Ndumberi, Tubogo helped Africans access clubs, KGU

In the 1960s when the newly emerging African middle class started showing some interest in playing golf, access to white-dominated golf clubs was not easy.

This book would, therefore, not be complete without something on the Tubogo Golf Club and Ndumberi Golf Club and how these two were to lead to the admission of African golfers into clubs and the Kenya Golf union (KGU) and gave the union an African face.

As Duncan Ndegwa puts it in his book, Walking in Kenyatta Struggles My Story, “For a long time, golf was not normally an African game. None of the golf clubs in the country had a regular African patronage at par with their whites for quite some time.

However, the caddies were of course Africans. The tradition was to slowly change – admittedly from very unlikely quarters and notably so to the benefit of Africans.

In 1968 my back was injured while playing tennis and golf seemed a good alternative. P.K. Kinyanjui, J. Michuki, Philip Ndegwa, Solomon Karanja and G. Gichuki were also thinking on the same lines.

Ndumberi Club and Course was then the African Mecca of golf. With my companions we formed a golf club known as Tubogo Golf Club to facilitate access to various golf clubs.”

Ndumberi had started with the initiative of Lawrence Kariuki who was its first president in 1963. Kariuki explains: “The word Tubogo (a Kikuyu word for young male buffaloes-buffaloes are black in colour) was coined by P.K. Kinyanjui. Personally, I did not like the word as it illustrated racial segregation which we were fighting.

“The Africanisation of golf came from Ndumberi and the first black against white match was a team of Ndumberi against a team of Embu Golf Club around 1964/65. One of our members, Reuben Barua was working for the veterinary department in Embu and he arranged it. The white members wanted to show Province Commissioner Eliud Mahihu that Africans would play golf as well.”

The Ndumberi course was and still is on community land where the chief’s office is located. It’s about four kilometres from Kiambu town on the way to Githunguri. Ndegwa takes up the Tubogo story from here: 

“As Tubogo Club grew, members’ friends, including women and children, got invited to take part in the nyama choma and booze. The Shell Club at Karura Forest became a popular rendezvous for such parties and under the leadership of a Shell member G. Gichuki.”