Market day: the rhythm of trade in the highlands

Long before tarmac roads, trade ran on the calendar. Market days rotated between hilltop centres — each location had its day — and farmers walked for hours with baskets of maize, bananas and vegetables balanced on their backs, returning with salt, cloth, iron hoes or a goat.

Photographs in our gallery show the continuity: women threshing corn for the market a century ago, and vendors at today's Marikiti market in Kisii town doing business in much the same posture of negotiation and exchange. The goods changed — mobile-money tills now sit beside the cabbage piles — but the institution did not.

The marketplace is also where culture travelled: news, songs, marriage introductions and disputes all circulated on market day. Our cultural marketplace online is a deliberate descendant of that institution — the same principle, a wider catchment.