The Watu Project

16/03/2026

In the mid-1940s, coastal Kenya was gripped by a chilling rumor. People spoke of Watu wa Mumiani or blood collectors believed to abduct locals and drain their blood to make a substance called mumia. Some believed these figures were connected to the colonial government.

Today, historians like Zebulon Dingley, writing in The Journal of African History, argue that we shouldn’t treat this as a literal vampire story. Instead, as Dingley explores in his 2018 study of the 1945 “Mumiani” scares, these rumors reflected the brutal conditions people were living under.

Between 1944 and 1945, over 1,500 Digo men were forced into labor in Taveta. At the same time, famine devastated the region. Land was controlled, labour was forced, and food was scarce. When people feel exploited and abandoned, trust collapses, and in that vacuum stories grow.

It raises an uncomfortable question- when societies face crisis like hunger, unemployment, environmental disasters, or governments that feel against the very people they are meant to serve, how do people make sense of it? History sometimes reveals how people explain power when it stops protecting them.

What do you think the Watu wa Mumiani story was really about?

If you’d like to read Zebulon Dingley’s full research paper, DM for the link.

08/11/2023

Image colorised using AI.

This photo, possibly taken between 1890-1915 (based on attire), is of a young Sikh family in Kenya.

Pictured are a father, dressed in a Victorian style 3 piece suit, with a pocket watch and walking stick.
His 4 children, decked in exquisite clothing and jewellery, and their male domestic attendant.

Their regalia suggests a wealthy family background.

The absence of the mother is not uncommon. During that time period, South Asian women, despite their religious background, were subjected to “purdah”. This typically meant that they would not appear in public unveiled. Even if they would appear in public, photographs were not a common practice. Passports of women in purdah are also known not to include any photographs.

Swipe to see the original version of this image.

24/01/2023

Two school girls in Menangai. Circa 1962.
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During the colonial times in Kenya, schools were segregated. Europeans, Asians, and Africans had their own schools, of varying facilities and curriculums. The European schools were the best equipped, the Asian curriculum was altered to include communal languages such as Gujarati and Punjabi, and the African schools were deliberately disregarded.
A lack of equal opportunities in terms of education meant that the British could maintain the status quo that kept them on a position of extreme privilege.
European superiority was reflected in the statements of one official who relayed to the colonial office that the duty of his administration was to “teach Africans to be good Africans and not bad Europeans”. The prejudice that Europeans had against Africans meant that they believed that Africans, even while going to school, should be kept unskilled- rarely being able to progress above the position of a clerk. African tribes in Kenya would pay the most taxes but get the least in return.
The Asian struggle was that of wanting equality with the Europeans. Major-General Sir Edward Northey, who became governor in 1919, told the Indians that "universal suffrage for the Asiatics in this protectorate on equality with the whites is out of the question.” (Cheriyot, 1974)

This picture of two school girls of Asian and an African descent was taken in the Menangai area during an inter-school sports tournament, the only time different ethnicities and genders were allowed to interact. The girl on the left, Baljinder Sahans, would later recount how fond she was of the freedom of the inter-school tournaments. After all, it was where she ended up meeting her future husband, a boy she radically chose for herself.

Would you like to know more about that story? Comment below!

05/10/2022

Did you know Kenya had vampires? We can’t wait to tell you all about it!
Buckle your seats and join us for a mystical ride into the legends and lore of Kenya from the 14th-20th of November as we embark on telling you enthralling tales!

15/09/2022

The Kolowa Massacre - 1950

“After the shooting began, there was chaos. People were falling down, other people were running away. It was madness… I remember trying to check to see if there were other people from my village area, whether they were still alive or where they were dead. There was so much yelling and crying, the noise was terrible.” Lokoulem Lochwa, 2006

The colonial times saw a rise in faith movements that were considered seditious by the British forces. One of these was the Dini ya Msambwa. Its founder, Elijah Masinde (image 4), gained followers across the country who rejected colonial supremacy. His teachings reached Baringo and a man named Lukas Pkech emerged to spearhead the movement for the Pokot people.
Pkech set off on pilgrimage with 500 men. A man named Tom Collins, came across them and claimed to have heard the group shouting anti-colonial slogans. Collins reported the matter to the district commissioner, Arthur Simpson who took a “pretty serious view on the anti-white sedition”.
Tribal constables were dispatched to arrest Pkech, but were unable to do so. The DC determined that this accounted for immediate police assistance and the forces set off to arrest Pkech.
On the 24th of April, Pkech and his followers reached Kolowa in the midst of a heavy downpour of rain. When the sky cleared, they heard vehicles approaching. When the Europeans arrived, Pkech grew agitated and drafted a quick letter in Swahili, which he couldn’t speak very well, requesting not to be shot at.
The Pokot approached the Europeans dancing, as was customary when headed to a public meeting. The DC shouted at the Pokot to lay down their spears, however, many of them couldn’t understand what was being said, and spread out. This spreading out was misconstrued as an attack formation and retaliation followed.
Eyewitnesses in 2006 claimed that shots were fired at Pkech, one entering his head, resulting in death. Later, when the site was visited with reinforcements, spears belonging to the Pokot were retrieved with their leather blade guards still on, indicating that they were not used and there was no intention by the Pokot to attack.

