The evidence of colonial Britain's attempt to eliminate the Talai a century ago is only now coming to light, as the last of the survivors seek justice.
Before 1934, Kibore Cheruiyot Ng'asura's life was peaceful. As a teenager, he spent most of his time looking after his family's livestock. He is Kipsigis, the largest subgroup of the Kalenjin who migrated to the Rift Valley in present-day Kenya centuries ago. Ngasura is also a member of the clan that was once the most powerful among the Kipsigis: the Talai.
The Talai became the Kipsigis' feared spiritual leaders more than 130 years ago, owing to the belief that the clan had supernatural and prophetic abilities allowing them to directly communicate with Asis, the singular creator of all things in the universe. According to Kipsigis oral history, Talai could predict the coming of wars, droughts, or natural disasters, were also medicinemen and rainmakers, and crucially, because of their unique reading of omens, could choose the opportune time for moran to go to war.
The Talai grew rich primarily from tributes from warriors returning from cattle raids. The herds of cattle and goats that stretched for miles down the green pastures near Ng'asura's family's village in Ainamoi, an area of Kericho, were enough to keep Ng'asura busy throughout his youthful days.
He never thought much about the Europeans. Four decades earlier, in 1895, they declared present-day Kenya and Uganda a British protectorate. Kenya officially became a British colony in 1920.
"The white people would sometimes come and take pictures of us," remembers Ng'asura, who is about about 103-years-old. "They would bring us sweets and we would sing and dance for them. When I was a child, I really liked them." He pauses, chuckling faintly.
But on this day in 1934, when Ng'asura was about 14, his typically serene and quiet village erupted into chaos. Kipsigis soldiers and tribal police, who worked for the colonial administration, arrived at his ancestral home. The colonial authorities had yet to provide these officers guns, so they all carried spears.
"The soldiers told all the Talai they needed to leave immediately," recounts Ngasura, who is one of the last living survivors of those mass expulsions. "If you refused they would beat you ruthlessly. Some of the women were raped. We weren't given time to collect our belongings."
From September 1934, hundreds of Talai were rounded up from across Kipsigis territory and transported to a British-controlled detention camp. Months later they would be expelled to the Gwassi Hills, a drought-stricken tse-tse fly-ridden area near Lake Victoria that even colonial officials described as not being suitable for human habitation. Many of them would end up dying there, without ever seeing their ancestral lands again.
It was the final move by the British that they hoped would forever break the Talai's sacred leadership over the Kipsigis, which for decades made it impossible for the colonial authorities to subjugate the tribe.
But nearly 90 years after this fateful day, the Talai and Kipsigis are beginning to heal, reuniting and cleansing themselves of the divisions colonialism had imbued in them. And, now, they want the United Kingdom to pay.
'Look like white worms'
This calamitous future was prophesied by a Talai elder immediately upon the British reaching the shores of the Indian Ocean and stomping their heavy boots into the lands that would become known as Kenya.
The Talai clan is not originally part of the Kipsigis, but was once the Laibons, or spiritual leaders, of the Maasai tribe, who the Talai had merged with upon their arrival in present-day Kenya. The Talai became leaders of the Nandi, another group of the Kalenjin, sometime in the 19th century, when a prolonged drought and famine caused infighting among Maasai clans and between tribes, according to Daniel Ng'asura Tuei, a Talai historian and Ng'asura's son, who documented this oral history in his book The Once Powerful Talai Clan: A Trail of Tears.
As the legend goes, a displaced woman, believed to be the wife of one of the Laibons, and her two twin sons - Kobogoi and Barsabotwo - sought refuge in a cave in Nandi territory. Nandi warriors invited this woman and her young sons into the tribe after witnessing their inexplicable relationship with a group of lions, who dutifully protected them and took turns killing wild animals, dragging their limp bodies to the entrance of the cave, and feeding them.
The Nandi warriors began to refer to these twin boys as "Talai", meaning "the one who is humble" in Kalenjin, owing to their ability to transform a fierce wild animal into a gentle and obedient companion. All members of the Talai clan are descendants of these twin boys.
Soon enough, the Nandi witnessed Kobogoi create water seemingly out of thin air during the drought. Shocked, they recognized the twins' supernatural abilities and made Kobogoi the Nandi's first Talai Orkoiyot, or the community's supreme spiritual leader.
