Despite his jovial and appreciative nature, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta valued his health and always wanted it to remain a private affair, something that is to date practiced by his family.
For instance, in 2016, the family of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta buried Margaret Kenyatta, his eldest daughter, in a private ceremony that only saw few invited people attending.
In his autobiography Walking in Kenyatta Struggles, My story, former Secretary to the Cabinet and later Central Bank of Kenya Governor Duncan Ndegwa, he potrays Mzee Kenyatta as a secretive man.
A delegation from Kitui had visited Mzee Kenyatta's Gatundu home and went on to wait outside for the whole day. At that time, Mzee Kenyatta was not feeling well.
When Ndegwa sort the permission of the former President to inform the delegation that he would not see them since he was unwell, Kenyatta angrily reprimanded Mr Ndegwa.
“Are you mad? Has something gone wrong with your head?” he quotes Kenyatta as admonishing him.
Kenyatta would not hear of wearing glasses even as his sight deteriorated, preferring his speeches to be typed in bigger fonts. He grudgingly wore glasses when the large-fonts-trick couldn’t work.
According to Ndegwa, Kenyatta’s heart was failing but he was not the one to entertain things like pacesetters.
So when the renowned South African heart transplant pioneer, Christiaan Barnard, visited Kenya at the invitation of the suave Attorney-General Charles Njonjo, a pacesetter on Kenyatta was out of the question.
Barnard’s visit would kick up a stink because Kenya was not supposed to have any ties with Apartheid South Africa but that is a story for another day.
The failing heart, Ndegwa writes, “was perhaps the cause of the blackouts that Kenyatta suffered from time to time, on occasion for long periods.”
On one such occasion, we have it on Ndegwa’s authority, Kenyatta “suffered a blackout at his Mombasa Tiririka residence and remained in a coma for three days.
"They were three days of uncertainty and when he came out of it… I asked him what had happened, he replied that he had visited “Weru wa Mukaaga meaning an expansive plain where he was all alone.”
Jomo, born Johnstone Kamau wa Ngengi, died in 1978 in State House Mombasa. The country held his 41st commemoration on Thursday. President Uhuru Kenyatta led the family and friends during the event.