10/09/2022

120 years ago, at the bank of the Tana River, a council of elders called the Kidjo would meet under the cover of darkness in a sacred grove to ask for spiritual guidance for the Pokomo people. They would beat the skin of a drum they call the ngadji, and it’s loud voice would boom across the Pokomo kingdom.
Said Kumbi-a-Wadesa (image 1), chair of the Kidjo, spoke to the Washington Post in 2019, and described the drum as the source of power of the Pokomo people.
Jens “Bull” Anderssen (image 4) was a Norwegian wood trader commissioned by the British East Africa Protectorate to oversee the Pokomo land. The reverence the Pokomo gave to the ngadji was so profound that no one except members of the Kidjo would lay eyes on it. Anderssen was expected to abide by the same rules, however the Pokomo say he and his men took it away from the Kidjo by holding them at gunpoint.
“The British took the ngadji because they had the power to do so,” Wadesa said. The kidjo, who were custodians of culture, law and order, and the wellbeing of orphans and widows. This started to crumble after the ngadji was stolen.
The British Museum acknowledges that the ngadji was “confiscated” but also say that it was “donated” to their collections in 1908. Repatriation requests are seldom considered by them owing to the fact that they would have nothing left to show from their loot if they were to return everything.
The current king of the Pokomo, His Majesty Makorani-a-Mungase VII said “if you combined Britain’s parliamentary mace and the Queen’s crown jewels, you would still not equal the amount of cultural significance the ngadji had for us. Its loss has stripped us of our sense of who we are.”
In 2016, the king’s brother, Baiba Dhidha Mjidho, convinced the British Museum to let him see the ngadji which is stored in a large specimen storage room, and not exhibited. He confirmed that the ngadji was intact. This incident renewed hope in the Kidjo that their source of power could be returned, however they are not sure how to go about the process, the British don’t seem keen on repatriation, and the Kenyan government doesn’t have strong structures in place to facilitate restitution claims.

09/09/2022

Kericho’s Apartheid
“There is blood in the tea. People were killed. Livestock was stolen. Land was taken. Women were r***d... And a crop was planted.”
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I will be doing a tremendous disservice if I didn’t talk about the Crown’s atrocities in Kenya.
One of the many is the eviction of the Talai and Kipsigis people from their ancestral land in Kericho and Bomet.
500,000 acres of land was stripped from the native tribes and transformed into massive tea plantations to feed the growing appetite of the empire.
The brutal eviction of the Talai and the Kipsigis was recounted by Kibore Cheruiyot Ngasura in 2019 at the age of 95. He was the only survivor of the mass deportations of 1934.
Ngasura described the “native reserves” that were allotted to his people instead.
“Life was so difficult. People were dying”. He said.
They were interred at Gwasi, which was a two week walk from the Kericho and Bomet highlands. Gwasi was an unforgiving land- barren, no water, and where malaria was endemic.
Other historians recount the atrocities of sexual violence committed against women as their husbands were tortured during the exodus.
The Kenya National Land Commission ruled in 2019 that grave injustices were committed by the Empire against the Talai and the Kipsigis and recommended that the British government and the British registered tea companies that still operate on the stolen land look into the matter and address the exploitation.

Ngasura, reaching the end of his years, just wants an apology before he dies. "After that, we would shake the hands of the British, and forget the past," he said.

Today, Unilever Ltd, James Finlay Tea, George Williamson Tea, Sotik Tea and Sotik Highlands Tea continue to occupy stolen lands, artificially fix the price of tea to deny local farmers a fair price, and exploit tea workers with appalling working conditions, substandard housing, with no investment in local schools and communities.

There have been no reparations, no apologies, and no acknowledgement of the plight of the people whose land was so brutally stolen.

I don’t know if Ngasura is still alive today, but I doubt he will ever receive the apology he deserves.

08/09/2022

Queen Elizabeth II in Kenya through the years

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At the foothills of Mt Kenya, on the 6th of February 1952, Princess Elizabeth found out about the death of her father King George VI.
She was now Queen.

When Kenya gained independence in 1963, she remained head of state until 1964 when a new constitution was adopted which abolished the monarchy.

Her 70 year old reign began here in Kenya in 1952, and through the years she came back 3 more times- in 1972, 1983, and 1991.

Kenya remains a part of the Commonwealth association alongside 55 other countries which were once British colonies, and are supported by the Commonwealth secretariat to achieve development, democracy, and peace. Queen Elizabeth was greatly fond of the Commonwealth and encouraged its work with a spirit of unity and friendship.

The Queen passed away earlier this evening at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. May she rest in peace.

10/08/2022

An amazing story about a brush with disaster told by a grandson. Swipe to read about how a first aid uniform saved Waweru Maina’s life during the 1952 State of Emergency 70 years ago!

04/06/2022

“Parekh’s clients drew on playful references to nineteen-sixties Black American fashion and Bollywood, symbols of a new, global diasporic vernacular. The aesthetic progression of the portraits charts Kenya’s changing identity, as decolonization broadened the visual language through which sitters expressed themselves, while an influx of formerly rural residents into Mombasa allowed for new groups to have their pictures taken.”

For almost half a century, N. V. Parekh’s studio captured the middle classes from Mombasa and elsewhere as they wanted to be seen.