The Winds of Laikipia

By Muruku Ngatia

In the Winds of Laikipia, Muruku Ngatia narrates the amazing story of how as a curious young man, he made an attempt at developing a theory of everything. The discoveries he made about human history, the self, and the nature of the universe, would make him question everything. The Winds of Laikipia introduces a new perspective of looking at these things and is based on the Laws of Events that are the foundations of his theory of everything.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Muruku Ngatia
• Release date: Jan 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005184520

Muruku Ngatia

Muruku Ngatia is a Math's and Economics graduate from Laikipia University. He is a freelance web developer and author.

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The Winds of Laikipia

Copyright 2020 Muruku Ngatia

Published by Muruku Ngatia at Smashwords

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1: There Is Life on Earth

Chapter 2: The Sick Man

Chapter 3: Thinker's Paradise

Chapter 4: further Education

Chapter 5: A History of Motivation

Chapter 6: The Publication

Chapter 7: The Motherload

Chapter 8: An Important Distinction is to be Made

Chapter 9: Things Are Not Even on All Sides

Chapter 10: A Man's Most Important Detail

Epilogue

About The Author

Acknowledgements

I would like to say thank you to the following people: Christine Wambui, Ojay, Simon Mwangi, Shyrose Wambui, Irene Muthami and Elizabeth Njeri Mwai. Thank you for your input in the development of this book. Your help and encouragement has been wonderful.

Prologue

If you read this book, you will be surprised at the many themes. The lessons are great and life changing! To give you an idea, the book begins by telling the story of a young man who dared dream big. And dream big he did.

At an early age he stated some scientific laws and even wrote a book about them. They would change everything including our outlook of physics, evolution, history, and society. While the book is not dedicated to these scientific facts, reading about their implications on our world will be worth every penny of your time.

The book also presents a human story that shares the journey to discovery in relatable ways. What happens when you start believing you can produce the next big theory of science? What does the next big thing even look like? And what does it do to a man?

Chapter 1: There Is Life on Earth

I was born on a Tuesday in 89, and life was already on earth. I cannot remember the exact time I knew this, but I always assume it was the day I stopped to think why Jimmy had cried after a beating from Mrs. Njũgũna, a no-nonsense class teacher who'd thrash boys in a touch your toes position. Certainly, he could not make up the crying just to be impressive now, would he? Later that day, a neighbor asked us to chase down a chicken he wanted to have for supper. After cornering it to a slight separation between two houses in our crowded neighborhood, I pounced on it, and holy cow, the chicken was alive!

There was not a thing I didn't doubt at the time, and my father didn't help with this. He was, after all, the only man known to us to have questioned the foundations of Christianity and 'treacherously' the existence of God. I grew up expecting grasshoppers to turn to angels, not because I had watched some fairytale movie but because my old man once held a grasshopper to my ear and asked that I repeat what it said. And that's hardly the end of it, as there was a particular bird that was fond of calling out his name just to keep him 'annoyed.' And what do you expect? There was this bird species that teased me everywhere I went by making the sound kuru kuru, which was, of course, borrowed from my name Mũruku and every so often, I'd throw a rock into a bush to ward it off.

Father had registered doubt on God and Christianity way back in the 70s, and mum could never quite stand it when he told us that God does not give us food and that it rains because we are on the windward side of Mt Kenya. Otherwise, it might as well rain in the desert. She, of course, had nothing to worry about as we never left her side on the issue. In any case, and long before I was even born, hadn't my father been institutionalized for a year? Anyways, that is a story for another time.

Sometimes before all of this, I would close my eyes and think I should know stuff like what the neighbor and his wife were quarreling about. Like the effort I put into memorizing sections of the road to school, such tasks were difficult, but I never thought them impossible. But now, if everything was separate and distinct, the scale of the many things happening simultaneously was dumfounding, and for that, my worldview was falling apart. As you should expect, it was a silly childish world, but with the definite characteristic that in it all things were knowable.

Okay, I wasn't that dumb. You can't possibly know everything, but you can hope to and hope is all we ever need. And so, at an early age, I knew the capital cities of most countries. My favorite city was Cairo, (the largest in Africa at the time), my river the Congo (the world's most powerful), and my favorite water body Lake Tanganyika (2nd deepest in the world). I could also tell you which town belonged to which nation, sometimes their official languages and even the presidents, but I never made anything of it. It is like the knowledge hadn't dissolved yet. And, of course, I didn't want to believe that there were that many stories as that would have been frustrating because, as earlier noted, I had a sizeable investment in the belief that there was no limit to what one could know.

For the eternity of a few childhood years, I didn't stop thinking about these things. I was even busy writing my first book when Bũũri, a great storyteller and an inventor whose simple inventions I had failed to copy successfully time and again told me about a guy called Einstein. He was a genius, he said, had changed the world and was the most original thinker of the 20th century.

Bũũri who also happens to be my brother was obsessed with Einstein. Whenever he got the chance, he would talk about a thing called physics. Another called the universe, and about a surprising theory titled relativity until as any ambitious kid would, I felt jealous and become convinced that there was no way this fellow called Einstein was better than Archimedes. Yes, I knew of Archimedes and for many years. He was my childhood hero.

