Shrishtee Bajpai
The Tharaka people and their territory known as the Land of Bees is a territory of community of relationships involving bees, rivers, forests, animals, ancestors, seeds and other beings. In this journey, the author learns how Tharaka people preserve their traditional ecological knowledge, revive sacred sites and rituals, Indigenous seeds and farming practices, traditional skills and intergenerational learning. Through all of this, practising forms of governance in which humans understand themselves as part of a living territory. Tharaka’s story attempts to articulate what might conservation and democracy look like if we learned to govern with the rest of nature, rather than over it.
A black kite soars above the water, while a little egret sits on the edge of a river. The river plunges in a stunning drop, and a couple of us stand on the opposite bank, listening to the legends of Kibuka, a great warrior, spiritual leader, medicine man, diviner and rainmaker known to the Tharaka people, who are Bantu speaking indigenous people of the region. It is here that the Kathita River meets the Tana River, in such a magnificent way that one isn’t surprised that the waterfalls are a sacred site.
The Kibuka waterfall, which forms part of Tharaka territory, is a site of sacred gathering. A site of repentance, appeasement, learning, surrender, rituals, revival and regeneration. But importantly, it is a site animated with stories of great warriors, whose lives narrate worldviews and lessons for the community. And so, when the site was proposed for the large-scale High Grand Falls Power Station project, the community reached back to the falls, called upon and prayed to the ancestors, performed rituals, and the project was rolled back in 2025 by the government1.
Kibuka Grand Falls in the county of Tharaka Nithi. Picture credits: Shrishtee Bajpai
Simon Mitambo, a Tharaka elder, is the executive secretary of the Society of Alternatives Learning and Transformation (SALT), Kenya. He narrates, “Kibuka’s story is an important story for Tharaka people. The story of Kibuka, a miraculous child who came with the rains and sought to protect his people and the animals around them. When his teachings were betrayed, he left for the waterfalls, leaving the people with a curse. It is a reminder that we need to listen to the lessons of our ancestors, pay our respects to them, and only then can we restore the natural balance and sustain life here. We couldn’t let this site be destroyed by a dam project or any other such destruction.”
Every year, during the month of September, when the trees have shed all their leaves and the earth awaits the rains, Tharaka people from all 30 clans gather at this sacred natural site of 21 acres to perform rituals. “It was important to us to appease and honour this good ancestor who was hurt in the past. We invented an appeasement ceremony that has never been performed for years,” adds Simon. For the last seven years, led by six elders of the community, the Tharaka people have been gathering here, where they re-narrate the legends of Kibuka and the lessons they have learnt, and restore their relationship with the rivers, forests, birds, crocodiles, sky, and several other beings that make Kibuka. Clans have to make offerings, including a mixture of seeds and locally made honey liquor, for appeasement in return for abundant rains, healthy seeds and a good harvest.
But Kibuka is a site that is part of a larger territory called Tharaka, a constituency within Kenya’s Tharaka Nithi County, located on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya and the upper Tana River. Primarily an arid and semi-arid land, the region is locally known as Nthiguru iri Njuki (“The Land of the Bees”).
Seeding regeneration
While driving up to Tharaka territory from Nairobi city, we crossed many ecosystems where biodiversity and Indigenous agricultural systems are tightly bound to climate patterns. Tending land, protecting Indigenous seeds, reviving traditional methods of cultivation and harvesting, including performing ceremonies celebrating land, seed, rain, sky, and the ancestors, are important parts of rejuvenation. Over the last few years, Simon and colleagues of SALT have been trying to revive organic farming and have helped communities improve harvests while maintaining relationships with the soil. They have demonstrated how Indigenous food systems can help revive and preserve diverse seed varieties, many of which are otherwise becoming extinct. They can offer important lessons for creating more biodiversity-friendly and climate-resilient food systems.
