Maina Wanjigi attended the prestigious Alliance High School in Kenya and Makerere University in neighbouring Uganda, before pursuing postgraduate studies at the University of Connecticut and Stanford University — both in the US — as Kenya’s first Fulbright scholar. He has been a Kenyan Member of Parliament and cabinet minister, and has also served as a college lecturer besides sitting on the boards of key government and private enterprises in the banking, hospitality, aviation, labour, education and agricultural sectors — some of which he helped to establish. Along the way, he has picked many commendations, including the order of the Elder of the Golden Heart, the Guinness Stout Effort Award and a Certificate for Distinguished Service to Youth in Africa from the African Alliance for Young Men’s Christian Association. Politician, entrepreneur and philanthropist Maina Wanjigi has had many distinctions in his long and eventful public life. At independence, he served as the first Director of Settlement, overseeing massive land redistribution that steered Kenya from the brink of social conflagration, and presided over the Africanisation programme that solidly placed the country on the road to prosperity. His long stint as a Government Minister under two Kenyan Presidents reaffirmed his credentials as a principled politician who would not hesitate to say his piece, no matter how discomfiting. That is as it should be; his singular pursuit, he writes, has been to live a virtuous life. This graceful and sensitive memoir chronicles that long and arduous journey, restating values that have kept Wanjigi going – through a childhood in the thick of war, surviving the tide of turgid streams to get to school, and the rough and tumble of politics – catapulting him from the margins of a rural community to the centrepiece of modern Kenya’s development.