It's entirely unexpected that a boy of 8 from Kenya would have known of Archimedes, let alone be inspired by him given that in those days, most households didn’t have electricity let alone a TV set. I had the good fortune of having CJ, a well-off gentleman, as a neighbor. He and his wife, Mama Mwangi — bless her too — gave us unlimited access to their television, films, and books. Up to my tenth birthday, I had been everyone — Aladdin with his magic carpet, Sinbad, Hercules, Jet Li, Bruce Lee, Conan, Tarzan, Mowgli, Kenshin, and pretty much everyone else.

But I'll never forget the day that the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) aired a small animated documentary of Archimedes. At that age, about a year and a half after I had started learning English, there was no hope that I could understand much. But CJ must have noted how interested I was with the Archimedes eureka moment. Otherwise, he wouldn't have objected to his daughter's urges to change the TV channel. He was perhaps even finding amusement from my reactions as Archimedes ran naked in the streets of Athens shouting eureka, and perhaps to my amazement when he presented evidence to the king showing that the gold in the crown had been watered down. Archimedes went on to build war machines, and to my surprise, perform the impossible by lifting a boat with one hand using a system of levers.

CJ patiently took me over the life of Archimedes and his many achievements. He also shared his knowledge of Greece, its philosophers, and mathematicians. Mom also told me about the Greeks, noting how knowledgeable they are, and everybody else said the same over the many years that the matter remained interesting. And thus, it was engraved in stone as of all those heroes fighting for my heart Archimedes had won outright.

The next day that is after discovering Archimedes, and for several more days, I built myself an airplane. Made of wood, of course, had the neighbors come to see it fly and made a lot of people happy. So you see, there was Archimedes, he was always there asking that I become an engineer and that I make the impossible now, who is Einstein again? Little did I know that Einstein rather than Archimedes would define the rest of my life. This, after all, is a story of how I dared do what Einstein could not. What's that, you ask? Well, Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life looking for a unified field theory that would answer most if not all questions about the universe. As an arrogant teenager, I thought, why not have a go at it too? This is that story, and it is not what you expect. Most arrogant teenagers don't even make a dent, but by my own estimation, I was breathing fire. Can I be trusted? Read on.

It was Bũũri who took me on half my journey to high school. There were no cars on the road that day because of a nationwide strike of PSV vehicles about a quite reasonable order to have cars fitted with seat belts and speed governors.

It was hell moving the 400 kilometers from our home district of Nyeri to Kitale, where we'd meet up with another of our brothers. This one called Mwangi, would now take me to the actual school some 200 kilometers further.

I recall noting that Bũũri was shy on the road, and I had expected that he'd be excited like I was. Maybe it was because he'd told me all these great stories about this school — the big snakes, the guns, the giants he'd schooled with, and the huge crocodiles he'd fought off in mighty River Turkwell and was perhaps afraid that I would soon figure out that they were not true. It would have comforted him to know that I was by then used to discerning all kinds of falsehoods.

Bũũri was at the time three years out of high school, and it was rumored that he would attend college and become a teacher despite wanting to be a journalist. Some college in London was even sending him letters about a journalism program they had in store for him, and I would eagerly fetch them at the school parade.

The big brown letters that almost got me the attention of the girl I always wanted. He'd have made a fine journalist even I knew, but it was said that nobody was known to be a journalist, there was no work, the program was expensive, and that teachers are always in demand. Back then, we were poor, and you were supposed to make no distinction between what you wanted and what was available.

I was going to the same high school Bũũri had attended. A low-cost, rugged school in the wildest and driest place I had ever seen. Someplace called Katilu in Turkana district. The school's name is Katilu Boys, formerly St Xavier Secondary School, till the locals felt the name was not representative, but it still remained a Catholic mission school even after the name change.

In those days, all schools in Turkana district were Catholic mission schools as the government didn't care about the people or the place. No wonder the road was so bad going there, no running water, not a thread of electricity, and everybody had a gun. Even I, despite my meager means at the time, could afford some bullets, which were sold at a paltry 20 shillings ($0.2) a piece.

Turkana district is home to a proud people called the Turkana. Unlike any other people I had known, they kept hold of their African ways with both men and women walking half-naked. Of course, not all, but most of the people there had no formal education, although they could speak Swahili intelligibly.

The Turkana are a warrior community. In the west, they fight the Kalamonjong of Uganda. In the north, it is the Marrile of Ethiopia, and just a few kilometers from the school, the fight is with the Pokot, and in places further away, they fight the Samburu. All for cattle and territory. While not fighting these human foes, they duel with stifling poverty, neglect, punishing heat, and long distances. Turkana is, after all, one of the poorest regions of Kenya.

On the day I was going to the school for the first time, I boarded the school bus nicknamed Blue Baby, a fond name for a lone ranger that had served the school faithfully over many years. She was beat up by endless potholes, decades of service, and had also endured several bandit attacks. Blue Baby was lucky that she was being driven around by Mr. Murunga, the most careful driver north of the Cherangany hills. Otherwise, she wouldn't have made it a day, not with all the tear and wear. When Murunga stopped to change gear, everybody held their breath, hoping that he was about to speed up, but it was a most unlikely thing! Often, he was slowing down further and reminding everyone else that he had a family and that except for a Mr. Musaba, we were all younger than him.

And so Blue Baby swung this way and that way jostling us from one to the other while mixing everything up. Crates of bread with diesel, foul breath with more foul breath, and this with the luggage for about 10 hours in the most dilapidated road in the republic. Despite the discomfort, I could hardly close my eyes. I wanted to see where the green ends, and the desert begins, but as the trees thinned out and as the green faded away one bump, two bumps