BY OLIVIA MUNGWANA

Friends, family and colleagues are painting different portraits of Stephen Mumbo,  the Price Waterhouse Coopers Forensic manager who fell from 17th floor of Delta offices which house the international audit firm.

Mr Mumbo was born in 1977 ,was the last born of two girls and three boys in Kisumu Nyamasaria, a hot, dry and humid area where black cotton soil sucks life from a crop.

Only determined weeds survive.  In the absence of his father, Arthur Waore Mumbo, an administrator at Kemri Busia who died in 1992, it was his mother, Mrs Waore, a teacher at Nyamasaria Primary School, who had the most influence in his life.

But after his father’s death, Mumbo was brought up in Alupe, Busia, by his uncle Mzee Obura, a doctor at Kemri in Alupe.

Fred Obura, a cousin, recalls that the father died when Mumbo was joining form one and his family took him.

But “when his mother died five years ago,” recalls Fred “he snapped in the office and couldn’t work. He took a one-year unpaid sabbatical to mourn his mother.”

Indeed, that Friday morning when he committed suicide, it was the huge photo of his mother in his bedroom that he last saw when he slept, and the first he saw when he woke up.

Fred attended St Paul’s Amukura with Mumbo who was ahead of him but he recalls that Mumbo was the class prefect in form one and two and by form three and four, he was the library prefect.

“Mumbo was deeply religious and never missed church,” says Fred. Other schoolmates, too, had their own recollections.

St Paul’s Amukura was an academic giant in Busia County where it was founded by Catholic priest Father Louis Okidoi in 1962. Mumbo was the shy brain box with an awkward gait.

In the school’s achievement board, mounted proudly in the administration block, Mumbo narrowly missed being immortalised by one point. It was A- in one subject, Kiswahili, that did him in.

Charles Ekirang, his classmate, says Mumbo was expected to succeed in life since “in an age where we chased girls we nicknamed Marios, from St Mary’s Amukura, Mumbo was chasing after whoever had the key to the library.”

Caleb Etyang, a year ahead of Mumbo, says the studious boy “wasn’t a guy to go for sports or drama outings, he was much more at home in the school and the library.”

He recounts a new, beautiful teacher who drove the boys crazy when she reported, but Mumbo was unmoved with her curves.

A mzungu woman who turned herself black after being fed up with being white has adopted a Kenyan name after being baptized in Nyeri.

Last year, 29-year-old Martina Big, a former blonde and blue-eyed air hostess from Germany, began the journey of transforming herself into an African (black). This came after she spent 6 million shillings to have breast implants that earned her the tag “the woman with biggest boobies in Europe”. They weigh 12 kilogrammes.

In an interview in the past, Big said that she admired the dark skin of Africans and had decided to turn herself black. Last year, she underwent a life-threatening melanin injection, a procedure outlawed in countries, and completely changed her skin color.

She further made a 50-tubed sun bed in her house, to accelerate her blackness and now believes her kids will be born black. She further visited a salon that caters for African hair and got a kinky weave, in her journey to become an African.

“I compared my hair with that of other Africans in the salon. Theirs is identical to mine,” she posted on her Instagram page after the weave was sewn in.

Last month, she began her maiden trip to Africa starting with in Kenya, where has adopted an African name after being baptized in Nyeri.

In a video she posted online, a man believed to be a pastor baptized her. He is heard saying, “Malaika Mkubwa, you are now a new creature in Jesus’ name”.

Martina donned a white African regalia, kneeling next to the pastor who the Standard learnt was pastor Isaac Murage of Gichira Baptist Church. Murage said he was introduced to Martina by a member of his church.

“She told me the lady wanted to be baptised, and I told them to come,” he said.

Murage denied claims that he chose the name “Malaika Mkubwa” for her. “She came with the name written down,” he says, adding that his church does not give baptismal names to its members.

Martina updated her website to reflect her newly acquired name. However, Race Equality Foundation, a European organisation that champions for racial equality criticised her attempt to be black.

“She has “limited understanding” of challenges ethnic minority groups face. Her story distracts from problems black people face,” said the group.

She has revealed plans to widen her nose and also enhance her bottoms to give it the African look.

–Mwakilishi.com