23/11/2025
I have been asking myself why almost all BETTY BAYO songs are about someone going through a painful season until I read this piece by .
He wrote:
I was watching an old interview of Betty Bayo and weh, she really grew up in serious hardship.
She’s the last born. Her father and mother separated when she was very young. Their dad chased them away, so they ran to Gilgil, to their grandmother’s home.
They stayed there for several years, then he came again and chased them out.
They went to Magumu in Nyandarua. Together with her brother, they worked on people’s farms to get school fees and support their mum. She was still in primary school at the time. The farm owner would measure "five mafuti” (10 by 10 footsteps), and after school they would hurry to finish the work so that by Saturday the task was done so that they can get paid....
But their father kept tracking them down and chasing them away. He didn’t want to see them getting comfortable.
Long story short, she eventually joined secondary school, but she struggled. She studied for six years up to Form 3, then gave up and burnt her books.
She later got employed as a househelp in Kikuyu. She lied to her employer that she had dropped out in Class 2.
One day she prepared supper, beans, meat, and rice. The child asked her to serve more meat and less beans. She explained to the kid that both beans and meat are proteins and serve the same purpose in the body.
Her employer overheard the conversation and confronted her:
“Where did a Class 2 dropout learn about proteins?”
Betty Bayo was forced to open up and tell the truth.
That was on a Friday. By Monday, they had bought her full school uniform and sent her back to school, straight to Form 4. They paid her full school fees.
That was the only year she studied continuously without dropping out.
She passed very well, and they were already planning to take her to Makerere University. The process had even begun.
But a few weeks before she joined Makerere, her employer’s husband died in a road accident, and that was the end of her education journey....
©Ndungu Nyoro