According to Tuei, the Talai historian, Kobogoi's leadership then passed to his grandson, Kimnyole arap Turukat, who is Ng'asura's great grandfather. In the late 19th century, Kimnyole called a meeting with his four sons and the leaders of the neighboring Kalenjin tribes, including the Kipsigis. He had recently caught wind that a group of Nandi, who blamed him for another drought and an epidemic - possibly smallpox - was planning to assassinate him and replace him with one of his sons.
It was a meeting that would inscribe the Talai's unfortunate fate onto the universe. In preparation, Kimnyole requested that one of his wives fill a teret - or a large, rounded traditional clay pot - with boiled water and maiyuek, traditional beer fermented from maize. Kimnyole also added a bull's tongue, pierced with thorns.
When the guests arrived, they each grabbed a long straw from the pot and consumed the traditional drink, according to Tuei. After some time passed, Turukat asked each of his sons to look inside the pot and describe what they could see.
Kimnyole's three eldest sons peered inside, but no vision appeared to them. It was then Koitalel arap Samoei's turn, the youngest of Kimnyole's sons who was in his 20s at the time.
"What do you see?" Kimnyole asked Koitalel. He squinted his eyes, moving his face closer to the liquid inside - until an image finally appeared to him.
"I see people," replied Koitalel. "But they have white skin; they look like white worms. And they have smoke coming from their mouths." At this moment, Kimnyole knew it was this son whom his conspirators would replace him with as the leader of the Nandi.
"Those people you are seeing have just arrived in the eastern waters," Kimnyole told Koitalel, indicating the Europeans' arrival at the port city of Mombasa, along the Indian Ocean.
"They will bring with them something that looks like an iron serpent. It puffs at the head and it will crawl across the earth," he intoned, referring to the Kenya-Uganda railway that the British began constructing from Mombasa in 1896. It would eventually snake across the land, terminating in Kisumu in 1901, on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, running 1,060 kilometers in length.
"They will steal your cattle and all of your land," Kimnyole continued.
Kimnyole then turned to his son Koitalel, looking directly into his startled face, and said: "And these people will be the ones who will kill you, Koitalel." Kimnyole instructed all the attendants to eat pieces of the boiled bull's tongue, as he vowed never to bless the Nandi with the Talai's sacred leadership again.
Kimnyole ordered that after his death, Koitalel was to relocate to the territory of the Keiyo, another subgroup of the Kalenjin, and his other two sons to Kipsigis country, where Kipchomber arap Koilegen, Kimnyole's eldest son and Ng'asura's grandfather, would become the orkoiyot, explains Tuei.
Around 1890, Kimnyole was assassinated by the Nandi, clubbed to death and left to be eaten by hyenas for failing to prevent the infestation of rinderpest and failing to warn the warriors about raids from neighboring communities, according to Tuei. Koitalel, who disobeyed his father's orders to migrate to Keiyo territory, rose to be the orkoiyot of the Nandi, while his brothers were driven out ending up in Kipsigis territory.
A few years later, the iron snake finally slithered its way into Nandi and Kipsigis territory. Their warriors responded by organizing deadly attacks along the railway line, armed with spears and arrows. They were led by Koitalel and Koilegen, respectively.
In 1902, the British and Kipsigis made a peace settlement, which recognized Koilegen as the paramount chief of the Kipsigis. But, in 1905, the final warning of Kimnyole's prophecy was fulfilled: Koitalel was shot and killed by Richard Meinertzhagen, a British intelligence officer, when he similarly invited Koitalel to negotiate a truce.
Meinertzhagen decapitated Koitalel, leaving his body, but taking his severed head, along with several of his possessions, to the United Kingdom. For decades now, the Nandi have been demanding the return of Koitalel's skull, believed to still be in the UK.
'Like a royal family'
"Koilegen was like the king of the Kipsigis," says Ng'asura, who is Koilegen's grandson. His eyes are sunken in and his body is frail; he cannot walk without the support of two men, who wrap Ngasura's arms around their shoulders and slowly guide him inside his home in the rural area of Kipkelion in Kericho County, where he currently resides.
A caretaker pours Ng'asura a warm glass of milk, as he slowly leans forward on a wooden chair to balance the cup between both his hands. Milk is the only food Ngasura has managed to keep down over the last few months. He finally reclines his body back in the chair, making himself comfortable.
