Kericho County sits in Kenya's fertile highlands. The soil is some of the most productive on earth. The hills are green year-round. The Kipsigis people have lived here for hundreds of years, farming, raising livestock, building communities, and maintaining a rich spiritual and cultural life tied intimately to this land.

Today, those same hills are covered almost entirely in tea. Not owned by the Kipsigis. Not benefiting the Kipsigis. Managed by multinational corporations whose presence in Kericho began not with purchase or agreement, but with soldiers, forced evictions, and fire.

This page exists to tell that story honestly, and to explain why it shapes everything Koyta Hope & Rift Initiative does.

The Kipsigis are the largest subgroup of the Kalenjin, an Indigenous people who have lived in the Rift Valley of present-day Kenya for hundreds of years. They comprise 196 distinct clans, each with unique roles, responsibilities, and a totem, a living thing to which the clan has a sacred and symbiotic duty of protection.

All land among the Kipsigis was communal. Territories were understood through natural markers, such as hills, ridges, valleys, rivers, and mountains. The concept of private land title had no equivalent in Kipsigis culture. The word for "squatter", sikweta, borrowed from English, did not exist before the British arrived, because the concept had no meaning in a system where land belonged to the community and the community belonged to the land.

Spiritual leadership rested with the Talai clan, believed to hold supernatural powers enabling direct communication with Asis, God, in the Kalenjin language. Sacred gathering sites called Kapkoros served as places of worship, naming ceremonies, and the selection of generational leaders. The Kalenjin oral tradition traces their ancestry to a migration led by "Musaiya" Moses. They share linguistic roots with ancient Hebrew. Their identity is inseparable from their land, their ancestors, and the spiritual practices tied to both.

On June 15, 1895, the lands of present-day Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda were declared a British protectorate. Kenya did not officially become a British colony until 1920.

Around 1900, the Kenya-Uganda Railway extended into Kipsigis territory, bringing colonial administrators, missionaries, and settlers. The Kipsigis mounted organised armed resistance. Led by chief spiritual and military leader Kipchomber Arap Koilegen of the Talai clan, armed with spears, arrows and shields, they conducted ambushes on colonial convoys along the railway. The British were forced to request reinforcements from Uganda and the King's African Rifles.

In 1902, the British approached the Kipsigis with a peace treaty. Koilegen, displaying deep distrust, refused to attend personally. That same year, the colonial government declared 90,000 acres of Kipsigis territory to be property of the British Crown and began violent forced evictions to clear the land for European settlement. The peace treaty and the land grab happened in the same year.

In nearly 70 years of British colonial rule, an estimated 900,000 acres of traditional Kipsigis land were confiscated. The most fertile lands, where the Kipsigis had lived and grown crops including finger millet and sorghum for centuries, were seized first. The British designated these the "White Highlands," reserved exclusively for European settlement.

Between 1919 and 1921, following WWI, an additional 25,000 acres were annexed and leased to British war veterans. The Kipsigis soldiers who also fought in WWI as part of the King's African Rifles received medals. The white soldiers received Kipsigis land.

The corporations that arrived to farm this land are still here today:

• James Finlay (Kenya) — established 1925, acquired 23,000 acres in Kericho. Now supplies Starbucks and other major brands. Harvests 28 million kg of tea annually.
• Brooke Bond — established in Kericho in 1925. Purchased by Unilever in 1984. Now operating as ekaterra (Lipton Tea), sold to CVC Capital Partners in June 2022 for $4.7 billion.
• Williamson Tea — still operating on leased Kipsigis ancestral land.

Today, 200,000 acres of ancestral Kipsigis land remain leased by multinational tea companies. Most colonial-era leases have now expired. The companies continue operating.

The forced evictions were not administrative transfers. They were campaigns of sustained and documented violence. British soldiers killed livestock, burned homes and sacred sites, and drove entire communities into forest exile. Villages were reduced to ash. Families were scattered, and some searched for years to find each other. Some never did.

In 1905, British forces burned the Kapkoros on Tulwap Sigis, the Mountain of the Kipsigis, the most sacred site in the Kipsigis spiritual world. The deliberate destruction of sacred sites became a military strategy to break the cohesion and spiritual resistance of the people.

In 1934, the British government rounded up all Talai, approximately 700 people, and exiled them to Gwassi in western Kenya: a region described by colonial officials themselves as unsuitable for human habitation, infested with malaria and poisonous snakes. Many Talai died there. With their sacred leaders removed, the campaign of terror accelerated.

115,000 surviving victims have been registered since 2018. Their testimonies are documented and have been submitted to the United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights.

