The nation is yet to and is very unlikely to forget the infamous Kisumu massacre of 1969, which left several dead, others injured and more arrested in the lakeside city.
This was after supporters of founding Vice President Jaramogi Oginga and his Kenya People's Union (KPU) booed President Jomo Kenyatta, resulting in a clash with the police.
Kenyatta has visited the city to open the Russian Hospital, built through Oginga's links with the communist republic, later to be renamed Nyanza General Hospital.
And though the clash was seen as a making of Oginga's angry supporters, Kenyatta's then lawyer Fitz Desouza says that Kenyatta might have been there to provoke them.
This came 3 years after Kenyatta-Oginga fallout, which was succeeded by enmity between them, and months after the assassination of Tom Mboya, which Luos also blamed on Kenyatta.
Fitz says that Kenyatta, with whom he was very close, might have been looking for a way of showing the region that he is in power and wanted to signal his authority in Kisumu.
"On October 25, 1969, just months after Tom’s death, Kenyatta arrived in Kisumu to officially open the new Russian Hospital, a project that Odinga had set up. It was believed he wanted to signal his authority in this Luo-dominated area," he says in his book "Forward to Freedom".
The aftermath of the same incident, which also included verbal exchanges between Kenyatta and Oginga, was the banning of the KPU, making Kenya a single party state.
Fitz also served as the deputy speaker and s member of Parliament.
Kenyatta never visited Kisumu again until his death in 1978.