Kenya's soapstone city — Gusii highlands where every stall glows pink and green
Kisii is the main city of Kenya's Gusii highlands — a densely farmed plateau on the eastern rim of the Rift Valley where tea and coffee grow alongside subsistence crops. The surrounding Tabaka village is the source of virtually all the soapstone carvings sold across East Africa — the distinctive pink-and-green stone is quarried from family plots and carved by Gusii artisans into animals, chess sets, and abstract forms. The Gusii (Abagusii) people have the highest population density of any rural area in Kenya, which makes the landscape feel impossibly productive — every square metre under cult…
The Abagusii are Bantu-speaking people who migrated to the western Kenya highlands from the north around the 17th century and established a reputation as fierce resisters of Maasai cattle raids and later British colonial incursions. The first colonial fort was established at Kisii in 1907 after repeated armed resistance. Soapstone carving at Tabaka became a commercial enterprise in the 1950s when Kenyan artisans began exporting pieces to Nairobi's tourist market; today Tabaka supplies the majority of soapstone objects in Kenya's craft trade.