Nipate
Forum => Kenya Discussion => Topic started by: KenyanPlato on June 15, 2022, 11:17:52 AM
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He was named Jonathan as a way of Moi honoring my Grandfather's ministering of moi when he was young. My fraternal Grandfather served as a AIC priest in Baringo. He baptized young Moi never forgot my Grandfather and when Jonathan was born he named him after my grandfather. Moi later was to contribute millions to build a church Lari where my grandfather lived and was ministering until he retired. Even before moi died several years ago he was sending Gideon to come and help expand that church. It was 25 years after my grandfather died but moi never forgot my grandfather impact on his life. My grandfather stayed for alomgitme in Baringo. He had run there after disagreement with his father and mother. He gone missing for a while
I am trying to piece family history and this what I found from my Aunt and it was collaborated by my dad and other relatives
One thing about dictator moi is that he was loyal to those that helped him along the way.
My grandfather made moi know that as he served kenyans he didn't want any favors as he had made his own money legitimately
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Interesting.
How did AIC just got restricted to Kijabe?
I thought Moi was baptized by Barnet - Australian whom kabarnet is named after.
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Look like Paul Barnett started in Kijabe - and must have taken your grandfather to Baringo with him. Kabarnett town is named after him - Kwa-Barnett.
https://www.oldbaringo.org/category/the-great-people-of-baringo/
It was while Paul Barnett was at Kijabe, learning Swahili, that he first came acquainted with Dorothy. The Lord drew Paul and Dorothy together and on September 22, 1941, they were married at Kijabe. They immediately moved to Eldama Ravine where Paul was already assigned to do church planting and evangelism. Soon Helen Carl and Pat were added to the family. Dorothy started a good Sunday school program and taught in the local primary school. She also reached out to women through Bible study and sewing classes and took care of the district church and church accounts.
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Or he this old Mzee Gathenya
https://www.oldbaringo.org/mzee-gathenya-everyones-friend/
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Look like Paul Barnett started in Kijabe - and must have taken your grandfather to Baringo with him. Kabarnett town is named after him - Kwa-Barnett.
https://www.oldbaringo.org/category/the-great-people-of-baringo/
It was while Paul Barnett was at Kijabe, learning Swahili, that he first came acquainted with Dorothy. The Lord drew Paul and Dorothy together and on September 22, 1941, they were married at Kijabe. They immediately moved to Eldama Ravine where Paul was already assigned to do church planting and evangelism. Soon Helen Carl and Pat were added to the family. Dorothy started a good Sunday school program and taught in the local primary school. She also reached out to women through Bible study and sewing classes and took care of the district church and church accounts.
May be Barnett had employed my grandfather. My grandfather history is murky. My great Grandfather had settled in Thindigua and his land was taken by white colonial govt and sold to a coffee farmer. He disbursed from there to Ribai. He had several wives. My grandfather left Ribai in kiambu and went to work in muranga as a priest but he may have been trained as a theologian in kijabe and posted in Baringo. I know he served in Githumu in muranga around 1950.
My great grandfather was born Gatara muranga the migrating to Thindigua. So our origin is in muranga. My grandfather sister family is still living in muranga.
In short
My grandfather may have worked for Paul as a servant and then got trained as a priest in kijabe. He may have been posted to baringo. Later he was posted to muranga in Githumu. I think he served in muranga around 1945 and 1950s since my dad stayed with him and did his intermediated school in Githumu. Later he moved back to kijabe and lived there till his death in 1986
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Or he this old Mzee Gathenya
https://www.oldbaringo.org/mzee-gathenya-everyones-friend/
Not this one. My grandfather must have been born in 1896 or there about
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I am sure if you search the Barnett you will find they wrote something. Barnet son was Moi's bestman in his wedding with Lena Moi. The chesire family - kittonys - were first AIC christian in Baringo - and hosted Moi. They would also know.
