When all one needed to be a teacher was passion

Kiserian Primary School teachers around 1970 [File]

Some 66 years ago, teacher training colleges literally went hunting for trainees in remote areas.

On this particular day in May 1955, an enterprising Maasai moran, Shompole ole Leroka was grazing his cows along the Nairobi-Magadi Road when Father James Barrett, who was the headmaster of St Mary’s School in Muthangari, happened to drive past. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that the herdsman could speak English.

The missionary learnt that Shompole had achieved this by teaching himself to read and write under a tree and later studied by correspondence. The encounter marked a new beginning for Barrett who also needed a guide to take him around local primary schools, and he decided to convince the herdsman to undergo training as a teacher.

Convincing him to abandon the rural life and his wealth to train for two years required divine intervention, and as Father Barrett prayed to his God, Shompole’s relatives wept uncontrollably despite assurances from their medicine man, Mbainei ole Kileiya, that all would be well.

Thirty-six hours after the roadside encounter, Shompole was driven to St Mary’s Training Centre in Machakos by Barrett, who also doubled up as an officer in the education department of the Catholic archdiocese of Nairobi.

The journey to becoming a fully fledged teacher, however, was torturous and at one time Shompole punched his way through college and almost dropped out. His temper got the better of him that December when he learnt that he and a number of colleagues would not be given bus fare to go home because their counties had not remitted money to the college.

“As a prefect and leader of the Maasai I was supposed to go to the principal of the college and collect the fare. I learnt that my name had been omitted. When I entered the office, Father Tiernem ordered me out and threatened to punch me.”

What happened next, as Shompole describes in his memoir, Dare to Defy, was the stuff of legend as he hurled the principal, a white man, to the ground and later kicked him out before installing himself as the new boss.

He gathered some of the money now scattered on the floor and later distributed it to his classmates as fare before heading home the following day. When the college reopened in January 1956, Shompole made peace with his principal and was even elevated to be deputy head prefect.

He would go on to leave a mark as one of the founders of the Kenya National Union of Teachers.