The Gaaru is the space where this wider council is held, not a building but a practice of gathering that draws knowledge from multiple sources and holds them in dialogue. Picture credits: Shrishtee Bajpai
Agostine Mwaniki, who has been associated with SALT for several years, says, while addressing the community in Gaaru – a council of elders and a community gathering space – “And the end goal is peaceful coexistence. That is at the heart of SALT’s work. And so, the interconnected elements that exist are an important part of this work. We need to understand why sacred natural sites are important, and how that revival will affect all of the community. The songs for different seasons, sowing, healing, harvesting, songs by young women, older men, children – all of these are an important part of meaning-making and collective belonging.”
The work of SALT is not simply about preserving tradition. It is about recovering the relationships, knowledge and ways of living embedded within traditions and bringing them into the present. Sacred natural sites, revival of indigenous seeds, celebrating wild foods, traditional songs, old rituals, animals, stories and rites of passage are all interconnected expressions of a living culture. Through reviving them, communities are not merely recovering the past; they are rebuilding collective belonging and imagining ways of living together towards peaceful coexistence.
When we reach, Grandmother Karuru, meaning squirrel in the Tharakan language, welcomes us to her homestead and quickly gets back to arranging some items that they have been working on with the kids.
Over the last several years, SALT, through community dialogues, ecological maps and calendars, and nature experiential learning processes, has been helping revive Indigenous knowledge and practices rooted in its Earth-centred methodologies. Grandmother Karuru has been an important carrier and facilitator of that wisdom. “Education does not happen only in schools; we need to learn from the forest, from rivers and mountains, just like we learn from our elders,” said Karuru while explaining to me their initiative on intergenerational learning.
Community dialogue in Kamarandi territory. Picture credits: Shrishtee Bajpai
This rings quite true. The concern is not only that humans have stopped listening to nature, but that nature has, in turn, stopped being part of the conversation. The challenge is therefore to learn again to listen to what nature is telling us. For Tharaka people, including many Indigenous and other nature-dependent communities, this has always been true, but the ability to listen to nature and also have nature around them is increasingly diminishing.
“Loss of relationship with nature results in loss of relationship with our local economy too,” adds Simon and highlights an interesting contradiction around traditional crafts and skills. People value and want beautiful traditional craft products, particularly because they can provide livelihood opportunities. Yet the younger generations are increasingly not learning the skills required to make them. This raises the need to revive traditional skills such as beadwork and other forms of craftsmanship. SALT, along with Grandmother Karuru, has specifically been aiming not simply to focus on cultural preservation, but rather to rebuild an eco-economy in which traditional knowledge, livelihoods, culture and nature reinforce one another. Such an economy can provide livelihoods while also maintaining relationships with nature.
Welcome ceremony by members of Kamarandi. Picture credits: Shrishtee Bajpai
Governing like Bees
Organising such work across 2,000+ members across Tharaka territory is not easy. But they learn from the bees how to do that. Tharaka people hope to be like bees. “Our grazing, our learning, and all work is organised just like how bees work, which is that we give different roles to different people, then we divide ourselves in group work, and we come back to it together,” says Simon. The word for governance is called Wibathi.
One of the elders said, “Water is a prayer, and honeybees are like the answer to that prayer.” While for some, bees have acquired an important position in their traditions, they cannot live in any place where there are no bees. Others added that bees are much respected and can know things of their own. They are very intelligent beings.
Curiously, I asked them how bees structure their beehive. Mugwe, the wisdom keeper and elder of one of the communities we visited, started by saying, “There are bees that will close the door, some at the middle and others at the last. Within which there are six types: one who builds, one who makes honey, one who brings nectar, one who brings water, one who is like a policeman to keep check, and one who gives birth to bees, the queen bee. And there could be more in the hive, but they know of that only, and the queen bee is called Nthamari and sometimes queen bees also other bees. So when you look at the hives, there are insects and wasps, and they are being eaten. They know how to eat.”
River Kithino, one of the sacred natural sites near Gaaru. Picture credits: Shrishtee Bajpai
Bees are not just messengers but deliberate participants in the decision-making process as Simon mentions in his earlier article on this website. They communicate when to plant, as they provide the most reliable signals for the planting calendar; they communicate when to perform rituals, when to tend, and how to read the seasons.
