Schools on the hills: education comes to Kisii

The first mission station reached the Kisii highlands in 1912, and mission schools followed — teaching literacy, arithmetic and catechism to children who a decade earlier would have spent those years herding and learning at the hearth. A colonial-era photograph in our archive shows Kisii students at the Adventist school, uniformed and solemn for the camera.

Kisii School, founded in 1934 as a government school, became the flagship — its administration block and main entrance are photographed in our landscape gallery. By independence, the Abagusii had embraced schooling so thoroughly that the community produced a disproportionate share of Kenya's teachers, nurses and civil servants.

That same value drives our own education programmes today: school visits to the cultural centre, curriculum-aligned heritage lessons, and this digital museum — so that the generation raised on smartphones can still meet the culture that raised their grandparents.