Tea and Trauma: The Unfinished Battle for Kipsigis Land

For over 60 years, members of Kenya’s Kipsigis community and Talai Clan have waged a relentless battle for compensation, seeking redress for the brutal evictions that forced them off their ancestral lands, now occupied by British multinational corporations. The fight for justice, for lands stripped away and lives torn asunder, has taken them from the National Land Commission (NLC) to Kenya’s Senate, courts in the United Kingdom and even to the United Nations. Theirs is a fight for the recognition of the deep wounds left by colonial-era displacements that tore them from their fertile homelands. In 2019, a glimmer of hope emerged when the NLC, responding to a petition from Kericho and Bomet counties, acknowledged the profound injustices these communities had endured.

The Kipsigis and Talai, indigenous to Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, were not merely displaced; they were victims of a violent history marked by severe human rights violations. The colonial decrees – the 1901 Talai Removal Ordinance and the 1934 Laibon Removal Ordinance –sought to erase their existence, exiling them to the tsetse fly-infested Gwasi area, more than one hundred kilometers away. An estimated 500,000 people were affected by these brutal decrees. Their hopes of reclaiming their land have grown dim. Despite the NLC’s 2019 recommendations, which called for an apology from the British government and direct reparations, progress has been scant.

The NLC’s actions, such as converting 999-year leases to 99-year terms and withholding renewals pending agreements with county governments, have been met with fierce resistance. Multinational tea companies, led by the Kenya Tea Growers Association, challenged these decisions in court, arguing they were excluded from discussions. In April 2023, Justice Oscar Amugo Angote quashed the NLC's recommendations, halting any State or local government implementation, leaving the Talai and Kipsigis once again burdened by unfulfilled promises and the enduring grip of colonial-era land dispossession.

Dozens of elderly Kipsigis still alive today carry memories too heavy to forget. Their land, seized by the British with brutal force, saw homes set ablaze, families exiled to far-off Gwasi, where many perished. Those who survived returned to Kericho only to find themselves living as squatters on the fringes of the massive tea plantations that now dominate their homeland. The land, blanketed in tea, bears witness to their pain, offering no solace, while their attempts to collect firewood or fetch water from ancient streams, have seen them branded as trespassers – on land that is rightfully theirs.

The Kipsigis endured one of the British Empire’s most blatant and lasting land thefts, a saga that began in the late 1800s with the construction of the railway from Mombasa to Kisumu. When the tracks reached Kericho, the Kipsigis resisted, inciting the wrath of the British. In June 1905, this wrath culminated in a massacre. The British forces unleashed over 15,000 bullets, killing at least 2,000 Kipsigis in a brutal display of power. Yet, the Kipsigis did not surrender. Under the leadership of the fearless and mystical leader Kipchomber Arap Koilegen, they continued their resistance. The British, failing to coerce him through invitations to royal celebrations, eventually arrested him and exiled him to Central Kenya, where he died in detention in 1916.

In the aftermath, Kipsigis land was stripped further of its identity, transformed into Crown land, a commodity for the British to distribute at their whim. British agricultural giants were handed thousands of hectares under 99-year leases. Companies like Brooke Bond, later absorbed by Unilever; James Finlay, under Swire’s ownership; and Williamson Tea, all laid claim to this stolen earth. They turned the original landowners into laborers, paid them meager wages that amounted to disguised slavery. The audacity of it all – employing those who had once owned the land, now reduced to near-servitude on what was rightfully theirs.

For nearly thirty years, the Kipsigis, now living on the margins of their own land, were forced into roles as cheap laborers, squatters, scavengers, and, for some desperate women, prostitution. The weight of these brutal conditions bore down so heavily on the community that by 1960, suicide – once unheard of among the Kipsigis – began to claim lives. The British invasion had ripped apart their society, leaving scars that remain unhealed.

Today in 2024, more than sixty years after independence, those wounds remain open. The land that was stolen is still in the hands of British-owned tea companies. The Kipsigis are denied even the dignity of accessing their ancestral burial grounds and sacred sites. The trauma of the elderly is as raw today as it was over six decades ago, while the tea companies continue to amass millions of dollars each year.

These multinationals still own an expanse of land stretching 3,237 square kilometers, territory so vast it dwarfs New York City four times over. Some of them may have changed ownership but the oppression remains. The factory once owned by Unilever, after taking over from Brooke Bond, has now passed into the hands of British firm Ekaterra. The other two multinationals are James Finlay (now owned by Swire) and Williamson Tea. 

As these multinational make billions, the Kipsigis receive nothing—zero. They deserve either the return of their land, to do with as they see fit, or a majority stake in these companies that continue to occupy their land.

Drop me a mail if you are willing to volunteer your time, expertise or resources towards reclaiming Africa’s land and natural resources. Let’s transform Africa Together!
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.