"The Kipsigis really respected the Talai," Ng'asura continues. "We were like a royal family. All the Kipsigis women wanted to marry a Talai man, because it would make them into the status of queens." Koilegen had 16 wives during his lifetime.
One of the only pictures hanging on the brown walls of Ng'asura's home is an old black and white framed photograph of Koilegen and his advisors dressed in traditional Omani clothing, taken during a 1906 trip to Mombasa, which at the time was still controlled by the Sultan of Zanzibar.
A year before, in 1905, following the murder of Koitalel in Nandi, the British recognised Koilegen as the sole executive authority among the Kipsigis. Before this Koilegen, along with the rest of the orkoiik, were considered priests and not chiefs.
Koilegen was invited there to attend a celebration of Edward VII, the then king of the United Kingdom. At the event, he was approached by British administrative officers. "They told Koilegen that the [Europeans] wanted part of the Kipsigis land to settle there," Ng'asura says. "And they wanted the Kipsigis to be relocated to Tanganyika [present-day Tanzania]."
"Koilegen returned and held a meeting with all the Kipsigis," Ng'asura explains. "He told them that he had come from the eastern waters and met with the [white people]. And what his father [Kimnyole] warned him about is coming to pass. They want to relocate us to Tanganyika and steal our lands."
The Kipsigis, therefore, needed to resume and strengthen their resistance, Koilegen ordered. Koilegen began organizing a mass revolt. Many of the Kipsigis who the British appointed to be colonial headmen and chiefs, and were expected to be collaborators, were still deeply loyal to Koilegen and the Talai leadership, making it easy for Koilegen to sabotage the British.
But in 1914, just before the outbreak of WWI, the British issued a detention order against Koilegen. The order emanated from the office of the chief secretary in Nairobi and was signed by the Governor. It stated that Koilegen has "heretofore conducted himself so as to be dangerous to peace and good order in the Protectorate."
Koilegen would be relocated to a prison facility in Fort Hall, now Murang'a County in the traditional territory of the Kikuyu in central Kenya, where he was to be held as a "politically detained native." He would be imprisoned there until his death in 1916.
Koilegen's leadership blessings were passed to his son, Kiboin Arap Sitonik, still described by elders as the "last great prophet" of the Talai. According to Tuei, Sitonik, who is Ng'asura's uncle, continued organizing for a mass uprising, instructing Kipsigis warriors to ransack the homes of British settlers and deliver their guns to him and his seven brothers, who were also part of the Talai leadership. They included Ng'asura Arap Chomber - Ng'asura's father and Tuei's grandfather.
Colonial authorities attempted to break the Talai's leadership over the Kipsigis in any way they could. In 1933, the British sentenced Sitonik to eight years in prison; his brothers were similarly imprisoned.
Ng'asura tells me the colonial authorities did not find any weapons on his father, Chomber. But he was still arrested and imprisoned for six months over accepting cattle as gifts from other Kipsigis, who asked him to pray for rain. The colonial officers accused him of cheating the Kipsigis people through claims of "witchcraft," Ng'asura says.
In an act that would haunt the Kipsigis for decades to come, the British convinced 10 Kipsigis representatives, some of whom were converted Christian chiefs, elders, and headmen, to take an oath in front of the detained Talai leadership - including Sitonik and Chomber - hoping to break their sacred bond once and for all. The Kipsigis leaders declared that they wished to separate from the Talai. According to Ng'asura, this involved them drinking water from a human skull.
When the skull was passed to the Talai, who the British expected to respond by similarly cutting their bond with the Kipsigis, they instead refused to touch the skull and promised to never denounce the Kipsigis, as they were "our people, our mothers, sisters, and our daughters."
In February 1934, Douglas Brumage, the Kericho DC, sent a letter to the Provincial Commissioner of the Nyanza province in western Kenya near Lake Victoria. "The government of the [Talai] is very efficient, more efficient than ours has been," Brumage wrote. "And it is extraordinary how they have dovetailed it in with our administration," he continued, noting that many of "our tribal police and native office staff" continue to be "under the influence" of the Talai.
He warned: "If nothing is done to these people in four months to come, then, I don't see ourselves ruling in this part of the colony."
