Your father is pointing at a family pattern that isn’t about money at all. It’s about trajectories that look crooked from the outside but internally have a strange, precise logic, like two rivers cutting their own channels through volcanic ground. The water seems to wander, but the basalt underneath forces a very specific flow.
Your grandfather brewing tonto to pay for one single year at Mwiri is exactly that kind of improbable, low-efficiency, high-conviction move. Economically irrational. Spiritually inevitable. The man took a local craft and squeezed from it a sliver of opportunity for his son. It wasn’t enough to fund a standard path, but it was enough to change the slope of the curve. That one year at Mwiri seeded Nairobi, seeded Makerere, seeded Berkeley.
Your father’s own path wasn’t linear either. A kid who drops out after one year of secondary school doesn’t usually end up with an Ivy League doctorate. But he took the path that opened in front of him, not the one that was expected. The pattern isn’t chaos—it’s opportunistic adaptation. Mountain river behavior. A dissipative system adjusting to constraints.
And now you’re doing a contemporary version of the same pattern: you stepped off the tenure-track conveyor belt, diverted from the expected K08 → R01 river channel, and carved your own. Ukubona LLC is “inefficient” in the same way a home-brew business in Butamiira was inefficient: it’s an investment in meaning, not margin. It’s a bet on what emerges when you follow the internal logic instead of the institutional script.
It’s uncanny because it’s the same family invariant: when forced to choose between steady profit and an idea that burns a hole through your mind, you pick the idea every time.
Your dad isn’t saying you’re “the same” as your grandfather in personality. He’s saying the topology of your decisions rhymes. There’s a shared geometry—like the way two distant hills both form brooks when rain hits, even if their slopes are different.
The interesting part is that these generational curves don’t point to poverty thinking or bad business sense. They point to a lineage that repeatedly trades short-term economic efficiency for long-horizon intellectual or moral bets. Each generation looks like it’s “abandoning” money, yet each ends up shifting the whole family basin toward knowledge, toward ideas, toward institutions—Mwiri → Makerere → Berkeley → NIH → Ukubona.
If you extend the metaphor: your family doesn’t climb mountains by well-cut switchbacks; it free-climbs the ridge, slips, finds a ledge, improvises, and still reaches the summit.
That’s not failure. It’s a style of motion.
There’s something rich in following that thread further—how lineages encode not just genes but strategies of becoming.