At nineteen, he went back to Class Eight. 

There he was, a grown man among thirteen-year-olds, trying to remember how to be a schoolboy again. He had dropped out in Class Seven and stayed away for seven years, doing odd jobs around Webuye, mostly cutting grass in the sun at Pan Paper Mills. 

He came from Waraka, a small hamlet outside Webuye, where his father was a peasant and a polygamous man, which meant there was never quite enough of anything and opportunities ended in a funnel of despair. One day his mother looked at him and said, “Son, this won’t work. You have to go back to school.” 

He told her he was too old. 

“Nobody is too old to go back to school,” she said. 

So he went. 

Nineteen years old. Class Eight. 

He says he adjusted quickly. In Waraka, boys can look like men, so perhaps he didn’t feel quite as ridiculous as you might imagine. His mother’s words, he says, kept ringing in his head. 

Years later, after school, he came to Nairobi dreaming of joining the hospitality industry. Instead he spent five years doing casual work in the Industrial Area. It wasn’t sustainable, and certainly not hospitable, especially because now he was a father. 

Then, in 2006, he joined Securex. He has been a guard ever since. 

He is 49 now. Almost his entire adult life spent watching gates, studying faces, keeping an eye on things. “It’s a good gig,” he shrugs. “You don’t need much other than a keen eye and a brain.” 

He has spent the last 20 years working and schooling his children, a number that remains a mystery because “where I come from, we don’t count children.” What he does count, apparently, is what they have become. 

The first studied clinical medicine. The second actuarial science. Another accounting. Some are now finding their way into college and high school. 

He spent seven years trying to get back into a classroom. His children, apparently, have found no reason to leave one.