In Memoriam
Beyond Eulogy
Immortalising Mama Zippy Kosgey
The funeral mass · Kipkoror hill, Nandi · 18 June 2026
There are women who stand behind their men, and there are women who stand beside them. Mama Zipporah Jerotich Kosgey — Zippy, to those granted the grace of knowing her — was the rarer, second kind. Measured. Elegant. Business-minded. She did not merely keep the home of Henry Kiprono Kosgey, the longest-serving Member of Parliament Tinderet has ever sent to the August House. She kept the conditions that made Henry, Henry.
I had meant to say this on Thursday, at the funeral mass on Kipkoror hill — that majestic shoulder of land that looks down on Lelwak and out to the Samoei and Kipsigak hills in the west. The next day the President of the Republic himself came to bid her farewell, and the slopes filled with people who owed her family a debt they could not name. But the eulogy was mine to give on Thursday, and I did not get the chance. So I say it here, where no order of proceedings can be amended at the last minute, and where the only protocol is the truth.
Let me begin with the truth about Henry, because it is also the truth about Zippy. Henry Kosgey has given away, quietly and across more than four decades, more than almost any politician of his generation dared to. Not Harambee theatre — the cheque waved before the cameras and dishonoured before the dust has settled. I mean school fees paid to the last shilling. Airfares. Hospital bills. Admissions changed. Futures underwritten. He served, for a generation of us, as a human bursary office, and he did it — I believe — without a wince or a whimper, often with nothing more than a nod.
No man gives like that for forty years without a woman who lets him. Every shilling that left that household to educate another mother’s child was a shilling Zippy did not spend on herself. That is the part the eulogies will miss, and the part I will not. Her generosity was not loud. It was structural. It was the standing permission behind his open hand.
My own family is a living testament. When we had nothing, Henry stood with us. He took on my sister — today Dr. vet. med. Philister Cherotich — and moved her from Kapsabet Girls to Moi Girls, and paid her fees from Form One to Form Four. Consider who she was: a mother of two who sat her KCPE at twenty-eight and her KCSE at thirty-two. The kind of candidate a careful patron would have quietly declined. Henry did not blink. And his help did not begin with Philister, nor end with me — but those are chapters for another book.
I am, in the plainest sense, a thing the Kosgeys made possible. So is my brother Dan. So are thousands whose names Henry could not now recite if you asked him, because he never kept the ledger the way the rest of us keep our grievances.
Let me give her sons — Allan Kibet, Hon. Alexander Kimutai Kigen — and her daughter Charlene Chepkemei something only a witness can give. Zippy once told me how she came to deliver one of her boys. It was 1982, the night the soldiers tried to seize the country. She left the house and lay on the lawn below it, hiding, while a nation held its breath. When Henry came to tell her it was over — that the coup had failed and the morning was safe — she went into labour. And so Kimutai Kigen was born into a Kenya that had just, barely, survived itself. There is a name that custom would have suggested for that boy, the name of his grandfather, and our people know exactly why it could not be spoken in that house. I will honour the silence and simply say: he was named into a lineage, and into a deliverance.
She had a second life the political obituaries will overlook entirely. Zippy made music. She and Emmy Kosgey — no relation, only a shared name and a shared faith — recorded gospel that some of us still carry in our heads. A woman of faith. A businesswoman. A homemaker. A mother. And, when the spirit took her, a singer.
Now to the matter I rose, in my mind, to raise.
We cannot pay Henry back. The arithmetic does not exist. But we can ensure that what Henry and Zippy poured into us does not die with the woman who made it possible. I propose, in her honour, a permanent thing: the Henry & Zippy Kosgey Endowment — call it the Moita Fund, call it a Scholarship of Merit, the name matters less than the mortar — to educate exactly the children Henry always educated. The needy. The brilliant. The improbable candidate the system would quietly decline. The child I was. The candidate Philister was.
The Proposal
A Henry & Zippy Kosgey Endowment
To educate the needy and the brilliant — free, fair, and beyond the reach of politics, for as long as there are needy children to teach. Ng'oom Banan. Amatinyei Piis
Let it be everything the bursary has stopped being. Free. Fair. Equitable. Insulated from political greed and immune to the season’s MCA. Not another fund to be nusianised into a campaign tool, halved before it ever reaches the child — but a clean instrument that does one thing forever: it pays the fees, and asks the child only to become.
And let it be built to outlast us all. Not a one-night collection that burns bright and is cold by morning, but an endowment — a body of capital that is planted and never dug up, so that only its harvest is ever spent, and the harvest returns each year on its own, whether or not anyone is watching. That is the whole difference between a gift that is merely kind and one that is sustainable. Henry gave from his own pocket for forty years; this would give from its own roots, forever. It is how you make a generosity immortal: you give it a structure that no longer needs the giver.
I make no claim on this family or its grief. I am not a son; I am a debtor. The Kosgeys will decide who stewards what bears their name, and that is exactly as it should be. I ask only to be allowed among the first to give — and I know I will not be alone, because there are thousands of us, and we remember.
That is how you immortalise a woman like Zippy. Not with a longer eulogy, but with a longer reach. With a hand, held open in her name, long after all of us are gone.
Rest easy, Mum.
Saisere chebo Cheptogoch.
Ru ne miee Pot Kibet.
Ru ne tala Pot Chepkemei.
Imuung’chi boori Opot Kimutai!
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