TERESIA WANJIRU MURIITHI

Tea picker who became a factory director and sent thirty-eight Tetu girls to school

Fourteen kilograms. That was Teresia Wanjiru's first day's tally as a tea picker, at the age of eleven, in 1950 on a neighbour's plot in Tetu, and she carried the number in her head for the rest of her life, reciting it to younger women whenever they complained that the leaf was heavy. By the time she died in 2019 she had picked, planted, weighed, argued over and finally helped to run a good part of Nyeri's tea industry.

She was born in 1938, married young and was widowed at thirty-one, left with five children and half an acre. She planted tea on it in 1969, among the first smallholders on her ridge to join the Kenya Tea Development Authority. When green-leaf payments were late she walked to the buying centre every week to ask why, and within months other farmers began walking with her. In 1982 she was elected to the committee of the Chinga Tea Factory, one of the first women to hold such a seat, and for twenty years she questioned every figure put in front of her, in Kikuyu, English and a very effective silence.

She did not stop at tea. Mama Teresia started a quiet bursary out of her bonus, paying school fees for thirty-eight girls from Tetu who might otherwise have married early; seven went on to university. She sold mandazi at the factory gate to raise money for the parish roof and sang in the Catholic Women's Association at St. Teresa's, always slightly ahead of the beat. Her kitchen was never without ripe bananas, hot chai and someone who needed a talking-to.

She died on a Sunday in May 2019, after Mass, in the chair beside her tea bushes. She leaves five children, twenty-one grandchildren and a long, orderly row of green terraces.

“Every leaf is a school fee if you pick it right.”