Unlike Mombasa and the coastal sultanates of Kenya, Nairobi was founded in a hurry and, from the very beginning, as a railway depot and market town between the port city and Kampala in Uganda, it filled up with pioneers, traders of all kinds, workers, and Africans of many nationalities in search of opportunities and work.
It was a unique area, the “land of cold waters” as the Maasai called it, with some parts marshy, others hilly, between forests and open plains.
With this jumble of people from various backgrounds, disease was rife, with the British residential areas cleared by the settlers just enough to reduce the lethal incidence of malaria.
But when the plague arrived in 1900, the short history of the Kenyan capital would already have been severely curtailed.
Had it not been for an indomitable and eccentric doctor of Portuguese origin.
Imagine Nairobi a century and a quarter ago: at that time, the metropolis it is today, immersed in international business, exponential traffic, and dizzying social inequalities, was little more than a village in the middle of its “cold waters.”
Tribal chiefs dressed in traditional garb, with painted faces and feathers, would show up at government offices to sign agreements, while maidens following their valiant husbands rode around in rickshaws dressed up as if in a Victorian play. Wild animals roamed freely but were just as freely hunted and killed.
But there were also those who bred them and tried to tame them.
Such was the case of Rosendo Ayres Ribeiro, an Indian doctor of Portuguese origin, one of those who arrived with his parents from the former protectorate of Goa, once it became a British colony.
He had grown up with animals and, despite having studied medicine at a college in India, he chose to move in 1900 to the place he had visited as a boy and fallen in love with.

Dr. Ribeiro was certainly not an ordinary character.
He visited his patients on a zebra that he had raised like a horse and which he bridled and saddled every morning. Even in times of adventurers, “wild boys,” and people of various backgrounds, a well-dressed man with a hat and briefcase riding a zebra did not go unnoticed.
The use of zebras as pack animals is not surprising; at the time, they were also used by the British to pull carts and carriages, but the fact that it was possible to have a friendly relationship with them, just like with a domestic animal, was more of a novelty at the time.
 
Apart from his eccentricity, Ribeiro was known as one of the best doctors in Nairobi, and his popularity grew dramatically when he was the first to identify a strange contagious disease in the city center, around the small Indian bazaar.
It was bubonic plague, and only he, who had come into contact with similar cases in India, could identify it, while the Queen's pundits speculated about who knows what virus from the Dark Continent.
It was precisely the commercial growth of Nairobi and the arrival of people of all races from Europe, Asia, and other African countries, as well as the increase in garbage, that created the conditions for the presence of rats and other rodents capable of transmitting diseases to humans.
The death of an Indian shopkeeper was followed by 20 other cases in the same neighborhood, and Dr. Ribeiro, after visiting the first Africans who had similar symptoms, two Somalis, called an extraordinary meeting with the leaders of the British protectorate. The only solution to eradicate the disease would be to burn the entire market area.
And so it was. The man on the zebra witnessed the burning of downtown Nairobi and was unable to prevent his own medical practice from going up in smoke, but he succeeded in saving Kenya from an epidemic that, considering the newly inaugurated railway and the nomadic nature of the people who traveled for business and livestock fairs, proud of their livestock and trying to make ends meet, could have caused far more than the 75 million deaths that the ‘Black Death’ caused in Europe in 1400.
From then on, Ribeiro was no longer just the ‘mad doctor’ who came to visit his patients by tying his black and white striped horse to a column, but the savior of Nairobi.
He was rewarded for this by the British Empire and became an eminent figure. Thanks to his Goan origins, the Portuguese government appointed him Lusitanian consul in Kenya in 1914.
Rosendo Ribeiro died in Nairobi in 1951 at the age of 80 and was buried in City Park Cemetery.
Legend has it that, in the first few years after his burial, a herd of zebras would occasionally appear near his grave.