Samuel Maina Njoroge

If you drive the lanes around Kiambaa at dusk and watch the lamps come on one by one, you are looking at the work of Samuel Maina Njoroge. He was born in 1943 to a coffee-picking mother and a tailor father, and he was the first boy from his village to win a place at Alliance High School. His mother walked him to the bus stop in Kikuyu town with his only pair of shoes tied around his neck, so that he would arrive with them clean.

After a diploma at the Kenya Polytechnic he joined the East African Power and Lighting Company in 1966, later Kenya Power, and for thirty-seven years he ran line crews across Kiambu, Murang'a and Nyandarua. He treated electricity as a promise rather than a product. When a village could not afford its poles he quietly found a way, and more than one primary school got its first bulb because of an 'inspection' that happened to fall at lunchtime. He retired in 2003 as Regional Distribution Engineer, famous in the depot for never leaving a fault overnight.

Home was a tin-roofed bungalow with a vegetable garden he guarded like a bank. In 1968 he married Grace Wambui, a young nurse at Kenyatta National Hospital, and for fifty-two years they disagreed fondly about open windows: she wanted them open, he wanted them shut. He fixed every neighbour's radio, kept a drawer of fuses for all comers, listened to the BBC at six every evening, and on Sundays sat on the deacons' bench at PCEA Thogoto, singing a gruff bass line he never once learned to read.

Samuel died peacefully at home in November 2020, with Grace beside him and a hymn playing on the radio. He leaves his wife, three children, nine grandchildren, and a lane full of lights.