Makena’s dark family secrets and long struggle with depression – VIDEO
Former Tahidi High actress Christine Njeri better known as Makena has laid bare her battle with depression after she found out that her dad had infected her mum with HIV/AIDS.
Njeri, a former TV producer of NTV’s youth show Teen Republik who now works for BBC, has also revealed the struggles she went through growing up in a household with an abusive father.
In a candid interview on NTV’s weekly talk show Unscripted, Njeri revealed some other dark family secrets including her father’s alcoholism and infidelity.
“My dad cheated a lot on my mum. I would bump into him in town with different women,” Njeri, who rose to the limelight with her role as Makena on Tahidi High, narrated.
NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
That was the beginning of a very painful and tragic experience for their family that led to her parents contracting HIV/AIDS and eventual demise.
After getting infected and finding out, her mother went into severe depression causing a nervous breakdown as she tried coming into terms with her health condition. However, she did not tell her children that she had been infected with HIV/AIDS by their father.
“She (mother), went into severe depression and got a nervous breakdown. So those are the things to date I still think about, she didn’t have to go through that. She would take medicine (ARVS) and say it was for the nervous breakdown. That’s what we knew,” Njeri recalls.
Then one day, as she was cleaning her mother’s room, Njeri discovered that the medicine were actually ARVs.
PARENTS’ DEATH
“At that moment my whole life came to a standstill because at that point I thought she is dying. I still struggle with what my dad took us through,” a teary Njeri told Unscripted show host Grace Msalame.
Her mother would later pass on in 2013 and Njeri chose not to speak to her father for two years until 2015 when he was on his deathbed.
She never visited her father in the hospital for a longtime until one day when her brother succeeded in convincing her just days before he passed on.
“He couldn’t talk, he was very sick and I told him, ‘Daddy I forgive you for everything you took us through. I set you free'”, Njeri says.