MashaTravel

Meru County is located along the eastern side of the Mt Kenya ring road.  Meru County borders Isiolo County to the North and North East, Tharaka County to the South West, Nyeri County to the South  West and Laikipia County to the West.

Meru County is the home of the Imenti, Tigania and Igembe sub-tribes of the Ameru (Meru) tribe, which is related to other tribes living around the Mount Kenya region: the Kikuyu and the Embu people.  The people of Meru County are now predominantly Christian: Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and other denominations, reflecting the work of missionaries. Meru County is also home to minorities of Indian descent, who are mainly Hindus, and African/Arab descent, who are Muslims. Meru County is also home to some Europeans, predominantly British in ancestry.

The proposed county headquarters is in Meru. The County has seven constituencies: South Imenti, Central Imenti, North Imenti, Igembe South Constituency, Igembe North Constituency, Tigania East Constituency, Tigania West Constituency and the proposed Buuri Constituency.

meru county official website:  meru.go.ke

It took 42 years and Sh20 million for Kenya to finally honour one of its greatest fallen heroes in cast bronze. “TJ” was assassinated on 5 July, 1969 as he stepped out of Channa’s Chemist, a few metres from where his statue stands.

The three-year effort of self-taught sculptor Oshoto Ondula shows Mboya in flowing Ghanaian kente robes, a gift from President Kwame Nkrumah, which he wore during his campaigns for Nairobi Constituency (now Kamukunji) during the 1960 General Election.

His right hand is stretched out to symbolise a leader reaching to his people and not looking down at them.

The statue stands on what symbolises Rusinga Island, where he was buried.

The fountain and flamingoes under the statue represent the aeroplanes used by Kenyan students in the now famous Mboya-fronted Airlift Africa educational project that saw Kenyan students study on scholarships in American universities in the late 1950s and 1960s.

The Ministry of National Heritage commissioned the statue’s tendering. Ondula was short-listed out of 20 hopefuls as he got Mboya’s face correct. The family approved.

The statue of Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi on Kimathi Street in Nairobi.

Kimathi was captured and hanged by the colonial government at the height of Kenya’s freedom struggle. His grave at the Kamiti Prison has never been identified.

A sculpture is a three-dimensional object with a message. It could be a statue thriving in the context of a city like Nairobi, watching over people coursing through a life that is damn so daily.

Sculptures have a life of their own since within every block of wood, iron, or stone lies a spirit waiting to be carved.

Nairobi’s latest is the statue of nationalist Tom Mboya on Moi Avenue. It was unveiled by President Mwai Kibaki on the eve of Mashujaa Day this October as a tribute to Mboya’s “remarkable contributions” to this country, and to “honour the departed hero and remind the nation of whom he was” and “what he stood for”.

Tom Mboya’s is the second statue to be gazetted as a national treasure, after that of freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi in 2007.

That was the year the government created a task force to carry out countrywide data collection to establish criteria for identifying, recognising, and honouring national heroes and heroines.

Mr Gideon Siundu, a lecturer at Masinde Muliro University, wrote in a local newspaper then that such monuments “act as public sites of memory, complementing in useful ways the narrative of resistance, visionary leadership, and embodiments of national aspirations.”

Statues and monuments commemorate the historical in eternal present, beside adding to a city’s aesthetic beauty.

Indeed, towering statues and monuments contribute to a country’s history, much like its antiquated and contemporary architecture, the rhyme and reason of its national anthem.

The world over, streets, highways, public places, and spaces are punctuated by brooding statues of decorated literary giants, military heroes, freedom fighters, and political liberators to remember triumph and tragedies, hardships and hark work, heroes and heroines.