Dennis Mutuku is only 16. At his age, he should be worried about school, friends and the ordinary mischief of boyhood. Instead, a dark inheritance hangs over his life.
Born into the lineage of Mr Anthony Matheka, Dennis is part of a family shadowed by a mysterious disease which relatives say has stalked the family through multiple generations, slowly draining its victims of strength, speech and sight before death.
For now, he is bubbly and relatively healthy. But in this family, health can feel painfully temporary.
Peter Kavita Nzeve speaks during an interview at his family home in Kathiani, Machakos County, on March 12, 2026, following a mysterious illness that has affected several members of his family.
Photo credit: Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation Media Group
His elders have watched the illness follow a chilling pattern. It begins quietly and almost casually. Then the body weakens, the legs fail, vision dims, speech slows to a slur then to almost nothing. In the end, the person is left dependent, incapacitated, waiting for an inevitable sad end.
Matheka died several years ago. Time separates him from his grandson Dennis, but the burden of the uncertainty that hangs heavily over the family’s life binds them.
Not much is known about how Matheka died, only that in the final stretch of his life, he could neither walk nor speak.
His widow, Rose Nduku, now frail and unwell, carries both the grief and the fear in equal measure. She has seen what this illness can do. She has watched it hollow out the people she loves, one after another, and still has no name for it.
“I don't know where help will come from, or how it will look like,” she said. “I just hope to get better.”
Rose Nduku Matheka, 73 (left), and Faith Kanini Wayua, 25, who are suffering from a mysterious illness that has reportedly affected several members of their family, rest on separate beds during an interview at their home in Kathiani on March 12, 2026.
Photo credit: Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation Media Group
It was the only words she could speak before she was overwhelmed. Hers is a quiet plea that captures her family’s ordeal with devastating clarity. But it also offers light into what navigating uncertainty together, carrying a burden that medicine has not fully explained and society has not fully met, feels like.
Without a confirmed diagnosis, there is no clear path to treatment, nor management, nor hope of improvement. The family is left to endure the symptoms as they come, never fully knowing whether the condition is hereditary, preventable, manageable or worsening. And the lack of answers deepens not only their physical suffering, but their emotional burden too.
The family could not trace medical records indicating a few diagnoses that its members have been given. However, a doctor the Nation spoke to said the symptoms described by the family are similar to those stemming from Motor Neuron Disease (MND).
MND is “a group of rare diseases that mainly causes gradual paralysis” the medical officer explained, adding it causes weakness that “will eventually render the patient unable to talk, walk and even swallow.”
Before Faith Kanini’s life was confined to the three-by-five bed where she now lies, she worked in Nairobi. But much of that life has slipped from her memory. She once built a life in the city. She gave birth to her son, Dennis. Today, those memories feel like fragments from another world.
Now Kanini spends her days on a mattress, her body failing in the same way others in the family have failed before her. When Nation visited, her voice had grown faint, low and largely incoherent. She could do little for herself. She needed help with nearly everything. Beside her lay her grandmother, also sick, in a shared room with three beds where family members nurse the mysterious illness together.
Kanini had also sought help for her eyes. On her last visit to an eye doctor, she complained of worsening vision. Slowly but surely, her eyes were losing their ability to perceive light. It was one more cruel step in a progression the family has come to know too well.
Then there is her uncle, Micheal Munguti, another man whose life was interrupted mid-stride. He once worked as a plant operator, until one day his body simply stopped cooperating. He could no longer press the clutch of the tractor he operated. That was how he lost his job. With it went the routine, the income, the pride and the life he had known.
Today, Munguti is frail. He moves by wheelchair. His voice is sluggish. The illness has stripped him down to dependence.
“Miguu ilileta shida,” he said in a lowly, almost incoherent words.
“My legs lost power to support the rest of my body… I could not even work,” he said, describing the slow collapse of their bodies.
Daniel Mutunga, Matheka’s second-born son, followed the same path. He died in January 2026, his life tracing the same grim script the family knows by heart. First came the weakness. Then his vision dimmed. Then his voice failed. Soon after, he died.
Eunice Mukonyo Mutunga narrates her experience after burying her husband, who succumbed to a mysterious illness that has reportedly affected several members of their family, during an interview at their home in Kathiani on March 12, 2026.
Photo credit: Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation Media Group
To his wife, Eunice, Daniel was first and foremost a loving family man. Before illness overtook him, he worked in a bakery in Nairobi and supported his family. Then one day he woke up feeling unwell. It seemed minor at first and something that might pass. But it did not.
He returned to the village hoping to recover and rebuild before going back to the capital. He never made it back.
“It starts as though one is intoxicated,” Eunice said, “then the body become so weak they cannot walk.”
She remembers that he first complained in 2017 of feeling unusually weak. When he failed to get better, he moved upcountry. From there, the disease tightened its grip until there was little left to do but watch.
The couple’s four children are alive, healthy and trying to build lives of their own. The youngest is 20. For Eunice, that should be a comfort. Instead, even that hope is haunted by fear.
“I now fear my children finding themselves in the same condition that befell their father,” teary Eunice said. “I pray and hope it doesn’t happen for them.”
That fear has settled over the Matheka family like a permanent dark cloud. It is not only the illness itself that torments them, but the waiting, the wondering and the inability to know who might be next.
The entire lineage of Matheka is now entangled in a disease that seems to attack without warning, stripping its victims of dignity and, eventually, life itself. A relative familiar with the family’s history shared a list of about a dozen people either already suffering from the condition or showing signs that suggest its onset.
In this family, this curious illness is no longer an exception. It is a pattern. A memory. A warning. A sentence carried in the body.
