On 5 July 2021, I received an email that was to be the last of very many contacts arising from a friendship that began over 49 years earlier in 1972 when David Kimenye, known to his family and friends as Daudi, began his career at Kelly College. In 2021, we were both living and working in different countries, he in Uganda and I in Singapore. That email was a lengthy response to birthday greetings I had sent to him earlier the same day, his 65th birthday.

Our lives had taken very different paths but over these many decades we remained good friends. We met wherever and whenever the opportunity presented, usually when we were both in the UK at the same time. We communicated by mail or telephone and more recently using the wonders of modern technology. The passage of time and the tyranny of distance in such circumstances resulted in our contact being limited to respective birthdays, seasonal greetings and milestone events in life such as weddings and the birth of our respective children or changes of career and country.

During his relatively short time at Kelly College from 1972-1974, David made his mark as an accomplished Cricketer, holding full colours in the 1st XI of 1974 and recorded in the Kelly College Chronicle for that year as “A very useful left-arm opening bowler”. He was an eloquent speaker, with a command of the English language, a level of confidence and a calm demeanour that stood him in good stead in the years ahead. He was one of a number of students from a memorable contingent at that time from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Malawi.

Daudi came from a remarkable family background. His late mother, Barbara Kimenye (1929-2012), was herself an accomplished, highly-acclaimed and well-respected author of more than 50 children’s educational books published by the Oxford University Press that have been used for very many years in a number of English-speaking African countries’ schools. She raised David and his older brother through their early years in Uganda where she was a personal secretary to the Ugandan traditional king and first Prime Minister after independence. Daudi’s grandmother, who I had the privilege of knowing, was a no-nonsense Yorkshire lady who had married a West Indian doctor, an uncommon occurrence in England a century ago due to the social attitudes and conventions of that time. David married his wife from Zimbabwe and became father to a daughter, Celeste, in 1983.

With the help of mutual friends, we have established and are saddened to know that David passed away in Kampala, Uganda after a battle with lung cancer, on 4 May 2022. His obituary, only recently found, was published in the Ugandan news outlet “Nile Post” on 7 January 2023 and highlighted David’s career with Uganda’s Radio One station as a presenter and voice-over artist.

David will be missed by those of us who had the pleasure of knowing him.

Written by Richard Wilson (1970-1975)