They did not inherit houses of stone—they built them, one era at a time.
In the early 1960s, the villagers of Gitithia emerged from the confines of ichagi, the concentration villages where they had been herded during the Mau Mau uprising. The transition was not just a physical shift but a journey toward reclaiming dignity and freedom. They built their lives from scratch, starting with humble huts made of mud walls and thatched grass roofs. These homes, though simple, were filled with hope and a renewed sense of belonging.
As time passed, the village evolved. The huts gave way to nyûmba cia míhírígo, homes constructed from wooden poles. It was an achievement managing to roof with iron sheets. Then came the era of mathirebu—houses made of timber rejects—before the villagers began using plaster to smooth the walls of their homes. Eventually, stone houses became the pride of the village, each one standing as a testament to the resilience and hard work of its inhabitants.
Gitithia, however, remained in the dark, both literally and metaphorically. Electricity was a distant dream, a luxury that seemed unattainable for the small village tucked away in the folds of the highlands. The nights were pitch black, with only the flicker of kerosene lamps casting shadows on the walls of the houses. The darkness was profound, almost weird, as if the village itself was a part of the dense Lare forests that surrounded it.
It wasn’t until the Kibaki era, around 2003, that electricity finally made its way to Gitithia. Former one term MP Kimathi was the one who brought the light, quite literally, to the village, starting with Gitithia shopping center. The village elders often reminisced about that momentous occasion, recalling how the village had been a vast sea of darkness. Standing at Karima-ini ga Satellite at around 9 PM in 2001, one could look down at Gitithia and see nothing but an inky void, as though the entire village had merged with the forest.
Despite the absence of electricity, Gitithia wasn’t entirely disconnected from the world. In the 1990s, three homes in the village had telephone lines, a rarity in those days. There was also an old, non-functional telephone booth at the chief’s office—a relic of a time when communication was still an enigma for many. This was the age of landlines, long before the concept of mobile phones had entered not only the villagers’ but also Kenyan’s imagination.
Communication in the village relied on messengers. Whenever someone travelled to a neighboring area or beyond, they would carry a bundle of letters from villagers to their relatives. The letters, written in Kikuyu, were the lifeline of the community, connecting Gitithia with the outside world in a time when the Uplands Post Office was still in its original location, at Uplands near crossing the railway line, before moving to Nyambari.
Life in Gitithia was centred around farming. The land was generous, yielding bountiful harvests of maize, beans, potatoes, and more. Food was never an issue; the villagers knew the land, and the land rewarded their toil. The village’s prosperity took on a new hue during the era of pyrethrum. The farms, once green with maize and beans, were now covered in white, as if blanketed by snow. Weekends were dedicated to plucking pyrethrum flowers, a communal activity that brought the villagers together in labor and laughter.
