World's oldest schoolboy dies aged 90 in Kenya

Kimani Maruge attends class at Kapkenduiywo Primary School in Langas, Eldoret, 300km west of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, October 6, 2006. Maruge celebrated in Kenya as the world's oldest school pupil has died in the east African country aged 90, local media said on Friday.

NAIROBI (Reuters) - A farmer celebrated in Kenya as the world's oldest school pupil has died in the east African country aged 90, local media said on Friday.

Kimani Maruge, an illiterate great-grandfather, grabbed global headlines when he jumped at a belated chance to educate himself soon after President Mwai Kibaki's government introduced free primary schooling in 2003.

Kenya's NTV broadcaster said Maruge had been diagnosed with cancer earlier this year and had undergone surgery, but that his health had since deteriorated.

The veteran of the 1950s Mau Mau revolt against British colonial forces, who never had a chance to attend school as a boy, had become a national celebrity and something of a poster boy for free education campaigners worldwide.

In 2005, he travelled to the United Nations in New York to urge world leaders to press education for the poor.

He pushed on with his studies even after his Rift Valley home was torched during last year's post-election crisis and he had to move first to a camp for displaced families and then to an old people's home in the capital Nairobi.

Local media said he was two years away from completing his primary education when he died.

In an interview in 2006, Maruge told Reuters he wanted to go to school so he could read the Bible for himself, and that he would only stop studying if he went blind or died.

"Liberty is learning, you know," he said at the time.