The Tachoni have been named by other people for most of our recorded history. This page sets out what is known, what is contested, and what we are still trying to establish — with the disagreements left in.

The names we have been given

Before “Tachoni” settled into use, the community appears in colonial and neighbouring records under several names: Kitoki, Kitosh, Sirikwa, Evekwe, Tashone. Some were what our neighbours called us. Some were what administrators wrote down when they could not or would not distinguish between the peoples in front of them.

This matters more than it might seem. A community that is recorded under five names across a century is a community whose history is filed in five different places — and often under someone else’s heading. Much of what follows is an attempt to gather it back.

Where we came from

There is no single account, and the Trust does not intend to manufacture one.

The most widely circulated tradition traces a migration from El-Matruh, on the Egyptian coast, southward along the Nile and into the lakes region — a long account shared in broad outline with several Luhya groups. A second tradition emphasises contact with Kalenjin-speaking peoples during the southward movement, which is the explanation most often given for the features of Olutachoni that set it apart from the speech of our Bukusu neighbours. A third connects the community to the Sirikwa, the name attached to the people who left the hollows and cattle enclosures across the western highlands.

These accounts are not fully reconcilable, and elders differ on them. The archive holds four distinct versions of the migration story as recorded so far. We publish them side by side, each attributed to the person who gave it. Where a version is thin, we say so rather than filling the gap.

A caution about sources. Much of what circulates online about Tachoni origins is thinly referenced and repeated between sites without checking. Where this page states something as established, it is because a primary source or a recorded elder supports it. Where it does not, the page says the account is contested. That distinction is the point of keeping a record at all.

The clans

The community is organised by clan — aba-, meaning “people of”. Among those recorded so far: Abachikha, Abamarakalu, Abangachi, Abasang’alo, Abasamo, Abayumbu, Abaluu, Abarefu, and others still being gathered.

The clan register on this site is the first attempt to write all of them down in one place, with territory, sub-clans and elders. Every entry is held in draft until the elders of that clan have reviewed it. If your family carries a name that is missing, the correction has to come from you — there is no other source.

Age-sets, and the August cycle

Generations are marked by circumcision cycle, held in August of every even year. The sets rotate through a fixed sequence of names — Vakolongolo, Vakikwameti, Vakananachi and the others — so that a man’s set places him in time without any need for a written date.

It is worth saying plainly what that is: the age-set system is the oldest census the Tachoni have ever kept. It recorded every man, in order, for as long as anyone can trace. The register on this site is not a new idea. It is the same idea, written down, and open to everyone.

The Trust recorded the August 2026 season in full, with the consent of the families and the presiding elders. The next cycle falls in August 2028.

Chetambe, 1895

In 1895 a fortified settlement on Chetambe Hill was attacked by a colonial force with a machine gun. The people inside were killed in numbers that have never been properly established — accounts range widely, and no count was made by anyone with an interest in making one.

The ground is Tachoni. Most published accounts describe the dead as Bukusu. Both statements are made confidently and often, and the distance between them is itself part of what this community has experienced: the absorption of Tachoni history into a larger neighbour’s.

The Trust takes no position on a question the evidence does not settle. What we do is gather the accounts — including family testimony recorded in the archive — set them out with their sources, and mark clearly what remains unknown.

A monument on twenty acres at Chetambe has been promised by successive governments, most recently in December 2025. It has not been built. It appears in the Charter for that reason.

What colonial administration did to the language

Olutachoni is spoken, largely unwritten, and thinning. Administrative boundaries placed Tachoni communities under different authorities and alongside different neighbours, and successive generations were schooled, counted and governed in someone else’s dialect. What survives is held mostly by people in their seventies and eighties.

This is the most time-critical work the Trust does. A language is not lost in a decade; it is lost in a funeral.

Being counted

A population does not fall by 28% in ten years without famine or war, and there was neither. What changed was how people answered.

In the same 2019 census, 3,944,257 people — about 58% of all Luhya — recorded themselves only as “Luhya, so stated”, naming no sub-group at all. Every Tachoni counted that way disappears from the sub-group figure, and from every calculation that follows it: allocations, planning, recognition, and the simple public fact of how many of us there are.

The next census is in 2029. That is what the register on this site is building towards.

Where we are

The Tachoni heartland runs across Webuye East and Webuye West — Mihuu, Ndivisi, Maraka, Misikhu, Sitikho, Matulo and Bokoli, with Chetambe Hills in the middle of it — and outward into Tongaren and Kimilili. Beyond Bungoma there are Tachoni communities in Lugari, Likuyani and Matete in Kakamega; in Trans Nzoia around Kitale; and in Uasin Gishu around Turbo.

Kenya publishes ethnicity only at national level. There is no official count of Tachoni by ward, and any figure presented as one is somebody’s estimate. What can be stated from the gazetted register is that Webuye East and Webuye West together hold 107,582 registered voters — 16.6% of Bungoma County.

How this page is maintained

Nothing here is published before elder review. Where accounts conflict, all of them are kept and attributed. Every figure carries a source, archived with a checksum so a dead link cannot quietly become an unsupported claim. Corrections are logged publicly and dated.

If something on this page about your clan, your family or your ward is wrong, tell us. Correcting it is not an embarrassment to the record — it is the record working.

Sources. KNBS, 2019 Kenya Population and Housing Census, Volume IV, Table 2.31, pp. 422–423 · Kenya Gazette Vol. CXXIV No. 119, Notice 7290, 21 June 2022 · Bungoma County Integrated Development Plan · Tachoni community records · oral history accessions held in the Trust’s archive. Retrieved and archived September 2026.

This page is in draft and awaits elder review.