# Taita-Taveta and Tsavo: war corridor, sisal estates, parks and landlessness

Taita-Taveta is a corridor story: Taita hills, Taveta caravan routes, mission coffee, Tsavo railway violence, First World War occupation, sisal estates, labour reserve status, national parks and Waata marginalisation.

*This story part of: Kenya: from the Swahili coast to the republic*
*This story parallel: The colonial map of Kenya: neglected regions and regional inequality*
*This story parallel: Fortress conservation: parks, conservancies, and the landless*
*This story continues: The peoples Kenya forgot: Taita, the Tana, the foragers, and the Nubians*
*This story part of: Ecology and environment*

## c. 1000 — Bantu farmers settle the Taita Hills

The Taita are a Bantu-speaking people who settled the isolated Taita Hills, a set of forested mountain blocks rising above the dry Tsavo plains. They grew out of several waves of migrants who clustered into tight hill communities and terraced the slopes for farming. The exact make-up of these early groups is reconstructed from language and oral tradition, so the details are debated.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## c. 1800 — Taita fighi charms and the ancestor skull caves

Taita religion centred on the ancestors. When an elder died, the skull was later removed and placed with others in ngomenyi rock shelters and caves, where the living brought offerings and asked for help. Communities were also guarded by fighi, protective medicine-charms set at the boundaries of a settlement to keep out enemies and disease. These practices were recorded in detail by ethnographers.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## c. 1800 — The Taveta hold the Chala caravan corridor

The Taveta lived in a dense forest belt near Lake Chala on the edge of Kilimanjaro, close to what is now the Tanzania border. Their fenced forest home sat on the caravan route between the coast and the Chagga kingdoms of the mountain. As a small people in a strategic spot, they made a living as traders, guides and hosts to passing caravans.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## 1892 — Holy Ghost Fathers open the Bura mission in Taita

The Holy Ghost Fathers, also called the Spiritans, extended their East African work inland from the coast and founded a station at Bura in the Taita Hills in 1892, one of the earliest Catholic missions in Kenya. They built a church, school, and farm and trained catechists to spread the faith. The Spiritans became the pioneering Catholic order along the Kenya coast and its hinterland.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## 1893 — Coffee begins as a mission and settler crop

Coffee was first planted at Bura in the Taita Hills in 1893, then at Kibwezi and Kikuyu near Nairobi. The crop became a settler and mission crop before African planting was allowed under control. Coffee did not just grow on Kenyan soil; it entered through alienated land, licensing, grading, auction and marketing rules.

*Source: History - Coffee Directorate*

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## 1898 — The man-eaters of Tsavo

During construction of the Tsavo River bridge, two maneless male lions preyed on railway workers over several months, halting work and terrifying the camps until engineer J.H. Patterson shot them. Patterson later claimed the lions killed 135 people, but studies of the lions' remains and bone chemistry suggest a toll closer to 35, so the true number is contested. The episode became one of the most famous stories of the colonial railway.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

> The district supplied labour while estates, ranches and parks took the best space.

## c. 1910 — Taita-Taveta becomes a colonial labour reserve

Colonial rule alienated much of the plains land around the Taita Hills for settler estates, railways and sisal plantations, penning the Taita into their hills. With little room to farm, men were drawn into wage labour on the sisal and the Voi railway works. The community was pulled into the bottom of a cash economy that it did not control.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## August 1914 — Taveta is occupied in the East Africa campaign

German forces occupied Taveta at the start of the First World War in East Africa, making Taita-Taveta a front-line corridor between the coast, Kilimanjaro and the railway interior. The war deepened labour recruitment, carrier service and military disruption in the region.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## c. 1920 — Sisal estates lock up Taita-Taveta land

Large sisal estates became a defining feature of Taita-Taveta land politics. The crop tied the district to export agriculture while local communities lived with labour recruitment, dryland pressure, wildlife boundaries and long-running claims that too much land sat under estates, ranches and parks.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## 1948 — Tsavo becomes a park and the Waata become "poachers"

When Tsavo was gazetted as a national park in 1948, land the Waata and Orma had used became off-limits and Waata hunting was recast as criminal poaching. Colonial authorities pursued Waata hunters, with sweeps in the mid-1950s driving them out of the park. Barred from their grounds and unlicensed, they lost the basis of their livelihood.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## April 1948 — Tsavo gazetted as a vast protected wilderness

The colonial government created Tsavo National Park, one of the largest protected areas in the world at over twenty thousand square kilometres. Kamba, Orma and other communities who used the land for grazing, hunting and honey were excluded from the new park. Its sheer size showed how much territory the wilderness-without-people idea could remove from local use in a single stroke.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## 1977 — The 1977 hunting ban deepens Waata marginalisation

Kenya's total hunting ban finished the outlawing of Waata subsistence begun under colonial game laws. Many struggled to make a living from farming in dry, poor country, and some turned to illegal ivory trading or charcoal burning while others drifted to towns. The Waata slid into poverty and near-invisibility as a distinct people.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*

## c. 2020 — Waata trackers turn to elephant conservation

In recent years some Waata have applied their bush and tracking skills to wildlife protection, working with conservation groups around Tsavo to guard the elephants their ancestors once hunted. The community, numbering only a few thousand, seeks recognition, land, and a place in Kenya's conservation economy. The shift from hunters to elephant keepers marks a hard adaptation.

*Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010*

*Source: Sisal Profile*

*Source: Taveta, Occupation of*