Director of East Africa will be in Kenya. Andrew is visiting campuses across the country to assess how Textbooks for Change can make the biggest impact possible with our textbook donations and envision the future of our impact model. He will be blogging along his journey.
In my role, you get to meet some very interesting people:
from international shipping agents and men selling books by the roadside; energetic but green undergraduate students to professors with decades of experience. But of all these individuals, high-level university administrators are particularly fascinating to deal with: these are incredibly bright and ambitious women and men who balance a passionate devotion to their academic discipline with a strong understanding of how to manage finite human and financial resources in their departments.
I had the pleasure of meeting one such individual at Pwani University, in Kilifi, this week, and felt compelled to get his story after his colleagues informed me that I was in the presence of royalty. Oh, it gets better:
· His full name and title is Captain (retired) Doctor Mukorani Y’Didha-a-Mjidho. He is currently the Dean of the School of Health and Human Sciences at Pwani University. He holds a degree in medicine from the University of Nairobi, as well as a MSc in Biomedical Research Management from a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and the Royal Tropical Institute.
· The ‘Captain’ part of his title came from his military service, of 8 years between 1986 and 1992. He worked as an army doctor at the Armed Forces Memorial Hospital in Thika, before moving to attachment with the 12th Armoured Brigade near Isiolo in the north of Kenya, and also attended the elite Recruit Training School in Eldoret.
· After working in hospital management he founded his private practice in 1999, and set up small private hospitals in Webuye (in western Kenya), and Mombasa.
· In the early 2000s he tried his hand at politics, first in Mombasa, then in the Tana River region. He failed both times, explaining to me that “politics in this country is not for people who speak the truth.”
· He did, however, see some success in a slightly different type of politics in 2013. Cpt. Dr. Y’Didha-a-Mjidho is from the Pokomo tribe, a group focused in the Tana River region, a dryland area in Kenya’s east. Issues occurring around the 2013 election led to his people feeling excluded from normal administrative and political power, and in order to remedy this they decided to use the structures of traditional leadership to help unify and guide them. Pokomos of centuries past had complex systems of political organization that had elements of democracy, a federal system and an autocracy, with local councils passing decisions that were broadly respected among nearby councils, and a small group of private councils with higher authority. In the past, the different councils reserved the right to elect a King, whose decisions would trump even the private councils, and while the King had to come from nobility, the kingship was not passed from father to son automatically. Cpt. Dr. Y’Didha-a-Mjidho was eligible for the title, as his grandfather was the last King to hold office, and in 2013 the Pokomos chose him as king.
· The King is not supposed to work, as he should instead be devoting his time to his people, but there was an exception made for the training of individuals in medicine, which was the preserve of the King, so Cpt. Dr. Y’Didha-a-Mjidho could keep his role as a professor. He is still an active lecturer, teaching anatomy, embryology, cytology and histology, as well as a management class for post-graudates.
For those of you who are asking “was he a consummately polite, kind, genteel, and smooth operator?” the answer is “yes.”
Dos Equis guy, he is coming for you.
