How Koitalel's death gave birth to Kericho, tea estates

Workers pick tea using a harvesting machine at a farm in Kericho. [Wilberforce Okwiri,Standard]

Kericho, the beautiful land of lush well-manicured tea bushes has over the ages witnessed more than its fair share of betrayal and treachery.

Mesmerised by its beauty, men of means and power have since the dawn of westernisation plotted to own a piece of this green land at the exclusion of their peers leading to bitter conflicts.

When President William Ruto said Kericho town was in dire need of land for expansion and indicated the county government will have to forcefully acquire 1,000 acres of land for this, he was echoing sentiments expressed 116 years ago.

But something dramatic had happened a year before the desires were put into action. After more than ten years of successful guerilla warfare that frustrated the annexation of the land in Kericho and Nandi counties, tragedy befell 35-year-old Koitalel arap Samoei and he was killed.

The shooting of the legendary warrior and seer on October 19, 1905 by Col Richard Meinertzhagen, marked the end of a 10-year Nandi resistance and opened doors for the colonial government to grab the highlands the white settlers had been thirsting for.

Eight months later on March 5, 1906, His Majesty's commissioner (equivalent of a colonial governor) of East African Protectorate, J Hayes Sadler issued an Executive Order.

"In exercise of powers conferred upon me by East Africa Township ordinance 1903, I hereby declare the following place within the limits hereinafter set forth to be a township for the purposes of the aforesaid ordinance:- the area comprised within a circle having a radius of one mile with the collectors office as the centre."

And with this declaration, Sadler created Kericho town which for over seven decades remained a white man's paradise.

Ironically, the name was borrowed from an illustrious Ogiek medicine-man, Kericho son of Lupo. Kericho was also the father of Kapkerichek clan. A descendant of Kericho's brother (Cheboror) - Kipketer arap Tombo - later administered the famous oath at Kipkelion famously known as Lumbwa. The oath was to bind the locals and the white not to fight as had happened in Nandi resistance.

To ensure the settlers would no longer be bothered by the indigenous people on whose land they had established vast estates, the government hatched a plan to evict residents opposed to appropriation of their ancestral land. More than a century later, the cries of villagers who were evicted from Nandi and Kericho are haunting multinational tea companies now faced with unenviable option of ceding their land.