ISAAC WEKESA WAFULA

Principal who taught Kakamega's children to read, to argue and to arrive on time

At Mukhonje Secondary School the bell was a length of old railway line hung from a guava tree, and for twenty-two years it was struck by hand, at exactly six-fifty every morning, by the principal himself. Isaac Wekesa Wafula believed that punctuality was the first form of respect, and a generation of Kakamega children learned to run the last hundred metres to school the way other children learn to sing.

He was born in 1950 at Malava, the third of nine children of a Friends Church lay preacher, and grew up herding goats, reading by paraffin lamp and winning every spelling contest in the district. A place at Kakamega School led to Kenyatta University College, where he trained as a teacher of history and literature. For twelve years he taught at his old school, where former pupils still remember his habit of closing the textbook halfway through a lesson, telling a story from his own village childhood, and asking what it meant. In 1990 he became principal of Mukhonje, a struggling day school with a leaking roof and big ambitions, and over two decades he turned it into a place that took students to the national drama festival four times and to university in numbers nobody had expected.

Away from school he kept bees, grew sugarcane he never sold, and cooked a Sunday chicken stew that his family insists has never been equalled. He was a lifelong AFC Leopards supporter who endured the club's decline with the patience of a man who taught history. He married Mary Nasimiyu in 1976, and together they raised three children and sheltered, by the family's count, eleven other children who needed a bed near a school.

Isaac died peacefully in July 2023 after a short illness, with the radio tuned to the football. He leaves his wife, three children, six grandchildren and a very large number of former pupils who still arrive on time.

“Be on time. It is the cheapest way to tell someone you respect them.”