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In medicine, to know the truth is to be healed. So too to history

Sometimes when I walk through Meru town, and by extension other towns like Nairobi, I find myself asking the origin of names and places. How was Meru town in 1900. Where did these places get their names from.

History answers so many questions. We come from a lineage that passed knowledge through oral traditions- and this means that along the way, most history died with our ancestors.

As Kiruki Mwithimbu observes in his book, many of us can give a blow by blow account of what happened in Medina in 632AD, what happened in Baghdad on that fateful sack of 1253, and what happened in Paris in 1804. But few, if any, can tell what happened in Kenya in 1960.

This book by the veritable engineer Kiruki Mwithimbu is a gallant effort to document where we came from. Indeed, a people who don't know their roots may not know where they are headed.

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