In the 2009 census, 118,363 people recorded themselves as Tachoni. In 2019, the figure was 85,597. There was no famine between those years and no war. A third of a community does not disappear quietly. What disappeared was the name.
Where the missing third went
The 2019 census asked people to name their ethnic group. Alongside the sub-group totals sits a line that explains almost everything: 3,944,257 people recorded themselves only as “Luhya, so stated” — naming no sub-group at all. That is 58% of every Luhya counted in Kenya.
Some of those people are Tachoni. We cannot say how many, because that is exactly the information the answer withholds. What we can say is that the Tachoni figure fell by 27.7% in a decade while the population of Bungoma County grew, and that no other explanation has been offered.
Others were counted as Bukusu. That is not an accusation against anyone; it is what happens to a smaller community that has been recorded under five different names in a century — Kitoki, Kitosh, Sirikwa, Evekwe, Tashone — and whose own dialect was administered out of official use.
Why a number on a page matters
Because almost everything downstream is built on it.
- Planning. County and national planning documents work from census figures. A community that is smaller on paper is smaller in every plan that follows.
- Recognition. When a community appears in the record as 85,000 rather than something closer to the truth, its claims are weighed accordingly.
- Memory. A figure that falls unexplained for two decades becomes, eventually, the story of a people who faded. That is not what happened to us.
It is worth being precise about what this article does not claim. We are not saying the census was wrong, or that anyone was miscounted deliberately. We are saying that how people answered changed, and that the consequences of that change fall entirely on us.
The next census is in 2029
Which gives us three years, and one very simple task: to be able to say, with evidence, how many Tachoni there are and where they live — before an enumerator ever knocks.
That is what the register on this site is. Not a membership, not a subscription, and not a list that goes anywhere. A count, assembled by the community, that anyone can check.
The age-set system did this for generations without a single sheet of paper. Vakolongolo, Vakikwameti, Vakananachi — every man placed in time, in order, so that the community knew its own size and shape. The register is that same idea, written down, and open to women and men alike.
Sources. KNBS, 2019 Kenya Population and Housing Census, Volume IV: Distribution of Population by Socio-Economic Characteristics, Table 2.31, pp. 422–423 (Luhya total 6,823,842; Tachoni 85,597; “Luhya, so stated” 3,944,257). The 2009 figure of 118,363 is as cited in Tachoni community records; the Trust has not yet obtained the primary 2009 table and marks it accordingly. Retrieved and archived September 2026.