May be Barnett had employed my grandfather. My grandfather history is murky. My great Grandfather had settled in Thindigua and his land was taken by white colonial govt and sold to a coffee farmer. He disbursed from there to Ribai. He had several wives. My grandfather left Ribai in kiambu and went to work in muranga as a priest but he may have been trained as a theologian in kijabe and posted in Baringo. I know he served in Githumu in muranga around 1950.
My great grandfather was born Gatara muranga the migrating to Thindigua. So our origin is in muranga. My grandfather sister family is still living in muranga.
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Seem there many different Barnetts.
Moi married her in a church wedding officiated by Erik Barnett, the son of Albert Barnett (after whom Kabarnet Town is named)
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Okay fixed, Erik’s younger brother, Paul,had baptized lena.
You should buy Moi biography
Long post
The Untold Story of Mama Lena Moi
In the 1960s and early '70s, Lena Tungo Moi strode Kenya’s political scene with her visibility as the vice-president’s wife. Then in the middle of the 1970s, she faded away from the public arena never to be heard of again until her death in 2004.
The collapse of her marriage in 1974 and divorce in 1979 was a bitter blow to the ardent Christian who had been raised under strict African Inland Church (AIC) doctrines.
Lena’s parents, the Paul Bomett family, were pioneer Christians in Eldama Ravine. They respected Moi, the young, tall, handsome and well-mannered orphan boy.That is how Moi found himself in the Bometts’ home, where he silently admired Helena, the beautiful girl with a round face. It was at the Bometts’ that Moi sought shelter during school holidays, unable to return home, 160 kilometres away, like the older boys.He would also stay at the home of the Christian family of Isaiah Chesire, the father of Kanu’s nominated MP, Zipporah Kittony,and former Eldoret North MP, Reuben Chesire. Moi’s father, Kimoi arap Chebii, had died in 1928. Moi was only four then and little is known about his mother, Kabon.
ELDER BROTHER BECAME GUARDIAN
What is known is that his elder brother, Tuitoek, became his guardian and that he was one of the herdsboys from Sacho location recommended to join the new Africa Inland Mission (AIM) School at Kabartonjo in 1934 before it was shifted to Kapsabet.
Lena, born in 1926, was also a student at the AIM School in Eldama Ravine before she joined Tenwek Girls’ Boarding School in Kericho. A devout Christian, she, together with her brother William Bomett and sister Dina, became the face of educated converts.
After exposure in the US with some Christian families, Lena had returned to become a primary school teacher and would visit local churches accompanied by Moi. They would each carry a Bible. “She was an iron lady but with a great sense of humour,” recalled Paul Chemirchir in Moi’s biography, The Making of An African Statesman, by Andrew Morton. It was during this period that Lena started dating Moi, whose promotion to principal at Tambach (he was recommended by education officer Moses Mudavadi, the father of one of Moi’s vice-presidents, Musalia Mudavadi) shoved him into stardom in the region, first as a teacher, then as a preacher.
A year after Moi returned from training at Kagumo Teachers College, he married Lena in a ceremony conducted by the Reverend Erik Barnett. The choice of Erik Barnett was apt. Whereas the Barnett family was instrumental in Moi’s education, Erik’s younger brother, Paul, had baptised Lena — his first duty after returning to Kenya as a missionary.
He also built Moi’s first house. Again, while Moi was in Tambach, and as Paul was going through the region opening churches and schools, he would sleep at Moi’s house.The relationship was much deeper than that. Erik’s father, Albert Barnett, had left Australia in 1907, believing that God had called him as a missionary to Kenya. Then a bachelor, Barnett had boarded a steamship to Mombasa and traveled towards Lake Baringo, where he lived among the Tugen in what is today Kabarnet before settling at Eldama Ravine. Kabarnet town is named after him. It means “the place of Barnett”.
INTENSE DEVOTION TO CHRISTIANITY
This started influencing a generation of African Christians whose intense devotion to the faith was impeccable. With his wife Elma, they built a mission station at Eldama Ravine where a large number of missionary families started converting locals into the faith.