In June 1934, a group of Kipsigis men raided a European-owned farm in the Kinangop area of the Naivasha district, which was owned by Alex and Stella Semini, a settler couple. Planning to steal money, firearms, and ammunition, a commotion broke out when the couple awoke from their sleep. Alex Semini was speared and beaten and later succumbed to his wounds. Stella was assaulted and raped. Several Kipsigis men were later arrested and charged with murder.
With the Talai being blamed for giving the order to rob settler homes, outraged colonial officials led a crackdown on the clan. In September 1934, the "[Talai] Removal Ordinance" was passed into UK law, permitting colonial authorities to expel the Talai en masse from the Kipsigis territory, identifying them as an "evil influence on the whole population."
The Talai would be exiled to the Lambwe Valley in Gwassi, a harsh and arid environment. This massive area located in Nyanza province lay within the Luo people's traditional territory. The area was infested with malaria-carrying mosquitos, tsetse flies, poisonous snakes and crocodiles. Sleeping sickness was rampant.
The ordinance to relocate the Talai underwent intense debate in the UK's Legislative Council, where some British parliamentarians warned that sending the Talai to Gwassi would be a certain death sentence. One described Gwassi as a "valley of death," where 30 years earlier 60 percent of residents in Lambwe valley had been killed by diseases.
The Move
"Everyone was too scared to resist," says Ng'asura, resuming his narration of the 1934 mass expulsions.
As screams travelled across Kipsigis territory, some Kipsigis desperately attempted to save their Talai relatives and neighbours from the soldiers. They hid the Talai in their homes and even adopted them into their non-Talai clans to protect them. To this day, there are Talai who still claim to be from other clans and families, hiding their real identities since 1934.
Nearly 700 Talai, including 308 children - the clan's entire population at the time, minus those who successfully hid from colonial officials - were detained and transported to an open-air detention camp in Kiptere, about 25 kilometers from Kericho town, where they stayed for several months.
"When we arrived they registered all of us and took our fingerprints," Ng'asura remembers. "The women used to sleep in houses grouped together according to their families. Every night the [Kipsigis tribal police] would rape the women, going from house to house."
The brutality of the tribal police meant that the unarmed Talai men were powerless to stop them; eventually the women would stop screaming for help, as assistance never came. "These soldiers were the most despised members of the Kipsigis; they could be merciless to us," Ng'asura says. "They wanted the Talai gone so they could trick our people into believing they were their true leaders."
Months later, escorted by armed British soldiers and tribal police, the Talai began the long trek to Gwassi; it took 14 days. They walked for about 24 kilometers each day and camped during the nights, recounts Ng'asura.
Once they reached Gwassi, they were shocked by the extreme dryness of the area. Already naturally arid, Gwassi at that time was also experiencing a prolonged drought. "There was no grass," says Ng'asura, his old, tired eyes peering at the wall in front of him. "The ground was like dust. But my father had very special powers that could bring rain."
Despite having already been detained over praying for rain back in Kipsigis territory, Ng'asura's father, Chomber risked the ire of colonial soldiers by carrying out traditional prayers. The ritual includes pouring milk and millet on the ground as he prays, his palms outstretched and facing east, requesting that Asis deliver them rain.
According to Ng'asura, the rains came. And then continued to come, causing floods. Soon, a lightning storm brewed. "The rains fell everywhere, covering the ground in water," Ng'asura recounts. "They flooded all the tents and swept them away. People became scared for their lives." The British soldiers were dumbfounded.
"One of the white officers knew about my father's powers," Ng'asura says. "He begged my father to stop the rain. He told him that some of us have no problems with the Talai and they were only following orders." Chomber, seeing the panic that had spread, prayed to Asis to discontinue the rains.
The rains stopped.
'Death was normal'
As downpours overwhelmed the bone-dry lands of Gwassi, an unusual and prolonged drought spread across Kipsigis territory, which typically experiences bountiful rain. A deadly illness, characterized by glandular fever, also afflicted the Kipsigis.
"All of the areas across Kipsigis-land were suffering from this drought," says 60-year-old Peter Bett, the head of the Kipsigis' Kipsamaek clan. "A curse fell upon the land when our leaders were banished. All of nature was thrown out of balance."
With the Talai banished to Gwassi, the British escalated their violent expulsions of the Kipsigis from across their traditional lands; these evictions were particularly brutal, with British soldiers raping and killing men, women, and children.
