By Ogova Ondego
Published September 25, 2023
When he composed and recorded My Land is Kenya, one of the tracks on his Roger Whittaker in Kenya: A Musical Safari album released on January 1, 1984, had Kenyan-born Roger Henry Brough Whittaker (March 22, 1936 – September 13, 2023) set out to market Kenya or was he promoting his own music career?
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Below are the lyrics of My Land is Kenya:
You only got one mama
You only got one pa
You only got one life to live
No matter who you are
You can go the whole world over
Every city has its dawn
But everybody liveth has one place where he was born
And mine is Kenya, so warm and wild and free
You’ll always stay with me here in my heart
My land is Kenya, right from your highlands to the sea
You’ll always stay with me here in my heart, here in my heart.
You only got one childhood
And the memories that spring
When you see your house, the tree you climbed
And all those precious things
The faces of the friends I had
The images that flow
When I close my eyes in the land I love
The land I was born
My land is Kenya, so warm and wild and free
You’ll always stay with me here in my heart
My land is Kenya, right from your highlands to the sea
You’ll always stay with me here in my heart, here in my heart.
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Whittaker, who died in France on September 13, was a British folk singer-songwriter and musician who was born to English parents in Nairobi in the then British Kenya Colony in 1936. He attended Prince of Wales School and then served in the Kenya Regiment that fought the Mau Mau insurgents in the Aberdare Forest. He enrolled to study medicine at South Africa’s University of Cape Town but dropped out to become a teacher and musician before relocating to Britain in 1959 from where he studied zoology, biochemistry and marine biology at University College of North Wales.
Whittaker and his wife, Natalie O’Brien, had two sons and three daughters and lived in Ireland for a while before relocating to France in 2012.
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Whitaker’s parents remained in Nairobi till 1989 when his father was killed by robbers and his mother returned to England where she later died in 1996.
Though living in Europe, Whittaker was actively involved in wildlife conservation efforts back in Kenya where he was born, grew up, attended school and served in the military.
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The songs on the Roger Whittaker in Kenya: A Musical Safari album are:
- Come with Me
- Come Back Again
- My Land is Kenya
- Good Old EAR & H
- Song of Kerinyaga
- High
- Shimoni
- Did You Really Have To?
- Make Way for Man, and
- Am Back
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Among Whittaker’s recorded albums are:
- New World in the Morning (1971)
- The Magical World of Roger Whittaker (1975)
- The Roger Whittaker Christmas Album (1978)
- Roger Whittaker in Kenya: A Musical Safari (1984), and
- Greatest Hits (1994).
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Roger Whittaker in Kenya: A Musical Safari, a 10-track compilation, is available online in four 14-minute parts for posterity.
