Mzee

For the poet, there is often more interest to be found in the cadence and connotations of human speech than in music’s reassuring rhythms and rhymes. This, however, is as much bane as boon without the temerity and resources to work a subject’s ramblings into an entertaining and accomplished form.

In June 2019, I returned to Africa, to Kenya, to film the clinical officer. Not only for charity, as an unpaid historian for this profession. But also for myself, to make a better documentary. Things don’t always go as one expects. But that’s okay. Of the clinical officers interviewed, Mzee Isaac Nunda, who began practicing in 1958 and helped to pass the Clinical Officers Act of 1988, was one of the more interesting. His drive was to the immediate benefit of others in his profession.

I chose Nunda for his character and setting and edited with few omissions: Mzee: An Old Kenyan Clinical Officer. It is an interest snippet of oral history; however, while Nunda was married to medicine for much of his life, his mistress has been his accordion playing.


Location: Kenya

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