Wonders of Sergoit Hills

By William Kiptoo For most of the twentieth century, the land around Sergoit Hill was settler farmland. The first Afrikaner wagons reached the plateau in 1908, and the English hunter A. C. Hoey later wrote of watching them from the top of Sergoit Rock. For decades afterwards, the Kruger family farmed below the hill. In the last thirty years, that same land has been divided and put to new uses. Walking around the hill today, you can read that change in at least five places. The first is the hill itself. In 1995 the Kruger family set up a wildlife sanctuary on Sergoit Hill and brought in thirteen giraffes. It is managed with the Kenya Wildlife Service and the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife, and it is now home to Rothschild giraffes, a priority species for conservation, along with antelopes, duikers and many kinds of birds. On a plateau that once held herds of thousands, as Hoey described, this small sanctuary is one of the few places where wild animals still live. The African Fun...

By Dominic Ng'etich The Kapbrar farm in Chembulet, is a large piece of land about 35 kilometres from Eldoret town along Eldoret-Iten Road. The 2,000-acre farm was once owned by a settler of Indian origin named Britham Brar Singh. He acquired the land in the late 1960s from a Boer farmer who was leaving the country for South Africa after Kenya gained independence. Brar Singh was a wheat farmer. In the early 1990s, during the Moi regime, the late Nicholas Kipyator Biwott, the powerful Keiyo politician who had been Minister of Energy from 1983 to 1991, acquired the land and gave it to the Keiyo community, mostly women's groups. Chiefs from Kaptarakwa, Chebior, Kitany, Kapkoi, Mutei, and Irong asked locals to send their daughters, wives, mothers, and any female who was willing to pay Ksh 5,000 to own an acre of land. The northern side of the land was given to the people from Irong, the eastern side to Mutei and Kaptarakwa, and parts of the southern and lower western sides wer...