Kenya gained independence in 1963. The cheers of "Uhuru" freedom rang out across the country. For the Kipsigis, freedom did not arrive. Land formerly owned by the British Crown became the property of the Kenyan government. The multinational tea companies were permitted to continue their operations undisturbed. The leases transferred. The people did not return.

The Kipsigis cannot visit the graves of their ancestors, buried on land now inside the tea estate boundaries. The companies have repeatedly refused permission. The graves are unmarked by stone in the Kipsigis tradition, their locations known only through natural landscape features that were destroyed when the land was cleared for planting.

The soil itself holds evidence. Shards of traditional Kipsigis pottery are unearthed each time tea plants are pulled up. Bald patches, "hut sites" appear throughout the estates where the alkaline soil, enriched over generations by Kipsigis fires and livestock, cannot grow tea.

Source: Jaclynn Ashly, New Lines Magazine, March 13, 2023

The colonial system was engineered to ensure the Kipsigis would have no economic alternative to working for the companies that took their land. Specific mechanisms included:

• Colonial taxes applied only to Africans, designed to force them into low-wage labour on settler farms
• Africans were legally prohibited from growing cash crops, such as tea, coffee, and sisal, that could compete with white settlers
• Price controls on African-grown maize eliminated any economic threat to settler agriculture
• The kipande pass system, a labour ID worn around the neck, controlled African movement and recorded employment history, creating a permanent record of economic dependency
• Those who remained on their lands were classified as "squatters" and subjected to strict livestock limits, with regular nighttime counts and confiscation of any excess

The descendants of those who built the tea industry on stolen land are today its lowest-paid workforce. Tea pickers in Kericho earn approximately 380–500 shillings per week, roughly $3–4 USD, for hard manual labour.

Does Kenya have a minimum wage? Yes, can it be circumvented absolutely!

This is not a coincidence. It is the continuation of a system that was designed, at the point of a gun, to produce exactly this outcome.

In 2012, Joel Kimetto, who worked for 35 years as a researcher for Brooke Bond on his own ancestral land, received what he describes as a divine vision calling him to reunite the Kipsigis and pursue justice. He began assembling leaders of all 196 clans for the first time in more than 100 years.

The legal campaign has advanced steadily:

• 2018: Registration of surviving victims begins. 115,000 registered to date.
• 2019: Kipsigis and Talai file a complaint with the United Nations.
• 2021: The UN sided with the Kipsigis and wrote to the UK government criticising its failure to provide "effective remedies and reparations."
• August 2022: Kipsigis file a case against the UK at the European Court of Human Rights.

The Kipsigis are demanding: a formal apology, an admission of the atrocities committed, $200 billion in compensation, and the full return of communal ancestral lands. They are also petitioning the Kenyan government to refuse renewal of the expired colonial-era leases.

The UK government has refused to respond meaningfully.

Source: Jaclynn Ashly, New Lines Magazine, March 13, 2023

Kamagomon is a rural village in Kericho County. Surrounded by tea estates, outside the cities, outside the flow of development and political attention. Rural villages like Kamagomon are not forgotten. They are ignored because poverty carries no political weight.

Households in Kamagomon typically lack reliable clean water, safe sanitation, electricity, internet access, and the digital services that now mediate employment, education, government, and healthcare. The primary employer in the region remains the tea industry. For many, the choice is labour on the estates that took their ancestors' land, at wages that keep them in the poverty those same estates engineered, or no income at all.

What the people of Kamagomon have, and what every development model working in this region must understand, is this: they are not passive recipients of misfortune. They are active, capable, ambitious people navigating a structural trap that was built around them over more than a century.

The trap is the problem. Not the people.

Koyta Hope & Rift Initiative does not operate in a neutral landscape. It operates in a specific historical and political context: a community dispossessed by force over more than a century, whose poverty is not random but engineered, whose land was not lost but taken, and whose capacity for self-determination was systematically dismantled by colonial policy and has never been fully restored.

Understanding this is not background. It is the foundation of every decision Koyta makes about how to work, what to build, who owns it, and what "success" means. A water pump that belongs to the community is not the same as a water pump administered by an outside organisation. A cooperative that the village owns is not the same as a program that a nonprofit runs in the village. The form of the intervention carries the same ideological weight as the substance.

The Kipsigis did not lose their capacity for self-determination. It was removed. Koyta's role is not to replace it with a new version of external management. It is to create the conditions — water, power, food security, digital access, enterprise, in which self-determination can be exercised again.

“Pamoja Tunainuka Tena.” To rise again together is to believe again.