According to elders, some 700,000 Kipsigis were displaced from about 900,000 acres of their ancestral lands; this land would become part of the 'White Highlands', and were reserved exclusively for European settlement. About 200,000 acres of this land is still being leased to multinational tea companies who acquired them from the British Crown.
The Kipsigis were corralled into an overpopulated "native reserve," where colonial authorities severely restricted their lives; others were transformed into "squatters" as their lands were confiscated out from underneath them. They would spend the rest of their lives labouring on white settler farms and tea plantations.
British missionaries, meanwhile, trained their energies on turning the Kipsigis against the Talai. The Talai, the missionaries preached, were not powerful leaders who had a special connection to God and a sacred duty to lead; they were evil witchdoctors responsible for all of the Kipsigis peoples' miseries.
"The British turned everything into its opposite," explains Ng'asura. "Our prophetic abilities made us well-respected leaders. But the British convinced the Kipsigis that these powers made us evil and dangerous - making them hate or fear the Talai."
Back in Gwassi, death overtook the Talai immediately upon their arrival.
"Gwassi was very harsh," Ng'asura says. "Many people died because of malaria and snake bites. Even the cows were dropping dead each day." Ng'asura's father, Chomber, his brothers, and his stepmothers died in Gwassi. Ngasura is now the only survivor of his family originally expelled there.
With the Talai, the rains also intermittently returned to Gwassi, prompting some Luo who had escaped the area years before to return. "The Luo were very happy with the Talai," Ng'asura remembers. "They used to do ceremonies with us. They became our good friends."
Kiptoing'eng Busienei, 80, was born in Gwassi. He speaks Luo as fluently as Kipsigis. "I don't have anything to compare Gwassi to, because it's all I knew," he says, in a low, raspy voice. "My father used to tell me about the past royalty of the Talai. But it was something I couldn't imagine, having lived only in the misery of Gwassi."
"Death was normal," Busienei adds. "Screaming woke us up each morning with someone finding their loved ones dead. At night, there was constant wailing."
According to Tuei, women and animals experienced frequent miscarriages and stillbirths. At least 200 Talai died in Gwassi, mostly from malaria and snake bites, estimates Tuei, the historian. "The Europeans had a plan to see all the Talai die there," Tuei says. They enacted a clear policy of intentional extermination, he adds.
Tuei shows me a 1937 letter written by the DC of Kisii district to the Provincial Commissioner, Nyanza. In it, the DC suggests checking the birth and death rate of the Talai in Gwassi for the following year.
"The census was being done every 10 years in other indigenous [African] communities," Tuei explains. "But the census was done every year for the Talai. They [colonial authorities] wanted to see how they were dying - to see if their strategy was successful."
In another 1943 letter written nine years after the Talai's expulsion to Gwassi, Brumage, the Kericho DC, states: "I think we should face up to the fact that we should concentrate on the children and, brutal as it may seem, leave the old men to die out gradually in Gwassi. I have little sympathy for the actual age group who made life so difficult for the government."
The Talai were also forced into providing free labour to colonial authorities while in Gwassi, including chopping down trees and harvesting wood for the construction of colonial facilities. Refusal would result in Talai men being publicly flogged, Tuei says.
'All my children were dying'
As the British kept track of the Talai's birth and death rates in Gwassi, the Talai were also unable to reproduce. The Talai are not allowed to marry within their own clan, while they could also not marry Luo men or women because they did not practice circumcision, an important cultural practice among the Kalenjin.
Therefore, following WW2, and in response to a petition by a Talai war veteran, in 1945 the colonial authorities permitted 45 Talai youths to return to Kericho to find wives from the Kipsigis on humanitarian grounds. But they would be imprisoned in a detention center, fenced in by barbed wire, while in Kericho.
That is how Ng'asura met his first wife, Rosa Koe Ng'asura, who is also Tuei's mother. As the British had already turned much of the Kipsigis against the Talai, Koe cried for days when she found out she was to be married to a Talai.
"I thought I would be taken to Gwassi and would never come back," she tells me, resting outside her traditional home on a wheelchair. Koe, who is also around 102-years-old, speaks through fits of laughter and a wide, beaming smile.
