WILSON KIPKEMBOI RONO

Kitale maize and dairy farmer, church elder, and the man who timed his children to school

Wilson Rono read the sky the way other men read newspapers. He would stand at the edge of his maize at half past four every morning with a gourd of mursik in his hand, sniff the air, and announce whether the neighbours should plant that week or wait, and for forty years nearly all of them did as he said. He was usually right. He was born in 1946 at Cherangany, the son of a farm labourer who dreamed of owning the soil he had spent his life clearing for someone else.

Wilson made the dream real. After Kapsabet Boys High School he worked as an agricultural assistant for the Kenya Farmers Association, saving every pay packet until, in 1971, he and two brothers bought twenty-two acres outside Kitale. He planted hybrid maize, then wheat, then a herd of Friesian cows that he named after his aunts, who were not informed. He sold milk at dawn and never missed a school-fee deadline for any of his seven children. His maize won the Kitale Agricultural Show cup four times; the cup stood on his television, and visitors who failed to admire it were not offered tea.

He married Priscilla Jepchirchir in 1973, and for forty-seven years she kept the farm's accounts while he took the credit, a division of labour both of them found reasonable. An elder at AIC Kitale Central, he sang bass, tithed in maize, and lent his tractor to any neighbour whose field was drying out. On school mornings he stood at the gate with a stopwatch and timed his children over the four kilometres to the road, a habit that, his family says, eventually produced a runner.

Wilson died at home in October 2020 after a short illness, with the Kitale rains arriving on schedule outside the window. He leaves Priscilla, seven children and twenty-three grandchildren.

“The land listens to whoever shows up before dawn.”