At times when Moi was not staying with the Bomett family, he would stay with the Barnetts. It is here that the story of Kapkorios Toroitich arap Moi and Helena Bomett, later Lena Moi, started. Moi had taken off to the mission hoping to get an education at the Barnetts-run African Inland Mission.
They would wake up at 6am, work in the vegetable gardens and haul gallons of water from the river to the station. In the afternoon, they would sit with Barnett’s Swedish wife, Elma, to learn numbers.The Bometts made Moi the Sunday school teacher at an early age as they encouraged him to take a leadership role in the church. By 1942, he was the school captain of the government school, with Paul and Erik Barnett as his peers — the two missionary sons of Albert Barnett.It is this close relationship that saw Erik officiate the wedding of Moi to Lena in 1950 at the AIC mission in Eldama Ravine after he paid two heifers, one ox, and four sheep to the Bomett family. Moi’s long-time friend, Francis Cherogony, was the best man.
With the marriage, Lena abandoned her career as a teacher and immersed herself into bringing up her family, settling down with Moi at Tambach Government School, where his first two children, Jennifer and Jonathan Kipkemboi, were born in 1952 and 1953, respectively.
Although most of those who knew Moi in the 1950s thought he would make an excellent preacher, Moi liked teaching more than anything else. Things took a new twist for Lena in 1955, when her husband was appointed to the Legco to replace the inefficient John ole Tameno. Moi bought a Land Rover and opened a posho mill in south Baringo, then started spending his early years of marriage crisscrossing the Rift Valley as the region’s senior-most politician at the height of the emergency.
QUIET TEACHING LIFE
The quiet teaching life that the couple had anticipated was gone as Moi moved out of the school compound with his family for Nairobi. “He now dressed in suits and ties rather than the shorts and long socks that had been his trademark as a teacher. He and his family were better fed, eating a richer diet than they ever had before,” wrote Moi’s biographer.
But Moi’s political relationship with his in-laws was not always at its best. The fallout with the Bometts appeared to have started in the 1961 election when his brother-in-law, Eric Bomett, stood against him as an independent candidate in the General Election. It was not personal. It was a matter of principle,” Eric would later say. Although Eric would enter Parliament as a Specially Elected Member on a Kanu ticket, it was Moi’s Kadu that carried the day, eclipsing Kanu in the region.
As Moi was on the move in the pre-independence politics, Lena became a housewife. In an interview in 1967, she said it was necessary that the children were cared for by their own mothers if they were to grow up mentally and physically healthy.
“She is equally assiduous about looking after her husband, who enjoys her cooking and only eats outside the home when he has to,” veteran journalist Faraj Dumila, who conducted the interview, wrote. Moi would also remark: “I owe her much of my success in the service of my people and my country. She has always been an encouraging factor in all aspects of my political life.”
But Moi chose not to say much about Lena to his official biographer, Andrew Morton, leading the writer to conclude: “The character of the man is elusive… a biographer’s nightmare; happy to let you near, but not so close. He has mastered the art of selective deafness…” Thus, Moi reveals nothing about his ex-wife. What we know is that in most of his public functions, especially after independence, Lena was always in tow, spotting a headscarf or with her Afro hair pulled back.
ROMANTIC WALK
There was also the romantic walk in July 1970 on the Orapa pipe in Botswana, where the world’s richest diamond mines had been discovered. With most of her children in their teens, with the last-born, Gideon, having been born in 1964, Lena had ploughed herself into public meetings, conducting harambees and supporting women’s groups in the Rift Valley.
But it was Moi’s appointment as vice-president in 1967 that brought her to national limelight, and she was to enjoy six years of fame. Lena was everywhere. She shifted to Nakuru’s Delamere (now Moi) Flats in Milimani area and enrolled her children at St Joseph’s Primary School. She was loved by her neighbours due to her humility.
