Simon Mitambo
In the Tharaka community of Kenya, the living world has always been understood as a council that includes more than human voices. Simon Mitambo shares how earthy governance in Tharaka has always been larger than the human community; it is where the land, the water, the seed and especially the bee have a seat in the council and are a part of decision-making processes. When a voice is removed from the council, it loses its capacity to govern.
The Bee Has Always Had a Seat in the Council
In Nthiguru iri Njuki – the Land of the Bees – governance did not begin with the council of elders. It did not begin with the Mugwe, the spiritual leader and the diviner. It did not begin with any human institution at all. It began with the land reading itself.
Long before the first elder sat in the first Gaarú (space where elders, youth and land dialogue), the bees were already doing what governance requires— observing, signalling, responding, and holding the community accountable to the rhythms of a living world. The swarm leaving its hive before the long rains is not behaving, it is speaking. The bees clustering low in the acacia before a cold front is not an instinct to be noted in a field journal, it is counsel. A counsel that is given freely, in a language that Tharaka people spent generations learning to hear.
In Tharaka’s earthy governance, the living world has always been understood as a council that includes more than human voices. The bee was never outside the decision. The bee was part of how the decision was made.
What Decision Making do Bees Communicates
The bees of Nthiguru iri Njuki do not simply pollinate, they deliberate. They deliberate in the full sense that Tharaka earthy governance has always understood deliberation: as the reading of living signs that carry weight, that bind the community to a course of action, that cannot be ignored without consequence.
Bees communicate when to plant. Tharaka farmers have long read bee behaviour as one of the most reliable signals in the planting calendar. The timing of swarming, the intensity of foraging activity in particular tree species, the directional shift of hive energy, and these are not supplementary information alongside the rains. They are primary indicators of a season’s deeper character: its temperature profile, its humidity, its likely duration. The bee knows the flowering before the flower opens. The farmer who listens, plants with greater confidence, and greater precision, than any calendar can offer.
Bees communicate when to perform rituals. The Kibuka Grand Falls ceremony; the sacred gathering where seeds and rainmaking rituals are performed are called when the living world indicates readiness: when water levels, bird movement, elder reading, and yes, bee behavior converge into a signal that the moment has arrived. The bee’s role here is sort of liturgical. Its presence, its volume, its movement around particular sacred trees near the Falls is part of how the community knows the ceremony will be received. That the covenant between people, land, and sky is in a condition of readiness to be renewed. Bees’ role is critical and is a participant whose behavior can confirm or defer the gathering.
Bees communicate where to tend. The placement of log hives in Tharaka is not random and not merely practical. Hives are placed in relation to sacred groves, to water sources, to the territories of specific ancestral lineages. Where bees thrive tells the community where the land is in health. Where they withdraw from a hillside, from a particular stand of trees, from a riverine corridor is a signal that the relationship between people and that portion of land needs attention, repair, or rest. Bees have, in this way, always been the land’s own monitoring system: not data for external assessment, but a living feedback loop within the community’s own governance.
Bees communicate how to read the rains and seasons. Tharaka ecological knowledge holds that the bee is one of the most sensitive readers of seasonal change. The behaviour of the colony across the short and long rain cycles, their response to drought stress in the vegetation, the sequence of their foraging in different flowering species all this forms a seasonal literature that experienced community members read as fluently as a sky reader reads clouds. In a landscape as ecologically demanding as the semi-arid Tharaka plain, this literature is not supplementary wisdom. It is survival intelligence, that is held collectively, transmitted through community channels and authoritative in ways that override individual human preference or short-term calculation.
Earthy Governance Structure in Tharaka
To understand why the bee has governance standing in Nthiguru iri Njuki, it is necessary to understand the structure Tharaka governance itself. This is because Tharaka governance was never designed only for humans.
While the Njuri Ncheke council of elders is the most visible institution of Tharaka governance, it holds authority over land matters, conflict resolution, ritual timing, and community direction. But the council of elders does not deliberate in isolation. It deliberates within a larger council that includes the Mugwe’s reading of spiritual and ecological signs, the testimony of experienced farmers and herders who have been attending to specific territories, the evidence of the sacred natural sites – the groves, the falls, the rivers and the behaviour of the living world, of which the bee is among the most articulate messengers.
The Gaarú 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. In the Gaarú, an elder’s memory of a drought fifty years ago carries weight alongside a young farmer’s observation of bee behaviour this season. Neither is more “evidence” than the other. Together they constitute the community’s reading of a living situation, in a living place, with living stakes.
