Loresho: The quiet residence within Nairobi
Kibagare in Loresho. Image sourced from Mapio
Like many areas within the place of cool waters, the name Loresho is derived from a Maa word – Oloressho that was used to describe the area where a neighbourhood of over 500 homes now sits.
Loresho, the coffee estate
From the Maasai grasslands it was taken over in the 1920s by Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere. He put up an expansive coffee estate and built a home with magnificent views of Mount Kenya which even hosted royalty in 1928.
The high altitude, which still defines the chillier than average climate the neighbourhood enjoys, was perfect for growing one of the earliest cash crops generated in Kenya. The challenge was the volatile prices of coffee which didn’t bring in the reward that Delamere had hoped. The plantation set in place the foundation of the duality that Loresho shares with its neighbours.
Several farmworkers resided on the expansive 400-acre farm. When the land was auctioned and sold to help clear Delamere’s humongous debts after his death in 1931, many of the workers were relegated to the outskirts forming the communities that still inhabit Kangemi, Michigwe and Kibagare.
Loresho, the housing estate
Meanwhile, many settler families set up individual homes on large plots around Kibagare Valley bordering Lower Kabete after the breakup of the plantation, an area that still remains a closed and exclusive enclave till today.
By the late 1960s the land was in the hands of the Loresho Housing Company under Savings and Loan. At the time this was an independent bank in Kenya and it undertook a development project of a housing estate.
The project began in earnest. Single residential units of four bedroomed bungalows were built along a winding crescent where coffee once dominated the valley. The earliest buyers took up units in the early 1970s with houses purchased for around Ksh 160,000 each. It became the first completely non-segregated Nairobi estate with large half-acre plots.
The first Loresho home owners
While Africans had started purchasing larger homes in previously white-only enclaves, Loresho was open to anyone who could afford the mortgage. As a result, Nairobi’s growing professionals took up many of the homes – senior civil servants, university lecturers and private sector employees. They all had in common a precious payslip with which to unlock a loan.
The scheme proved so successful that construction of a second phase known as Loresho South began in the late seventies with an additional 200 homes. Land has always been highly valued in Kenya. And while only five years had passed, Loresho houses by then cost upwards of Ksh 400,000.
The growing community
Over time the community of Loresho established itself. The Presbyterian Church of East Africa took up the faith land allotment and set up Loresho Community Church in the 1980s. It started with a Sunday school which began to build societal ties across the vast multiracial estate. While it had a designated shopping centre, there were no buildings until the late 1990s. Until then, two kiosks served the entire community: Kahara’s and Mama Tony’s!
Life was languid in this quiet neighbourhood, served by the 117 bus which only came in twice a day (but always on time). Anybody else needing public transport would have walk a few healthy kilometres away to the Kangemi bridge to catch a 22 or 23 matatu.
For years Loresho was one of the safest spots in Nairobi to live. Gates only closed at night and neighbourhood kids knew whose house to go to by the trail of bikes left out on sidewalks. Games of shake and nyabs would dominate the streets during the holidays.
Loresho South Estate (1981). Image by mwihaki
From threats to safety measures
By the late nighties however, the security situation in Nairobi had changed drastically. Burglaries had become common in the neighbourhood.
Many houses emptied of renters as insecurity took hold. An unkempt look became the norm on once carefully tended compounds causing the homeowners of Loresho to rally together.
For years a plot allocated to a police post had been the target of a land grab. Residents advocated and took to the streets demolishing the structures of the grabbers and demanding the establishment of police presence. It was eventually granted and with community efforts a permanent Police Post was set up.
The Church on the other hand had grown. It became the melting pot of the estate’s youth, irrespective of their denomination. After the establishment of security groups in different sections, normalcy took hold once again by the mid 2000s.
Image credit: Worldwide Elevation Map Finder
And today…
Today Loresho is thriving once again, a little-known green treasure on what used to be the outskirts of Nairobi. A community made up of retirees and young families. They are all making the most of forty years of investments in community, in greenery and in security.
#MitaaYetu #HistoryOfLoresho
5 Comments
Excellent capture. A must read for current residents all three Loresho sub-estates: North, South and Central.
Will share among my neighbours who have no idea about their estate’s chequered history.
Much appreciated
Thank you for this. It is a nice place to call home.
Whoever wrote the “history” of Loresho in this series could do with solid and actual history of the place by some reference to Godfrey Muriuki’s History of the Kikuyu, Louis Leakey’s History of the Southern Kikuyu and most of all some reference to the evidence adduced on both sides of contestants of land rights in southern Kiambu (British settlers and Kikuyu) in the 1943 Morris Carter Land Commission. Then or she should round this up with Elspeth Huxley’s White Mans Country which was actually written in Lord Delamere’s Nairobi home then and which is now the Kenya Police staff institute. For the Paukwa article is remiss at least up to 1980.
Firstly, there were no Maasai grasslands in these parts ever, the land having been heavily forested highland until the mid-18th century when Muranga Kikuyu migrants opened farm settlement on forested land bought from the Dorobo. Coming up the railway the British encountered the Muthondu family at what is now Westlands, Gathuku and Kinuthia at Muthangari (Msongari), Njogu, Gicamba, Kiuna, Tutua, and Mugwe at what is now Loresho, Spring Valley and Kitisuru (Getathuru to the Kikuyu).
To name a few. The original railway (in 1900) cut through Kyuna’s land from Westlands on to Kabete and the escarpment. It brought in the Cooper family who with two others took claim to thousands of acres (with Kikuyu still farming parts of ìt), called it Kirawa, subdivisions of which became Kiuna, Kibagare, (Kikuyu names), Spring Valley, Kirima Kimwe, etc. Delamere was the greatest admirer and friend of the Maasai in Kenya and when he took the 400 acres you refer to from the Coopers, he asked his Maasai entourage to name it and so Loresho it became. By the 1930s most of the land had been brought under coffee and the original land holders evicted–some to Kangemi and the greater Kiambu or the Rift Valley. The seeds of political trouble had been sown.
In the evidence to the Carter commission Cooper admitted to have known Njogu and Mugwe etc. Under the Kikuyu Central Association and later KAU Kikuyu pursued their land rights. By the 1950s political arguments gave way to violence. Mau Mau battles were fought in those coffee estates. In October 1954 to cite one example, 13 fighters were killed in an all night battle near what’s now the KARLO campus. There’s record of shootouts at Kibagare Way in 1955.
So independence came in 1963. Not much changed here. Coffee had given way to Whites-only family residences in Kibagare, Spring Valley, Lower Kabete etc. Loresho had long been sold to Loresho-Kiora Company. And it is this company that subdivided the land and built Loresho North (1974) and later Loresho South to be sold to all comers not just Africans and it was not as easy to buy as your article states.
The multitudes in their hundreds of thousands now encamped in the Ķangemi slum have nothing to do with the cruel displacement of Kikuyu in the coffee estates in the 1920s and 30s. What we are seeing there is the result of decades of rapidly growing population and rural migration to the cities at the rate of 6percent annually. And monumental state incompetence to deal with the problem over that time. At this rate it will only get worse, never mind the new roads.
May be one day we will get a solution. And it will begin by getting the history and economics of this place and others right.
Thank you so much for enriching the story of Loresho’s history. We will amend the story accordingly.
Thank you for the stories of the various Nairobi estates and giving their history. You have provoked Professor Chege and maybe others too who will give us more details and create conversations around our Kenyan history that majority don’t know. Thanks for trailblazing👊🏾👊🏾