At the height of her popularity, President Jomo Kenyatta bestowed on her on January 1, 1968, the Order of the Golden Heart medal for her service to the community. That week, when the wife of the US vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, arrived in Nairobi as part of her husband’s “listen-and-learn” Africa tour, Lena led the government delegation that received Mrs Humphrey at the Embakasi Airport, although she held no government position. Moi would arrive at the airport later to receive Mr Humprey together with then US ambassador to Kenya, Glenn Ferguson.
With Kenyatta suffering a heart-attack in 1969, Moi (and to an extent Lena) were left to fill in for official engagements. In the mix, Moi abandoned Lena for politics, which was fast-moving and dangerously so after Tom Mboya’s assassination in 1969. It was in this year that he bought the Kabimoi Farm and built a house where Lena settled. Moi was also a frightened man. “He would travel anywhere, do anything, see anybody, if that was Kenyatta’s wish,” wrote Morton.
These schedules, some of them deliberately crafted by Kenyatta allies to tire him, broke his family. He was also portrayed by his Kalenjin rivals, the likes of Jean Marie Seroney, as a sell-out to the Kikuyu. In 1974, Moi’s place in Kenya’s politics came under severe threat from the mandarins surrounding Kenyatta. As he was fighting for survival and getting harassed in the Rift Valley by provincial commissioner Isaiah Mathenge and roads engineer Kim Gatende on behalf of the Kiambu mafia, his marriage to Lena took a nose-dive.
Lena started disappearing slowly from the public arena and little is known on what else caused the cracks. Moi’s biographer blames politics, and there is little about Moi’s days with Lena. It leaves the reader unable to have a glimpse of the woman who bore him eight children. Instead, Moi let family friends speak of Lena.
PUBLICLY REFUSED TO DANCE WITH KENYATTA
Although they told Andrew Morton that the final breakup came after Lena publicly refused to dance with Kenyatta during a dinner dance at the Rift Valley Technical College, there are archival pictures to show that indeed, Kenyatta danced with Lena and Moi danced with Mama Ngina during that event. In his book, Morton hints that Lena, in fact, insulted Kenyatta when he asked her for the dance. “As an uncompromising Christian (Lena) believed that dancing was sinful, but the insult to the President gravely embarrassed Moi”.
Rev Paul Barnett, who had known both Moi and Lena, was perhaps privy to the couple’s problems. He was the only one who agreed to be quoted talking of Lena and the breakup, but only saying: “It was for the best that they parted.” Lena left the vice-president’s official residence at Nairobi’s Kabarnet Gardens and retreated to the couple’s Kabimoi ranch farm in Baringo. The school-going children were sent to boarding schools. From here, she immersed herself into rural life, attending the local church, joining women’s groups, and keeping out of the glare of the media that she had become used to.
With Moi settling elsewhere with their children, Lena’s hope, according to Morton, was that Moi would return one day to the matrimonial home once he was done with politics. He wrote: “Even today she keeps a room of the house as a shrine to her former husband, believing that when he sets aside the cares of high office, he will return…”
It is now known that apart from Jonathan, who lived in Kabimoi with his mother, the others — Jennifer, Raymond, John Mark, Doris Elizabeth and her twin Philip, Gideon, and adopted daughter June, opted to stay with their father in Nairobi.
LITTLE JOY FROM HIS FAMILY
Despite this, according to his biographer, “Moi had little joy from his family… Those who know the family well observe that with the possible exception of Gideon and June, the President felt disappointed and rather let down by his children.”
Bringing up the children, with their mother absent, took a toll on everyone in the family. Moi was also fighting to survive politically as the change-the-constitution campaign was started to block him from ascending to the presidency.
Four years after the separation, Kenyatta died and Moi, thanks to Charles Njonjo and Mwai Kibaki, managed to outwit his political foes to get the job. By this time, Lena had completely vanished from the limelight. While some people thought this helped Moi to focus on his politics, there was an apparent silence on her whereabouts.
