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On Friday night, I stood with the CITAM Men's Chorale inside PCEA Kahawa Farmers during an overnight hymn session of praise and worship. Somewhere between the hymns, the name of the place began to preach to me.
Kahawa is our word for coffee. The farmers were those first families. Yet the ground that once bore that name now holds houses, a market, tarmac, and sewage ponds. The name still stands, although the farm is gone.
I am not writing to mourn Kahawa. Nearly every Kenyan neighbourhood keeps a name like this, a word that remembers a harvest we no longer gather. What unsettled me was not that the land changed hands. It was a pattern I encounter everywhere, in our crops, cooperatives, and institutions: we are so good at beginning things and strangely willing to let others finish them.
Watch what we do with tea. In 2024, Kenya was ranked the world's largest tea exporter, selling about 625,000 tonnes, far more than China or Sri Lanka. Then the twist: we earned roughly what each of those countries earned, nearly 1.4 billion dollars, while selling far more leaf. We win the race, but our purse is no heavier.