Through the community dialogues in 2013, SALT initiated discussions around the revival of cultural practices, bee keeping being one of them. In 2018, they finally agreed to collectively perform the rituals. “We decided that we are coming in good faith and hence worthy,” says Simon, and elders and community representatives started becoming convinced to perform the rituals again. It was important to maintain certain constraints, such as keeping themselves clean, not having sex, and not eating meat before performing the ceremonies.
But there is an even more difficult problem: how such practices are perceived in a highly Christianised society. “To practise our traditions, entering our forests, we are labelled as performing witchcraft,” said Mugwe. “But when we’re talking about the traditions, when we’re talking about organic farming, we’re talking about our soils, we’re talking about our seeds, we’re talking about traditional skills like weaving, dancing, beading. So it’s really bridging back the wisdom of traditions, some things that are important in the current times that we are living in,” added Mugwe.
Returning to one’s roots
Simon shared a deeply personal story about his relationship with the place and his community. He was brought up here, he grazed animals, and he went through important rites of passage here. He subsequently left and continued his life elsewhere. Over time, he developed a desire to reconnect and return to his community. His experience raised a larger question about colonisation and disconnection. “As much as we can run away from it, we will come back to our rituals. We will come back to our roots. We’ll come back to where we always belong,” shares Simon while the community listens, nodding their heads.
Umuntu – a good relationship of care about others, a cosmological guide to all that unfolds in Eastern Kenya. For people in Tharaka, governance looks like taking care of a web of relationships. A 96-year-old grandmother, Gatumi, sat through the meeting alert, listening to all the stories. After much discussion, she said, “People will critique us. Say this and that. But we need to find strength in our roots. Our stories of origin. We need to value our community, our rituals, our language. While we listen to others and learn, we mustn’t stop in our path.”
Simon addressing the community members at Gaaru. Picture credits: Shrishtee Bajpai
Stories as a weave
One evening, close to the Kibuka Grand Falls, looking at the sacred mountain, Simon, Agostine, and I enjoyed fresh fish from the Tana River, caught and cooked for us. I asked them why stories are so important. Why is every site, every ritual, animated with stories? Simon shared something incredibly moving: “Stories don’t impose; they weave. When I tell you a story, I invite a story. Story is a way of weaving lived realities. Stories are ways of sense-making and meaning-making. Stories are a trust-building exercise. But stories need good receivers. Listeners can’t be distracted or uninterested.”
The stories of Simon, Agostine, and their community, along with several other Indigenous peoples and local communities across the world, are a tapestry of possibilities – a pluriverse of not just different relationships with nature, but also non-extractive economies of care, enoughness and equitable distribution. They point to a deeper, wiser, more life-affirming notion of democracy than the one currently prevalent across the planet. They embed a notion of Earthy Governance – a form of decision-making that is not centred on humans alone, but also encompasses the rest of nature.
All of this celebrates a plurality of existences, contexts and forms of knowledge.
Acknowledgement: the author is indebted to Simon and Agostine for being generous hosts. This article wouldn’t have been possible without their support along with the communities and people she met who shared their wisdom with openness and kindness.
Shrishtee is a researcher and a writer working on themes of interspecies justice, earthy governance, and systemic transformations. She is a member of Kalpavriksh, an environmental action group in India and coordinates Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence) network that researches, documents, networks around systemic alternatives. She is the core team member of Global Tapestry of Alternatives ,and was part of Emerging Futures: Visionaries Programme of Joseph Rowntree Foundation. She also serves on the Governing Council of Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.
In this milieu, she can also be found birdwatching, photographing tiny creatures, exploring new music, and collecting books she swears she’ll read—eventually.
1 The National Treasury of Kenya officially terminated the Ksh 337 billion (~$2.6 billion) contract for the High Grand Falls Dam project on July 2, 2025: Business Daily Africa