Moi was frustrated that apart from Gideon and June, his other children did not appear in public when he was president to give him moral support. In 1979, the divorce was finalised and Lena “was accommodated in Moi’s family”. Interestingly, she was never seen at the weddings of her own children. In 1997 when her father died, Lena was kept in the background during the burial.
After the breakup, Moi and Lena saw less and less of their children. “This combination of absence and sternness produced the inevitable backlash, and as adolescents, the boys rebelled against their father’s austere moral code,” wrote Morton, who says some had to be disciplined by the presidential guards.
That Lena missed the church weddings of her children indicated the divide between her and Moi. That could explain why in August 1982, when rebel soldiers from the Airforce announced that they had deposed the president, an attempt by Moi’s bodyguards to evacuate her from Kabimoi to a secure place was met with a solid “No”. Moi had ordered several lorry loads of troops to her farm to evacuate her, but she told the soldiers that she had a telephone that reached from Kabimoi to heaven.
“The men went inside and removed their caps while she knelt in supplication. As she prayed for the country, for deliverance from the enemy, and for her husband’s protection, a soldier sitting outside… yelled the news that the enemy had been defeated.” Lena was not about to abandon Kabimoi and this time, Moi had settled at Kabarak near Nakuru town.
The death of Lena in July 2004 caused confusion. At first it was announced that she would be buried in Sacho. But this was shifted to Kabarak, where she was laid to rest on the trimmed lawns in front of the imposing bungalow where Moi lives. In death, Lena was reunited with her husband. Kenya’s would-be second First Lady had largely gone unnoticed.
via The Daily Nation
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So either you grandfather went with Albert Barnett as young land in 1907 or later in 1940s (unlikely with sons)
So I would say focus on Albert Barnett...
He also built Moi’s first house. Again, while Moi was in Tambach, and as Paul was going through the region opening churches and schools, he would sleep at Moi’s house.The relationship was much deeper than that. Erik’s father, Albert Barnett, had left Australia in 1907, believing that God had called him as a missionary to Kenya. Then a bachelor, Barnett had boarded a steamship to Mombasa and traveled towards Lake Baringo, where he lived among the Tugen in what is today Kabarnet before settling at Eldama Ravine. Kabarnet town is named after him. It means “the place of Barnett”.
INTENSE DEVOTION TO CHRISTIANITY
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Seem there many different Barnetts.
Moi married her in a church wedding officiated by Erik Barnett, the son of Albert Barnett (after whom Kabarnet Town is named)
I will search. I may write a book to unravel my family history. I am going to Seattle to interview my aunt this summer
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So either you grandfather went with Albert Barnett as young land in 1907 or later in 1940s (unlikely with sons)
So I would say focus on Albert Barnett...
He also built Moi’s first house. Again, while Moi was in Tambach, and as Paul was going through the region opening churches and schools, he would sleep at Moi’s house.The relationship was much deeper than that. Erik’s father, Albert Barnett, had left Australia in 1907, believing that God had called him as a missionary to Kenya. Then a bachelor, Barnett had boarded a steamship to Mombasa and traveled towards Lake Baringo, where he lived among the Tugen in what is today Kabarnet before settling at Eldama Ravine. Kabarnet town is named after him. It means “the place of Barnett”.
INTENSE DEVOTION TO CHRISTIANITY
Thank you my man. This makes sense now
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Here you go - REV PAPA :)
https://www.europeansineastafrica.co.uk/_site/custom/database/?a=viewIndividual&pid=2&person=7632
Name: BARNETT, Albert Edward Austin 'Papa' (Rev.)
