A few minutes before 11am on a Monday morning, the fourth year students of community psychology started congregating for their class outside room 207 of the Gandhi Wing building at the University of Nairobi’s main campus.
It was a chilly and foggy morning in Nairobi and the nine students who had made it to class sat close together comparing notes as they waited for their lecturer.
A half an hour later, Michael Ndurumo walks in. The bespectacled 66-year-old associate professor of psychology wore a grey suit, a white shirt, a matching striped white-and-black neck tie and black shoes.
INTERPRETER
He smiles gently at his students and the “strangers” — the four-man gang of two reporters, cameraman and photographer from the Sunday Nation and NTV — who had joined his class that morning to witness him teach.
Prof Ndurumo unzips his leather briefcase, fishes out his books and a laptop which he gives to his assistant, Jacqueline Njue, who set up the projector for the PowerPoint presentation of the day’s class.
By all measures, it looked like the hundreds of other classes taking place at the UoN or any other university around the country at that time.
However, this was a unique class, for Prof Ndurumo is deaf and therefore cannot speak yet for 15 years, he has been teaching his students of normal hearing through an interpreter.
ADJUST
In December 1960 at the age of eight, he travelled to Nairobi from their rural home in Marua village in Nyeri to visit his father who was working as a cook at the Mathare Mental Hospital.
During his stay in Nairobi, he contracted meningitis, an airborne viral infection that can be life-threatening if not treated quickly. In Ndurumo’s case, it only left him deaf.
“It was harder on my mother, but also to my father given that I was the first born son,” he said of his parent’s initial reaction to his condition and to the entire family’s struggle to adjust to his needs. He is the fourth born in a family of 11.
He was a standard one pupil at Muruguru primary school in Nyeri when he caught the infection and the disease seemed to have sealed his fate and consigned him to ‘lesser’ vocations in life such as tailoring, carpentry or stonemasonry. These are the occupations society has reserved for people like him who have disabilities.
IDEOLOGIES
But the fact that he was standing before his students that Monday morning, and not perhaps a Jua Kali shed somewhere in Nyeri, was a testament of a never-say-die attitude that has brought him to the pinnacle of academic success.
‘Psychological dynamics of modern Russia (Adapted from A.V Yurevitch and D.V Ushakov)’ was that morning’s topic, at the end of which he asked his students to discuss how it applies to Kenya’s politics today.
In particular, he wanted to know how the day’s topic applies to the ideologies of the Jubilee administration and how they have evolved since coming to power in 2013 and how it has now crystallised in the Big Four agenda of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s second term.
Miss Njue, who has worked with Prof Ndurumo since 2012 as a volunteer when she was studying for her undergraduate degree in sociology at the UoN, was the interface between the lecturer and his students.
TRANSLATE
She first heard of the deaf professor from her roommate who told her that he had offered to teach sign language for free to students who weren’t necessarily hard of hearing.
“It was an eye-opening experience,” said Ms Njue who was hired by the university in 2016 as a graduate assistant permanently assigned to Prof Ndurumo to help him in class.
She is now pursuing a Master’s degree in rural sociology at the same university. I asked her how much preparation she needs to do to be able to accurately interpret technical terms for students.
“I don’t need to read his notes for me to translate since most of the terminologies in sociology and psychology are related,” she told me. Once in a while they get stuck on difficult terminologies for which there is no sign for them yet, but in such instances, they improvise as they go.
However, I was keen to know how much is lost in translation between the lecturer and the students. “We don’t lose a lot,” said Mr Dennis Lemeloi, one of the students in class that day.
“I pay more attention to him and the interpreter so that I don’t get lost on the way, and that is a positive factor for me. It makes it a very interesting class,” he said.
DEAF SCHOOL
His colleague, Cynthia Bach, who is pursuing a double major degree in psychology and political science, said their professor’s life story “has encouraged me a lot.” She now desires to learn sign language after she graduates.
And what a story it has been!
Despite his condition and the attendant societal stereotypes, Ndurumo’s parents were determined to give him an education like all their other children.
There being no primary school for the deaf near home, the young Ndurumo was forced to study with normal children at the local primary school in Nyeri.
His teachers and classmates made sure he did not fall behind in his studies. He taught himself English by reading the dictionary since the disease struck him even before he had learnt the language.
In 1968, he sat his Certificate of Primary Education examination and performed very well. Unfortunately, he was forced to stay home for a year, unable to proceed to secondary school because there were no schools for the deaf around his home.
MISSIONARY COUPLE
“Many people never thought that a deaf person could actually continue with education to high school level. No one was willing to give me a chance,” he recounted.
The teenager was then introduced to Dr Peter Lowry and Ruth Mallory, a missionary couple, who were in charge of Nyeri Baptist, a small Christian secondary school in Nyeri.
In 1971, he briefly went to St Peter’s Mumias High to be close to the school for the deaf, but in the same year, the Mallorys organised for him to transfer to Harrison-Chilhowee Baptist Academy in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, becoming the institution’s first foreign student.
In the US, he was given an interpreter to accompany him to class and was therefore forced to learn sign language. Previously, he had been communicating by writing notes.
In 1974, he joined Gallaudet University in Washington where he took general studies, including psychology, a field he was to specialise in later in life.
Two years later, he joined Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, which is an institution for the handicapped and admits students from all over the world.
TENNESSEE SCHOOL
He enrolled for his Master’s degree in educational administration, psychology and special education at the same university.
In 1980, he completed his PhD studies in the same discipline at the same university.
When he earned his PhD, he became the third deaf African and first East African to acquire a doctorate degree at the time. The other two were West Africans.
After graduation, he took up a teaching job at his former high school in Tennessee, and later moved to Gardner-Webb University, North Carolina.
In 1982, he returned home and joined the Kenya Institute of Education (KIE) as a curriculum developer. He was charged with the task of developing a curriculum for special education and training for teachers.
TEACHING JOB
He gradually rose to become a senior principal and head of special education at KIE — now Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development — and played a key role in pushing the government to do more to develop sign language in Kenya.
After 22 years with KIE, Prof Ndurumo took early retirement and took up a teaching job in 2003 at Moi University in Eldoret where he was put in charge of the department of educational psychology. His appointment made him the first deaf lecturer in Kenya.
“Teaching was my first love,” Prof Ndurumo says. “I enjoy sharing my knowledge with students. To me, every day is a learning day and that is what life is all about.”
RUNS NGO
In the 1990s, he was offered a teaching job at the UoN but the offer was withdrawn when the university’s administration learnt that he was deaf. However, he had no such challenges when he applied for a teaching job in 2009.
Besides teaching, the don runs a non-governmental organisation called the Africa Institute of Deaf Studies and Research across the road from UoN which trains qualified sign language interpreters.
Alice Kimani, a third-year Bachelor of Education student at Kenyatta University, volunteers to run for him the institute and interprets for him when he is outside the university.