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12 July, 1995
The following message was posted on NUAFRICA. We are very sorry for Professor Gideon Were's death.
Carolyn A. Brown
cbrown@zodiac.rutgers.edu
Kenya has been hit by a spate of road accidents this week which have killed 18 people including the country's leading historian Professor Gideon Were.
Professor Were was among those killed in a road accident on the Kericho-Kisumu road in which a cyclist died on the spot but Professor Were and another person died on arrival at Kericho hospital. He was identified during a postmortem at the hospital. The other dead were Samuel Kiprotich and Moses Baroda, a Ugandan.
Professor Were was travelling from Nairobi to Kisumu in the Peugeot. Were was history Professor at the University of Nairobi until his retirement in 1991 and wrote a number of books on the movement of peoples on the African continent. His pioneer title was A History of Abaluyia of Western Kenya, but among the most famous was a widely used school textbooks East Africa Through A Thousand Years and A History of South Africa.
Were 61, was born in Butere, Kakamega district and attended Kakamega and Maseno High Schools before going to the then Royal Technical College of East Africa in 1957. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Nairobi to teach history. He leaves a widow, five daughters and two sons.