On her wedding day, the first time she set eyes on Ngasura, he was being escorted by an armed soldier. "I ran as fast I could," she says, giggling. "He looked like a criminal. I got scared so I tried to escape." She sprinted and hid in some bushes - until her family convinced her to return.
During her pregnancies, Koe would visit Gwassi with special permission from colonial authorities, as it is Kipsigis tradition that the wife stay with her mother-in-law throughout her pregnancy, until she gives birth.
"All my children were dying," remembers Koe, who was also temporarily arrested by the British when she was six months pregnant after being accused of delivering messages between the Talai in Gwassi and Kipsigis leaders in Kericho.
"I gave birth to 12 children and only three of the boys survived," she says. "Most of them died from malaria." Despite the frequent deaths due to the environment in Gwassi, she still continued traveling there during each of her pregnancies - holding tightly onto Kipsigis culture, which colonialism had by then almost entirely deformed.
The Return
On the eve of Kenya's independence in 1962, the British collected the Talai from Gwassi, along with those being held in the detention camp in Kaptere, transported them to Kericho town, and dumped them there. By this time, Koe had spent more than a decade at the detention center with Ng'asura.
"For those of us who survived Gwassi, we returned to Kericho impoverished," Ng'asura says. "We didn't have anything to assist us. We didn't have any land to plant crops or keep cows or goats. We were once royalty and we were transformed into squatters and addicts - the poorest of people."
According to Tuei, many Talai women and girls were forced into prostitution. Drug addiction also became widespread. The Talai had no choice but to brew illegal alcoholic drinks, such as busaa and chang'aa, selling it to the workers in the tea estates.
Koe remembers sneaking into busaa taverns and grabbing leftovers of the alcohol from peoples' drinks. She would bring them home, mixing it with sugar and water. After a few days of allowing it to ferment, she would boil the concoction over a flame and then sell it as chang'aa.
"This is what we had to do to feed the children," she says. "We had no choice. We needed to find ways to survive. Life was so horrible in town."
The only Talai who were able to leave Kericho town were those who made enough from these economic activities to purchase small plots of land elsewhere, according to Tuei. But "most of the Talai who came from Gwassi ended up dying in Kericho town," Tuei says.
Upon the Talai's return, they were also met with widespread stigma around their clan identity, owing to years of brainwashing by British missionaries. While many Kipsigis continued to protect the Talai they had adopted into their clans, others saw them as evil.
The Talai's dishevelled appearance upon their abandonment in Kericho town, along with the illicit activities they were forced to engage in, only seemed to reinforce the prejudicial narratives the British missionaries had instilled.
Throughout his schooling, Tuei says he felt scared to tell other students he was from the Talai clan. "It was very difficult for me," Tuei tells me. "If the students knew I was Talai they would run away from me in fear."
For decades after independence, the Talai continued to live as shadows of their former selves. "The British turned our society inside out," Ng'asura says, leaning back in the chair in the warmth of his home. "They put the least respected people among the Kipsigis into power and stripped their God-ordained leaders of their dignity."
Yet even through these hardships, they were still able to imprint their hopes onto the future. As Koe spent her days bent over massive iron pots, breathing in the toxic fumes emanating from the concoction that she would sell as chang'aa, she was able to afford to send her son Tuei, the Talai historian, to school.
Even in her poverty, Koe, in educating Tuei, was inadvertently creating the foundations for the current battle being waged between the United Kingdom and the Talai, bringing renewed hope to a people that the British had left to die in economic and spiritual devastation.
Like many Kipsigis who had no choice but to seek employment from the same tea companies that had grabbed their lands, Tuei, who is now about 70-years-old, worked for decades as an accountant with Brooke Bond, the imperial British tea producers that at its height controlled over one third of global tea production and distribution that had acquired tens of thousands of Kipsigis traditional lands during the colonial era. In 1984, Brooke Bond was bought by Unilever, the London-based household-goods giant and one of the largest producers of tea in the world. It is now owned by the private equity firm, CVC Capital Partners, which acquired it in 2021.
In the 1980s, Tuei began compiling a history of the Talai; and in 2000 he took early retiremenent from Brook Bond to dedicate his life to demanding reparations from the United Kingdom over the atrocities committed against the Talai.
