#HistoryKeThread: Kisumu - The Early Years
This is a 1936 photo taken from the air of Kisumu Airport. It is the Kisumu International Airport we know of today.
This is a 1936 photo taken from the air of Kisumu Airport. It is the Kisumu International Airport we know of today.
There was one factor that led to the rise of Kisumu as a major business and administrative centre. It was the fact that it was the lakeside port at which engineers had identified the railhead of the first phase of the Uganda Railway would reach.
In the period immediately before the arrival of the railway, Kisumu was known as Port Florence.
One British administrator in charge of wider Luo Nyanza was Charles W. Hobley (pictured) - “Obili”, as native Luo speakers called him.
As the railway fast approached in 1900, Hobley was instructed to move to Port Florence and make it headquarters of Nyanza province.
When the railway line eventually reached Port Florence in 1901, Hobley appointed a Luo leader to help him administer the province.
His name was Odera Ulalo.
Odera became chief of several administrative jurisdictions among them Sakwa, Uyoma, Asembo, Gem, Yimbo, Seme and Port Florence itself.
But as Odera’s area of jurisdictions was vast, he was allowed to appoint assistants. The two assistants he appointed were Mudhune Agina and Odera Akang’o, about whom I’ve separately written in the past.
In his administrative tours around Nyanza, Odera Ulalo was invariably accompanied by a few hundred men comprising of soldiers and porters. At times, his two deputies, Mudhune and Odera, accompanied him.
At the end of these tours, the caravan would often terminate at Kibos, near Port Florence, where Indian merchants had established a market centre.
Here, caravan leaders, porters and soldiers were paid in kind by the Indian merchants. They received various goods such as beads (some blue ones called “nyamachi” proved popular) soap, mirrors and different types of cloth.
According to history Professor Bethwell Ogot, the goods also included different types of cloth, including some that were known as Japan, because they had been imported from the Asian country.
The Indians also provided a kind of cloth that the locals called “Amerikani”, which had been sourced from the United States.
Prof. Ogot attributes this trade in cloth to the practice of nanga - that is, wearing of western clothes.
Prof. Ogot attributes this trade in cloth to the practice of nanga - that is, wearing of western clothes.
“Soon, jonanga (singular jananga), that is people who wear clothes, became a social class apart from the other people, the naked ones, in society”, wrote Prof. Ogot.
The Indian traders were also involved in a great deal of barter trade with locals. Among items bartered were pots and traditional stools. It is said that members of the Abagusii community, too, brought their soapstones here for barter.
It is worth noting that Sumo means “the place of barter trade” in Dholuo. It is this word that gave Kisumu its name.
This is a photo (credit to Gordon Omenya) of an old Indian house in rural Kisumu.
We also learn from Prof. Ogot that Odera Ulalo built a large walled village at Luanda, where the present Ebusakami School in Bunyore is located. The village was known as Luanda Kodera and was kept under guard by Nubian soldiers seconded to to the Chief from Uganda
Caravans from Mombasa or Nairobi to Uganda stopped at this village to replenish supplies and exchange goods.
But boosted by the railway’s presence and trade with Uganda, it is Kisumu that rose to become Nyanza’s busiest business and administrative hub, and Kenya’s third largest city.
God willing, I shall be writing more on the history of Nyanza and its people in the near future.
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