GRACE WAMBUI NJOROGE

Matron at Kenyatta National Hospital who delivered thousands of Nairobi's babies

The night shift in the maternity wing at Kenyatta National Hospital in 1971 was two nurses short, and a twenty-five-year-old Grace Wambui delivered three babies before sunrise, went home, slept four hours and came back to deliver two more. That was how Grace worked for thirty-four years, and how a generation of Nairobi mothers came to name their daughters after her.

She was born in 1946 in Limuru among the tea terraces, the fourth of seven children. Her father, a church elder, held that a girl who could read could do anything, and she proved him right at the Kenya Medical Training College before joining Kenyatta National Hospital as a staff nurse in 1967. She rose to ward sister, then to nursing officer in charge of the maternity unit, and retired as Matron in 2001. She trained hundreds of young nurses and insisted that each of them learn to wash their hands 'as if the baby were your own'.

Grace married Samuel Maina Njoroge in 1968. Their home in Kiambaa smelled of mukimo with pumpkin leaves, and of the cardigans she knitted, without a pattern, for every grandchild and for the premature babies on her ward. She hummed hymns while she cooked, always half a tone higher than Samuel could manage, which he said was the secret of their harmony. In the Women's Guild at PCEA Thogoto she ran the sick-visiting rota for twenty years and never once missed a name.

After Samuel died in 2020 she kept his reading glasses beside her bed. Grace passed away peacefully in her sleep in April 2023, aged seventy-seven, in the house she had filled with people for half a century. She leaves three children, nine grandchildren and, somewhere in Nairobi, several thousand people who began their lives in her hands.

“Wash your hands as if the baby were your own.”