In 2009, Tuei personally authored a letter to Queen Elizabeth II, who died in September 2023, requesting her acknowledgement of the plight of the Talai. In the letter, Tuei writes: "I have seen old men and women from the community crying and asking God why they were born [...] The young ones who are innocent die because of poverty-related diseases not knowing why they are so poor."
He also urges the Queen to respond so as to avoid the embarrassment of the Talai taking their case to international courts. He concludes: "We are ready to reconcile and forgive each other." Tuei received a reply a few weeks later from Buckingham Palace which stated that the Queen would not intervene in the matter.
Tuei has been petitioning for the Talai to receive financial compensation for these colonial-era injustices. Along with this, he has requested that the British support various mechanisms to alleviate the Talai's poverty, including funding a support home for elderly Talai, an educational foundation to assist Talai children, and a museum to preserve Talai artifacts for future generations.
None of the requests has received a positive response.
From the Kenyan government, Tuei has requested that county officials provide the Talai suitable land to settle, along with prioritizing Talai youths for government employment, arranging bursaries for Talai students qualified to attend university, and supporting Talai-owned income-generating businesses.
Expiation, reconciliation, unification
In 2012, circumstances proved once and for all that if the British had hoped almost a century ago that the Talai's expulsion to Gwassi would permanently divide them from the rest of the Kipsigis, they were sorely wrong.
Joel Kimetto, a Kipsigis elder who is now the head of all the clans, began the long journey of reuniting the people, whose members were left scattered throughout the country following the mass colonial evictions. He called for community meetings, eventually bringing together leaders from all the 196 Kipsigis clans for the first time in more than 100 years.
Kimetto, who is about 72 years old, has led a purification process among the Kipsigis, encouraging the clans to research their history and identify any wrongs they or their ancestors may have committed. The clans then apologise for their ancestors' misdeeds and, when needed, provide compensation to the descendants of the individual, family, or tribe that was wronged -- an attempt to purify their own souls that were left corrupted by colonialism.
In the first of these community meetings, in 2013, the animosity among the Kipsigis towards the Talai was discussed. For the first time, Tuei was able to present a well-documented history of the Talai to his fellow Kipsigis.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
"I showed them that the Talai are not bad... That it was the wazungu [Europeans] who brought these divide-and-rule tactics," Tuei says. "How can someone say that the Talai are bad when it was only after the wazungu came that you started to think this way?"
According to Kimetto, at the end of the meeting all of the Kipsigis clans agreed to "remove this poison from our minds and our society." Many Talai who had hidden their identities for the entirety of their lives, came out for the first time and admitted publicly that they were Talai.
The clans whose leaders had taken an oath against the Talai before their expulsion to Gwassi were made to repent for this sin and ask the Talai for forgiveness. Once the Talai accepted the clan elders' requests for forgiveness, they ate and drank milk together as a symbol of reunification and forgiveness for these historical wrongs.
Since then, the Kipsigis and the Talai have merged their struggles for colonial reparations, approaching the United Kingdom as one unified people - and demanding that the UK repent for their sins and provide $200 billion in compensation to the clans. The Kipsigis also want the full return of their communal lands that were stolen and leased to European tea companies.
In 2021, the United Nations sharply criticised the UK government in a letter over its failure to provide "effective remedies and reparations" following these colonial-era injustices. In August 2022, the Kipsigis filed a case against the UK at the European Court of Human Rights.
Coming home
As part of the Talai clan's purification process, a group of elders embarked on a mission to locate Koilegen's body on the grounds of the colonial prison in Murang'a County. He had been buried by colonial prison officials in circa 1916, without any of his family present.
"Koilegen was under detention, so when he died they [colonial officials] didn't follow any rituals," Tuei explains. "He was buried as a convict." In 2013, a committee of elders performed a series of complex rituals in which they communicated with Koilegen's spirit.
These rituals consist of starting fires by rubbing sticks together. Once the fire becomes large, the elders ask a series of yes or no questions. After each query, they throw a dried mixture of various herbs and fat from a virgin ram onto the flames, which produces a thick smoke.
In Kalenjin religion, the ancestral spirits communicate with their descendants. It is this smoke that allows Assis and the ancestral spirits to communicate with the elders.
If the smoke goes straight into the sky after throwing the dry sacred mixture onto the flames, it means God or their ancestors have accepted their prayers and requests. If it does not, the requests have been rejected.
