Thika

Thika grew where the Chania and Thika rivers meet, on land farmed by Kikuyu families long before the colonial period and close to the frontier with Kamba and Maasai country. The British built a road and then a branch railway from Nairobi early in the twentieth century, and settlers took farms in the surrounding country. The town that served them acquired a hotel by the falls, a trading street, and a reputation among settlers as the last stop before the frontier districts to the north-east.

That settler world was recorded in The Flame Trees of Thika, Elspeth Huxley's memoir of a childhood on a farm near the town before the First World War, published in 1959 and televised by Thames Television in 1981, and made the name known far beyond Kenya. The farms themselves changed the district: pineapple canning began at Kenya Canners, formed in 1948 and later part of Del Monte, whose plantation and cannery near the town employ several thousand people; canned pineapple is Kenya's largest single manufactured export.

Independence brought land transfers to smallholder cooperatives and a push for industry. Thika became one of Kenya's main manufacturing towns, with textile mills, a tannery, food and cooking-oil processing, cigarettes, vehicle assembly, packaging and chemical works, and a workforce housed in estates such as Makongeni. Some of those industries struggled from the 1980s and 1990s as imports and liberalisation bit. The rebuilding of the Nairobi road as an eight-lane superhighway, completed in 2012, reshaped the town again, turning it into a commuter and college town of the capital's outer belt, and a county government at Kiambu now administers it.

Thika's culture is Kikuyu in language and custom but industrial in character, a mixture found in few of the highland towns. Factory shifts, college terms and the daily run to Nairobi set the pattern of the week rather than the farming calendar alone, and the town has long had a working-class social life of estate bars, football clubs, churches and welfare associations built around the workplaces.

Music at weekends is mugithi, the Kikuyu guitar style whose singers work through long chains of songs while the crowd joins in, alongside gospel, benga and the genge and gengetone that the students bring from Nairobi. Churches are numerous and loud, from old mission congregations to large Pentecostal halls, and harambee fundraising for school fees, medical bills and funerals is a constant of community life.

The town is also known for what visitors come to see at weekends: families picnic by the waterfalls, and the gardens above them have been a meeting place for generations. Elspeth Huxley's book has given Thika a literary shadow that local people regard with mixed feelings, since it describes the settler side of a history that cost the surrounding Kikuyu families their land. Manners are formal by regional standards: greetings first, respect for age, and modest dress in town.

Thika had 279,429 residents at the 2019 census, and its built-up area now runs almost continuously along the highway through Juja towards Nairobi. It sits in Kiambu County, whose headquarters are at Kiambu town although Thika has the county's largest economy, and a large share of its working population commutes to the capital or to the industrial zones between the two.

Work is varied by Kenyan standards. The plantations and cannery, textile and food factories, the tannery, vehicle assembly and packaging plants, the wholesale and retail trade of a busy market town, and a large student economy built on Mount Kenya University in the town and the technological university at Juja all provide employment. Farming continues around the edges, with pineapples, coffee, maize, bananas and dairy cattle.

The day begins before dawn, when matatus fill for Nairobi and factory shifts change; the market is at its busiest in the morning, and the highway clogs again in the evening. Housing is a pressing issue as flats rise on former farmland, and so are water supply, the cost of living and jobs for the many young people the colleges turn out. Weekends bring families to the riverside and to the churches, and, for those with land, journeys further upcountry.

Thika's everyday food is the Kikuyu highland kitchen: githeri, boiled maize and beans eaten at home and in every workers' canteen; mukimo, potatoes mashed with maize, beans and green leaves; ugali with sukuma wiki, collard greens braised with tomato and onion; and beef or goat stew with chapati. Uji, a thin millet or maize porridge, is drunk at breakfast, and roasted maize cobs are sold on every corner.

Nyama choma is the weekend meal — goat or beef roasted over charcoal, chopped on a board and eaten by hand with kachumbari, the salad of tomato, onion and chilli — and the garden bars on the edge of town exist largely to serve it. Street food runs to mutura, the grilled sausage of meat and blood, smokies with kachumbari from handcarts, deep-fried potatoes and samosas near the stages.

The town's own product is fruit. Pineapples from the plantations around Thika are sold whole or cut at roadside stands and are the thing most associated with the place, alongside mangoes, avocados, bananas and passion fruit from the surrounding farms. Coffee grown in the district leaves it mostly as beans, while chai, the sweet milky boiled tea, is what people actually drink, and muratina, the traditional fermented sausage-tree brew, appears at family celebrations.