Voi

Voi owes its existence to the railway. When the Uganda Railway was pushed inland from Mombasa in the 1890s, a station and workshops were established here on the edge of the Taita foothills, at a point where the line met the old caravan route between the coast and the interior. The construction years are remembered for the lions that preyed on labourers at the Tsavo river crossing north-west of the town in 1898, an episode that has been written about and filmed many times since.

The station made Voi a trading and administrative point for a district whose people, the Taita, lived mainly up in the hills. Sisal estates spread across the hot plains around the town in the colonial period, and the branch line towards Taveta, since abandoned, made Voi a base during the campaign fought along the border with German East Africa. Farming in the hills, livestock on the plains and work on the railway shaped the town for decades.

Tourism arrived with the parks: Tsavo East and Tsavo West were gazetted in 1948, and the gate on the town's southern edge turned Voi into the main entry point for the eastern half. Gemstone mining in Taita-Taveta, including the green garnet named tsavorite after the park and mined in Kenya since the early 1970s, added another trade. The Standard Gauge Railway from Mombasa opened in 2017 with a station outside town, and Voi has grown steadily as the largest centre in its county.

Voi is a Taita town on the plains below the Taita Hills, and the hills are where the county's cultural weight lies. Taita communities farm terraced slopes, speak Kidawida and related languages alongside Kiswahili, and keep a tradition in which patches of forest were preserved as sacred groves — places of ritual and of skull caves where the remains of ancestors were kept. Those fragments of cloud forest are now reduced to a few square kilometres and are among the most closely studied and most threatened habitats in Kenya.

The town itself is mixed and mobile, a place of traders, drivers, railway workers and government staff from across the country, with churches and mosques, Kamba and coastal families, and the matatu and bus culture of any Kenyan junction. Football and athletics are followed closely, and the market is the social centre as much as the commercial one.

Manners are ordinary Kenyan ones: a handshake and a greeting before any request, respect for elders, modest dress, and patience in the heat of the day. Around the parks, wildlife is not a spectacle but a neighbour — crop raiding by elephants is a live grievance, and community conservancies and electric fencing are constant subjects of local debate. Visitors who ask before photographing people, and who use a local guide in the hills, are received warmly.

Voi is the largest town in Taita-Taveta County, with a population in the tens of thousands and a role well beyond its size: it is where the hills come down to shop, where buses and trucks between Mombasa and Nairobi stop, and where the county's administration, schools and hospital are concentrated. The rhythm is set by the highway, which never really goes quiet, and by the market, busiest early.

Work comes from trade and transport, from the parks and the lodges, from government offices, and from farming — maize, beans, vegetables and fruit in the hills, livestock and sisal on the plains. Mining for gemstones employs many people in small-scale operations across the county. Water is the constant problem: the plains are dry, boreholes and piped supply are stretched, and drought years hit both crops and cattle hard.

The town has grown quickly, with new buildings around the centre and along the highway, and it is used increasingly as a base by visitors who once drove straight past. Human-wildlife conflict on the park edge, land and mining disputes, and youth unemployment are the issues that dominate local discussion.

Voi eats inland Kenyan food rather than coastal Swahili cooking. Ugali, stiff maize porridge, with sukuma wiki (braised collard greens), beans or a beef or goat stew is the everyday plate, and githeri, maize boiled with beans, is the standard cheap meal. Chapati and mandazi, lightly sweet fried dough, come with strong chai boiled with milk and sugar.

Nyama choma is the town's social food: goat or beef roasted over charcoal at a butchery, ordered by the kilo, cut up on a wooden board and eaten with kachumbari, a salad of tomato, onion and chilli. Mishkaki skewers are grilled at stalls in the evening, and roadside stands sell roasted maize to bus passengers.

The Taita Hills supply much of what the market sells — bananas, avocados, mangoes, tomatoes, cabbages and beans grown on terraces — and the coast sends dried fish and coconuts up the highway, so coastal dishes such as pilau appear alongside upcountry ones. Fresh juices, sodas and Tusker beer round out the drinking, and in the hills, home-brewed sugarcane and maize drinks remain part of village life.