Old School: Kanunga School: Where Kenya’s ‘billboard baron’ schooled

A Catholic priest who went to Kanunga in Kiambu County in 1945, organised about 7,000 people to take part in a sports meeting to raise funds for the construction of a school.

Land has always been scarce in Central Kenya, but 1946 generous elders donated four acres. After all, the missionaries had donated food to locals when drought ravished the area in 1943.

Different religious denominations including the Protestants, adherents of independent churches and the ‘un-churched’ shed off their previous aloofness and became interested in construction of Kanunga High School along the Riara-Karuri Road. 

Kanunga was not short of students. The  Pope’s representative at the time, Bishop Mathews, who had admired Mang’u High School as an exceptional school, put pressure on parishes to establish elementary, primary and intermediate feeder schools.

Across Kiambu, schools begun to sprout and so did education harambees.

Notable alumni of Kanunga include former Limuru MP George Nyanja, also famous as the architect who designed Nyayo National Stadium, and Kiambu Town MP, Jude Njomo. Then there is also prominent businessman Stanley Kinyanjui, the ‘billboard baron’ with Magnate Ventures, as well as journalist, author and KBC MD, Waithaka Waihenya. 

John Obere, a senior lecturer of econometrics and statistics at KU, Dr Boniface Wambua of Research, Development and Planning (Redplan) Consultants and Dr Urbanus Mutuku Kioko, an economist and lecturer at the University of Nairobi, also attended this  academic giant in Kiambu.