Early life
Othaya, the Chania and a paraffin lamp
Mary Wanjiku was born in 1948 in Othaya, Nyeri County, the third of seven children. She grew up on the slopes above the Chania, fetching water before school and reading by a paraffin lamp after dark. Her mother said she could recite whole pages of her schoolbooks before she was ten.
She finished school at the top of her class and trained as a teacher, the first in her family to do so.