Wonders of Sergoit Hills

A Historical and Documentary Account By William Kiptoo Introduction The history of land in Sambul, in present-day Kesses Sub-County of Uasin Gishu County, provides an important window into Kenya's long and complicated land question. It reflects the difficult transition from large colonial estates to African ownership and, later, from collective or group ownership to individual land titles. At the centre of the Sambul story is Sambul Farm, L.R. No. 11218/2, a property of approximately 2,125 acres. According to the Environment and Land Court, the farm originally had 35 members. The members acquired the farm from a colonial settler and were settled on it before a formal survey had been undertaken. Some of the original members subsequently sold portions of their entitlement to other people, who became members through those purchases. The absence of an agreed and completed survey at the beginning of African occupation became significant many years later. When surveying began around 1996...

By William Kiptoo The history of Simba Hills Farm, known locally as Kanyesore Toloita, is a story of land, labour, aspiration and a dispute that has endured for more than half a century. What began in the late 1960s as an effort by farm workers to acquire land eventually developed into a complicated struggle involving competing claims over the size of the land purchased, payment of the purchase price, control of a farm company, and, ultimately, ownership and registration of the property. At the centre of the story is L.R. No. 8304, situated in the Moiben area of what is now Uasin Gishu County. The property was described in subsequent court proceedings as measuring approximately 1,680 acres. Its history is preserved partly in court records and government documents, but also in the memories of the people who lived and worked on the farm and in the settlement that grew around it. The legal record is extensive, but it does not tell the whole story. It records competing claims and judicial ...

An overview of three accounts of return visits published in Habari, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa: "'n Safari in tyd" (A safari in time) in Habari 2005, a letter from Dave Lichtenstein in Habari 2006, and "Kenya Safari" by Peter Davies in Habari 2007. The first is in Afrikaans. This is a summary for readers of this archive, not a translation. It follows the earlier post Going Back: Return Visits to Eldoret, Sergoit, Turbo and Patatadraai , which covers the visits of 1992 and 2002. Between 2004 and 2006 three more groups of former settlers came back to the Uasin Gishu. One came overland by road from Pretoria, one was a Hill School old boy living in Australia, and one was a member of the Davies family of Sergoit. Each of them went looking for a house, a school or a grave, and each found the land now farmed by Kenyan families. Their accounts record what had become of many places this archive writes about, including Sergoit Rock, the Kruger farm and...