Where Imenti House stands today, bounded by Kenyatta and Moi Avenues, and Tom Mboya and Cabral Streets, once stood the courthouses of the Protectorate. It is outside that building, on a cold March 15th morning in 1907 that the following events take place.
The first men and women who landed in Nairobi considered the brackish swamp land perfect. The area was picturesque, with hills in the horizon and rivers crisscrossing the plains. The land was not suitable for farming, and certainly not for settlement, but it was perfect for grazing.
In late 1911, a 20-year old woman joined the Consolata Missionaries in Turin, Italy. She took her final vows two years later and boarded a ship for Mombasa, Kenya, in 1914.
Number 26, Teddy Roosevelt, holds two crowns. He was the youngest person to assume the US presidency, and the most badass of them all. He did many things to earn that second title, but none of them featured a drunken spree in Nairobi that nearly caused a diplomatic mess in 1909.
In the trivia section of the IMDb profile of the film Sanders of the River (1935) lies this nugget “Jomo Kenyatta, who was President of Kenya from 1963 to 1978, had a bit part in this movie as a tribal chief.” It was a 6-minute role he never talked about, and with good reason.