Tharaka rites of passage also communicate how this governance literacy is transmitted across generations. Young Tharaka people are not taught about the land as an object of study. They are formed within the land as participants in its governance, learning to read bee behaviour, seasonal signs, water movement, seed response, as a language of civic responsibility. To know when the bees are signalling a late planting season is not folk knowledge. It is governance knowledge. It qualifies you to participate in decisions that affect the whole community.
Regarding Mugwe, the spiritual and political leader from the Tharaka’s Kithuri clan, Mugwe holds the covenant between the human community and the living territory. His authority is not abstract. It is rooted in his ongoing, intimate accountability to the sacred natural sites of Kithuri clan like the Nkunguru, Iri ya Mwambia, the riverine groves, the ancestral territories whose ecological health is both the sign and the substance of his leadership. When the Mugwe and other custodians of sacred natural sites speak about the condition of the land, they are not reporting on the environment but reporting from within it, as custodians.
Together, these cultural and governance institutions – the council of elders, the Gaarú, rites of passage, Mugwe – constitute a governance system that has always been larger than the human community where the land participates, the water participates, the seed participates and the bee, in the Nthiguru iri Njuki, has always had a seat in that council.
What Is Lost When the Bee Is Silenced
The decontextualization of Tharaka knowledge does not only remove information from its context. It removes a voice from a council, and when enough voices are removed, the council loses its capacity to govern.
When the sacred groves near Kibuka Falls sacred natural sites are cleared for a project that a distant institution has assessed as economically beneficial, the bee loses its hive site. The Mugwe and custodians lose the living sign system they read. The council of elders lose one of its most reliable sources of seasonal counsel. The young people coming through rites of passage lose a teacher that no curriculum can replace.
The threat by the High Grand Falls Dam on Tana River is likely to disrupt its ecosystems. It is not only water that will be interrupted but its governance conversation that has been running, unbroken, for generations between the Tharaka people and the river. Tharaka people have lived alongside the river, learned from it, and been held accountable to. The dam does not merely change the hydrology but will silence a participant in earthy governance whose voice cannot be replaced by any scientific findings.
The Bee’s Seat Cannot Be Vacated by a Report
Nthiguru iri Njuki is not waiting to be validated. The bee has been a participant in Tharaka governance since before there was a word for governance in any language other than the one the bees themselves speak, the language of swarm and season, of foraging intensity and hive silence, of arrival and departure that the whole community has, for generations, known how to read.
What the Land of the Bees asks is not recognition but the conditions under which earthy governance can continue to function. The Land of Bees is asking for intact sacred natural sites and territories, free-flowing rivers, living seed systems, and a community whose young people are still being formed, through rites of passage and other initiations, to hear what the bees are saying.
That is what Society for Alternative Learning & Transformation (SALT) is protecting. That is what the Tharaka Biocultural Territory declaration is envisioning. And that is what the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA), in its vision of earthy governance, exists to stand with. And not to study, not to include in an assessment, but to stand with, in solidarity, as kin across territories who understand that the Earth is always already governing, and that our task is simply to listen, and not to interrupt.
Conclusion
The question before us now is not whether Tharaka earthy governance is legitimate. It has already answered that question, across generations, in the health of sacred natural sites and territories, in the survival intelligence of communities who learned to read a demanding landscape by listening to what the land itself was saying. The question before us is whether the external world, its institutions, its networks, its assessments, its well-meaning frameworks will have the humility to stop speaking long enough to hear what the bee already knows.
GTA was not woven to add more voices to the noise, it was woven so that voices like the bee’s; ancient, place-rooted, irreplaceable, might continue to be heard, by the communities whose governance depends on hearing them, and by a world that is beginning, finally, to understand what it has lost by not listening. The governance conversation between the Tharaka people and their living territory has not ended. It asks only one thing of those who would stand alongside it: do not extract. Do not interrupt. Come as learners, stay as kin, and let the bee finish speaking.
Simon Mitambo was born and raised in the Tharaka Indigenous community of Kenya. He is an Earth Jurisprudence Practitioner and a member of the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective. As co-founder of the Society for Alternative Learning and Transformation (SALT) and The Kithino Learning Centre, he accompanies the Tharaka clans in regenerating biocultural diversity. Read more from Simon Mitambo.