image of individualimage of individual
Birth Date: 30.1.1876 Wellington, NSW, Australia
Death Date: 24.12.1971 Wheaton, Illinois
Nationality: Australian
First Date: 1907
Profession: Africa Inland Mission missionaries at Rumuruti when Stauffachers went on leave in 1909
Area: Rumuruti, Eldama Ravine
Married: In Kijabe 22.11.1908 Elizabeth 'Elma' Nicher 'Mama' Andersson (Swedish) b. 6 Dec 1881 Stockholm, d. Nairobi 8 Feb 1957, buried at Kijabe
Children: Kurt Albert (Rumuruti 29.7.1909-1911); Arthur Malcolm (twin with Erik (Rumuruti 3.12.1910-2014); Erik Stanley (d. 2006, wife Emily); Paul Austin (1 Aug 1913 Kijabe-2004, wife Dorothy); Ruth Dorothy (30 Mar 1915 Kilombe-26 Jan 1999 Leesburg, Florida) (married Thomas W.G. Collins); William
Book Reference: Tignor, KAD, Red 25, Hut, Red 31, Red 22, Grasshoppers, Barnes, Dow, Old Africa, Red Book 1912, Gazette, Red 19
General Information:
Barnes - Kijabe Cemetery - Mama Barnett 1881 - 1957 with the Lord loved by all
Dow - In 1907 an Australian bachelor named Albert Barnett, believing God had called him as a missionary to Africa, boarded a New York-based steamship headed for Kenya. When the vessel stopped at Genoa, Italy a young Swedish woman (also going to Kenya as a missionary with AIM) boarded the boat. It was love at first sight and, after getting married, the young missionary couple began to raise a family while they worked among the Tugen clan near Lake Baringo in the western part of Kenya. Because of hostile opposition from colonial officials, the Barnett family relocated from Kabarnet to a former Maasai region called Eldama Ravine. ……… [more]
Red Book 1912 - A.E. Barnett - Kisumu
Red Book 1912 - Africa Inland Mission - Superintendent at Rumuruti with Mrs Barnett
Gazette - 12/11/1919 - Register of Voters - Rift Valley Area - Rev A.E. Barnett - Missionary - Eldama Ravine
Red Book 1919 - A E Barnett - Nakuru
KAD has Rev. A.E. Barnett, A.I. Mission, Eldama Ravine
Kenneth Richardson, Garden of Miracles , A History of the Africa Inland Mission, 1968: Albert Edward Barnett was an Australian who had;gone to America to study flour-milling. There he heard the call to whole-time service for the Lord. After training at Moody Bible Institute, he went to Africa in a party of twenty-three led by the Lee Downings returning from their first furlough. They arrived at Mombasa on 3rd Decembey 1907, and eventually reached Kijabe by train about nine o'clock the following night. Bwana Hurlburt and others were on the platform to welcome them.
On arrival at the Mission they were shown into a house built of bamboo poles and mud, divided into several rooms. They welcomed it. The train journey had been hard and tiring, and soon they were fast asleep in comfortable beds. But it did not last long. Thousands of blackpinching ants invaded the house and they had to rise to disperse the aggressors with hot ashes. They succeeded after a long struggle and were able to settle down in their beds again. What an introduction to life in the wilds!
After spending a few weeks at Kijabe, Mr. Barnett joined Mr. Hurlburt and several others to prospect for new stations. They found suitable places among two tribes, one at Kilombe, the other at Kapropita, A. E. Barnett was left to open work at the former site among a branch ol the Masai people. A little later he married Miss Nicher, a nurse and masseuse from Sweden who had also trained in America. Together they entered enthusiastically into the work. But they were not at Kilombe for long. When the Stauffachers were ieaving for furlough, the Barnetts were asked to go to Rumuruti. Mrs. Barnett was no stranger to the station and its people. She had lived there before her marriage.
When the Stauffachers returned after furlough they were given other work. Papa and Mama Barnett (as they were called by all) remained at Rumuruti for four years until they, in their turn, went on their flrst furlough. On their return in 1013 they went to their former station of Kilombe which had been without missionaries since they had left it. The house which Papa Barnett had built was still standing and habitable. But their growing family meant that more accommodation was needed; so he set to work to erect a larger dwelling. Miss Siater who had been a fellow-worker at Rumuruti was aiso stationed at Kilombe..
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https://m.facebook.com/A.I.Csection58/photos/a.682132771847845/4963706867023726/?type=3