Umoja the Women’s Village
The road winds past pineapple plantations and stretches of deep red earth — soil so vivid and fertile I’ve never seen anything like it before. After the pineapples come banana trees, mangoes, sweet potatoes and maize. We drive by coffee plantations, fruit stalls, and flocks of sheep grazing along the roadside, while Mount Kenya looms protectively on the horizon. The journey takes me from Nairobi, through Nanyuki, and north-east towards Somalia — to a place called Archer’s Post.
The Legacy of Colonialism
The greater the beauty of the land, the harsher the story it tells — one of conquest, violence and humiliation. For many Kenyans, that story didn’t end with independence in 1963, no matter what Western history books imply. As I travel north, I pass the faint but persistent scars of colonial continuity.
On the pineapple plantations, my travel companion Bethi Ngari tells me, it’s the American corporation Del Monte that holds power. Local people are allowed to harvest the fruits of their own soil for poor wages. Those who don’t work fast enough are punished — guard dogs are set on them, or they’re beaten by supervisors. The fruit is then preserved, sweetened with industrial sugar, and sold in sterile tins to supermarket chains around the world.
It’s much the same with coffee. Foreign companies still exploit Kenya’s land and people, selling coffee abroad for high prices, while most Kenyans themselves drink instant coffee from Nestlé — small plastic sachets that are cheaper than the aromatic beans grown under their own sun, in their own rich red soil.
Then come the British army bases. For years, villagers nearby have protested against the toxic waste the troops leave behind and the fatal accidents caused by weapons testing. Increasingly, there are also reports of sexual violence — British soldiers assaulting Kenyan women in the surrounding communities.
I let these images of suffering pass in silence, aware that the story of Umoja — the women’s village at Archer’s Post — is woven into this same troubled history.
Rebecca Lolosoli - Founder of Umoja
By the banks of the Ewaso Nyiro River, which runs beside the village, I meet Rebecca Lolosoli — a Samburu woman (the Samburu are an Indigenous community in northern Kenya) and the founder of Umoja. I’ve never met a queen, but sitting next to her, I think I know what it might feel like.
Rebecca radiates wisdom and authority, even through her tiredness. She is constantly travelling — speaking at conferences, organising women, raising awareness about gender-based violence, collecting donations, and holding together a community of more than forty women* and over a hundred children, all of whom have fled violence.
To explain how Africa’s first — and still only — women’s village, Umoja (Swahili for “unity”) came to be, Rebecca takes me back to the early 1990s, when she ran a small grocery shop in Archer’s Post.
She opened it simply to feed her six children and herself. But soon she found she couldn’t ignore the women* who sat outside her shop, destitute, clothed in rags, often with small children, and desperate to tell someone their stories. They told her about the rapes committed by British soldiers — and how their husbands and families had cast them out in shame. Abortion was illegal, so if they became pregnant, they were forced to carry the child and, once it was born, ordered to kill it. Others came to her fleeing their husbands’ beatings.
Many were sick with malaria or other diseases, their children malnourished. Rebecca gave them food and paid hospital bills out of her own meagre income. Her husband and his family warned her to stop, threatened her, argued constantly.
Some women* tried to earn a little money by brewing and selling illegal alcohol. If the police caught them, they were imprisoned — their children left to fend for themselves. Rebecca saw toddlers lying alone in the dirt, mothers dying of illness, children sitting beside their mothers’ corpses for days, thinking they were asleep until the smell became unbearable.