Other times, elders slaughter a virgin ram, strangling it to death. They then skin the animal and remove its intestines; the elders will be able to "read" the intestines, Tuei explains. These intestines can also communicate various future events to the elders, such as whether war or drought is coming.
Through these rituals, Koilegen's great grandchildren were able to request forgiveness from Koilegen's spirit for their grandparents and parents, who had failed to visit Koilegen's grave. The elders then received permission from Koilegen's spirit to retrieve his body from Murang'a.
After many rounds of ritual fire-making, the elders found that Koilegen wanted to be laid to rest at the home of his deceased grandson Samoei Arap Sonoet, Ng'asura's cousin, in Koibatek in Baringo County in northern Kenya.
They made three more ritual fires for confirmation; Koilegen accepted all of them. The elders called Esther Taprandich Sonoet, Sonoet's eldest wife who is now about 95-years-old and informed her of Koilegen's decision. Taprandich, sitting on a couch in her small home with a wide smile stretching across her face, tells me that she was "very happy" receiving the news -- and she knew exactly where Koilegen was supposed to be buried.
Two decades earlier, in 1994, her husband Sonoet, who died in 1999, told her to collect a seedling with three stems protruding from it and that it was to be planted in a specific location outside their home, Taprandich recounts.
She collected a seedling of the Prunus Africana tree, or tendwet, and brought it to her husband. Sonoet then carried out both Christian and traditional prayers at the site while delicately planting it.
"[Sonoet] poured some milk on the seedling and told all of us to make sure that this tree is well taken care of because it is going to assist you in the future," Taprandich remembers. "I didn't know what that meant until I got the phone call from the elders that Koilegen was to be buried here."
In June 2014, the elders, including Tuei, traveled to Murang'a County to collect Koilegen's remains. But there was a major issue: his grave was unmarked at the prison's communal cemetery. The elders did not know where his body was located.
So they prayed. Removing their shoes and rubbing sticks together to produce the fire, they requested God to show them where Koilegen's remains were buried. According to 62-year-old Joel Kimutai Sonoet, who is Sonoet's son and Koilegen's great grandson, an area of the ground nearby suddenly turned green and the grass instantaneously developed dew on its blades.
"It was the dry season," remembers Kimutai. "And the grass in this one area changed, like it had suddenly received rain. It was marking exactly the grave where Koilegen was buried." They uncovered Koilegen's body and transported it to Taprandich's home, where she directed the men to bury him beside the tree that was planted decades earlier. By the end of the process, the elders had lit about 10 ritual fires and slaughtered four virgin rams.
A shrine dedicated to Koilegen now marks the location of his grave. A week after the burial, "four gray crested cranes came and began dancing and singing upon the grave," Taprandich recounts, confirming to her that Koilegen's soul was finally at peace.
"It is very nice having his spirit here," Taprandich says. "I feel very content and there's a lot of peace inside of me. I'm feeling protected because our home was chosen as Koilegen's final resting place. Now I know that I'm loved by our ancestors."
'The future is green'
While Koilegen's soul is finally at peace, the Talai have a long journey ahead to fully heal from these colonial wounds. Sitonik's body is still buried on the grounds of the prison on Mfangano Island where he died 70 years ago. Talai elders have plans soon to also retrieve the remains of their "last great prophet" and bury him with dignity.
"But we can only heal so much on our own," Tuei says. "We need the British to be a part of this. We cannot become whole again until the British repent for the sins they committed against us and join us in purifying their souls."
Ng'asura slowly shifts in his chair; after more than an hour of recounting his life's history he appears increasingly tired and weak. But he harnesses enough energy to deliver a final revelation:
"The future of the Talai is a very bright future," Ng'asura says. "It is very green. The British found us as rich people and they stole everything from us. Not just our wealth - but our culture, kingdom, community, and dignity."
"When the British compensate us, we will use it to educate our children, buy land, and live like other people," he continues. "Then the natural order that was disrupted will be reinstated. And the Talai will return to their former glory. This is what has been prophesied."
Ng'asura turns his head to me and lifts his index finger, slowly shaking it back and forth: "Go to the United Kingdom," he orders. "Go tell this new king that I am getting very old. I want that compensation before I die. I want to still be alive to witness the British right their wrongs."
Jaclynn Ashly is a freelance journalist.
