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From Ndarugo to Xerox and Toyota, the pioneering spirit of ingenuity liveth in us

Xn Iraki

By XN Iraki | Feb 05, 2025

Local names can be fascinating. Just before you start descending to Naivasha from Limuru, a small town with an unusual name, Flyover awaits you.

The only problem is that the flyover was never completed. Where did the money go? How many lives have been lost because of that incompleteness? Will it ever be completed?

Turn right into Magumu, a nearby town now full of tree trunks on the roadside. Where is this deforestation taking place? Has the price of timber fallen?

I recently recorded five degrees Celsius at Magumu, living up to its name. Drive past another funnily named town, Kwa Haraka. Who is Haraka?

Keep Reading business

Get to Njabini. Between Njabini, home of Sasumua Dam that gives Nairobi its life-giving water is another oddly named town, Engineer. The signboard with Ndarugo awaits you, more than 100km from Ndarugo between Juja and Thika.

This county has a town named Machinery, Sophia and hosts Dundori, where its alleged passengers compete to sit next to the driver to arrive earlier.

A young man wearing a balaclava found me taking a photo of the signboard. “Do you get building stones from Ndarugo near Thika,“, I asked him. ‘No” he answered back.

Machine-cut stones

But they are machine cut. With time all machine-cut building stones are now Ndarugo! It does not matter where they are mined. Don‘t be surprised to find Ndarugo in Shamakhokho or Ekalakala.

How did the name of a place come to symbolise machine-cut stones? It’s the reward for pioneering. Ndarugo quarries near Thika pioneered machine-cut stones. It eliminated the need for stone dressing and possibly reduced the time to complete a house.

We have been there before. Xerox pioneered photocopying. Xeroxing is now photocopying.

In the university, mwakenya means illegal materials in an exam. Remember the pioneering seditious publications in the KANU era?

Not sure who can take credit for that. In some parts of Kenya, the generic name of a car is Toyota even if the model is a Jeep or Volkswagen. Toyota pioneered in making affordable cars for the masses.

Before Toyota, the generic name was “mbiúki.” Sounds familiar, Buick. The model was common during Kenya’s colonial period.

Just imagine if each village and hamlet pioneered an idea like Ndarugu, Xerox or Toyota.

That would be a faster route to economic transformation than waiting for the money from the national government. What has your village and hamlet given us, pioneered? Has your village or hamlet “ndarugod” anything? Talk to us.