June Chepkemei takes garrulous pleasure in being the adult in the room. She was unlike the other children growing up. She could earn money, take care of her younger brothers, milk the cows, sell the milk and plan the week—all signs that she was more adult than child.
The naive and the willfully blind will say that she missed out on a childhood, and they would be right. But we all make a Faustian bargain, and say what you may about the devil, he honours his due. Those early years serve as the backdrop to her tenure as CEO of the Kenya Tourism Board, a far cry from the days she started life in Nairobi as a mama mboga. “People think I am naive,” she says. “I am not.”
