Kiambethu Tea Farm
Working colonial-era tea estate in misty highlands, still farmed by the founder's descendants five generations on.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Kiambethu Tea Farm above Nairobi opens with the question facing Arnold Butler McDonell after buying three hundred fifty acres from the colonial government in nineteen ten: what do you do when every crop you try, coffee, corn, flax, fails on the same land? It follows him to nineteen eighteen, when he risked twenty acres on tea at seven thousand two hundred feet, a crop nobody expected to survive there. The gamble passed down through five generations of the same family, from his daughter Evelyn to her daughter Fiona Vernon, who still farm a fraction of the original acreage today.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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