From Misri to the highlands: the Abagusii migration story

Gusii oral tradition holds that the people now called Abagusii — and their Kalenjin, Luhya, Kuria, Luo and Suba neighbours — descend from a population associated with a place remembered as Misri, often linked to the region around Mount Elgon. Whether "Misri" refers to Egypt, as some elders and early writers proposed, or to a closer locality, the tradition remembers a long southward migration under pressure from other peoples.

By roughly the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Gusii-speaking communities were established in the highlands west of the Rift Valley — the ridges and valleys of what are today Kisii and Nyamira counties. The highlands offered fertile volcanic soils, reliable rainfall and defensible ridges: good country for the mixed farming of finger millet, sorghum and livestock on which the community was built.

Early colonial ethnographers such as Northcote and later scholars recorded the migration tradition while noting how much remained unverifiable. What is clear is the result: by the nineteenth century the Abagusii formed one of the densest rural populations in East Africa, organised in named clans each with remembered founders and territories. This record is labelled oral tradition where it rests on memory, and historical where documents agree.