Obadiah Adonija Ajuma Oginga Odinga was a notorious young man back in his schooling days, a characteristic that always landed him in trouble with his Maseno School Principal Carey Francis.
Having graduated from Maranda Primary School in 1928 and admitted into the new institution in early 1929, the student who would later become the second most powerful man in the nation began his mischief.
He hated his new school that he vanished when he was sent home to fetch the school fees and would spend an entire year away before he was found and returned to the school by his primary school head teacher Shadrack Osewe.
The fee was sixty shillings. When Jaramogi declared his inability to raise the fee, Carey came in to help, securing twenty shillings from his own mother and advised the going man's friends to raise the remainder.
He also organized for the leader who would later grow super rich in the course of his political career, to be employed as a school servant in exchange for six shillings a month, with the money divided between catering for fee and books.
Though records indicate that he was around 10 years then, Jaramogi, in his book 'Not Yet Uhuru', insists that he was around 16 at the time, and would avoid both home and school before his return.
He claims that the bad school food was one of the reasons that made him opt to escape, but avoided his home which was about 35 kilometres away throughout his time in exile.
He later completed his course in 1934, joined Makerere University, came back to Maseno as a teacher, before joining the political field.
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