During his 15-year rule, Kenya's founding President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta suffered many health complications.
According to various reports, his failing health was due to many factors, among them, his advanced age.
In his book, Walking in Kenyatta’s Struggles: My Story, Duncan Ndegwa notes that the Head of State on various occasions slipped into a coma only to recover after several hours or days.
All these health scares, Ndegwa writes, were kept as a top secret by Kenyatta's aides led by powerful Kiambu politician Njoroge Mungai who served as his personal physician.
Mungai, a Stanford Medical School graduate, was also the Cabinet Minister in charge of Foreign Affairs.
In April 1968, the 'Father of the Nation' while at his Mombasa Tiririka residence suffered a heart attack which sent him into a three-day coma.
Ndegwa, who was then serving as the Head of Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet, writes that the three days were full of uncertainty as Kenyatta's allies engaged in a fierce jostling for power within government.
He referred to Mungai and his powerful colleagues from Kiambu; Mbiyu Koinange and Charles Njonjo- the Attorney General.
When Kenyatta woke up after three days, Ndegwa was among the first people who visited him and upon asking what had happened to him, he said in Kikuyu that he had visited 'Weru wa Mukaaga'(a wilderness of lacking), a statement that left Ndegwa confused.
"I asked him what had happened. He replied that he had visited what he called Weru wa Mukaaga, meaning an expansive plain where he was all alone. Kenyata recalled that one could not see the end of that serene plain, where he had been at complete peace and where the sun never set... Kenyatta toured Weru wa Mukaaga on other occasions, but the final one was on August 22, 1978, when he went, never to return," Ndegwa writes in his memoirs Walking in Kenyatta’s Struggles: My Story.
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