Sylvia Nasimiyu

Migration Story

The Woman Who Carried Bungoma On Her Back A Bukusu Migratory Tale — As Told By Me, Sylvia Nasimiyu My name is Sylvia Nasimiyu. Daughter of Batilu, blood of Bukusu, granddaughter of people who looked at the Bungoma highlands — sitting green and generous at the foot of Mount Elgon — and decided that this was not just land. This was home. I was born in Mateka village, Bungoma. A place small enough that everyone knows your name, your mother's name, your grandmother's name, and the argument your grandfather had with the neighbor in 1974. Privacy is a concept we understand theoretically. Sit down. We are going back further than Mateka. In The Beginning — Mubukusu Everything — and I mean everything — starts with Mubukusu. One ancestor. One name. Enough descendants to populate an entire county and still have some left over for Trans-Nzoia and parts of Uganda. Mubukusu and his people were Bantu, moving southward and eastward through the great migrations that shaped this region centuries ago. They came through Uganda, past the slopes of Mount Elgon — Masaba as the old people call it — that enormous ancient volcano sitting on the Kenya-Uganda border like it owns everything, which honestly it does. When they arrived at the fertile lands of what is now Bungoma, the soil was dark and deep. The rains came reliably. The land sloped gently toward rivers that actually had water in them. Mubukusu looked at it and made a decision that would affect every single one of us born after him: "We stop here." From him came the clans. Many clans. My people — the Batilu — among them. We took our corner of Bungoma, specifically the western stretch, and we built. The Ancestor Who Started Our Specific Branch Her name was Nabarasa — and she arrived into our lineage the way most women arrived into most lineages in those days: through a marriage negotiated by men who had very strong opinions about cattle exchange and very few opinions about asking her what she thought. She had, however, very strong opinions of her own. Nabarasa came from a neighboring Bukusu family and married into Batilu during a time when the community was still establishing itself in this part of Bungoma. She was young. She was sharp. She watched everything and said little — which the elders mistook for obedience. It was not obedience. It was strategy. She learned every lineage tie, every clan obligation, every piece of land boundary and who had agreed to what with whom. She filed it all away quietly and then, when disputes arose — and disputes always arose — she would produce the correct information at the correct moment with the calm precision of someone who had been waiting patiently for exactly this opportunity. Her husband, a man named Wafula, was broadly considered the head of the household. Nabarasa was broadly considered everything else. The Time Things Got Complicated My great-great-grandmother Nekesa — Nabarasa's granddaughter — lived through the period when British colonial administration arrived in Bungoma and began doing what colonial administrations do: drawing lines on land, collecting taxes, renaming things, and generally reorganizing a world they had only recently discovered existed. The Bukusu did not receive this calmly. The Chetambe War of 1895 — where Bukusu warriors made their position on colonial occupation extremely clear at Chetambe Fort — happened within living memory of Nekesa's grandparents. The resistance was fierce. The outcome was painful. But the spirit — The spirit did not go anywhere. Nekesa navigated the colonial period the way many Bukusu women did — by holding the home together while the world outside reorganized itself without asking permission. She planted. She preserved. She made sure the children knew their lineage names even when the new administration was busy assigning everyone numbers and foreign surnames. "They can name the district whatever they want," she reportedly said, "but you are Batilu. Remember that first." My Grandmother Mwambia — a woman built like someone who had decided very early that the world was not going to move her and had been proven right consistently ever since. She lived her entire life within a radius that would take you forty minutes to walk across. Mateka village and its surrounding area. She knew every path, every family, every seasonal pattern of rain and dry. She had a garden that people talked about. Not because it was decorative — this was not a decorative garden — but because things grew in it with an enthusiasm that suggested the soil was personally trying to impress her. She told me our history sitting outside in the evening, the way old people do when they've decided you're old enough to carry information. Voice low. Unhurried. Like she had all the time that had ever existed. "Nasimiyu," she called me — my traditional name, not Sylvia, never Sylvia when it was serious — "a tree that doesn't know its roots thinks the wind invented it." I was ten. I didn't fully understand. By twenty I had written it on the inside of my brain permanently. My Mother Nafula — born during a time of rains, which suited her because she was the kind of person who made things grow. She was the first woman in our immediate family to go beyond primary school. She did this through a combination of genuine brilliance and a stubbornness so complete it became almost architectural — you could not move it, you could only build around it. She raised us in Mateka — in the same village, on the same land, near the same paths her grandmother walked. Not because she had no ambition. But because she understood something that took me years to learn: Staying can be just as intentional as leaving. She made sure I knew both Bukusu traditions and the world beyond Bungoma. She taught me to cook tsiswa and also to read a map. To greet elders properly in Lubukusu and also to speak English with confidence. "The world is big, Sylvia," she told me. "But Mateka is where you are from. Never mix those two things up." And Then There Is Me Sylvia Nasimiyu. Born in Mateka village, Bungoma. Daughter of Nafula. Granddaughter of Mwambia who grew things. Great-great-granddaughter of Nekesa who held the family together through colonial disruption. Descendant of Nabarasa who filed information strategically and deployed it at exactly the right moment. Batilu. Bukusu. Bungoma. I carry the Imbalu drums in my memory even when I am far from home — that sound every even year when the boys become men and the whole community gathers and Bungoma reminds itself what it is made of. I carry Mateka in the way I talk about home — not as a place I escaped from but as a place I came from, which is a completely different thing that takes some people a lifetime to understand. The migration that began somewhere north of Mount Elgon, that brought Mubukusu southward through Uganda and into these highlands, that eventually landed my specific ancestors in this specific corner of Bungoma — It landed. In me. In a girl from Mateka village who knows her lineage, knows her clan, knows the name of the woman whose strategic silence built the foundation everything else stands on. I am still going somewhere. But I know exactly — exactly — where I started. — Sylvia Nasimiyu, Batilu clan, Bukusu people, Mateka village, Bungoma County. Rooted. Moving. Arriving.

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