The Eldoret Postman Runners.

Adopted from the an article in the Habari East Africa

Eldoret was known in the early days of settlement as "64."

In 1907, the then Postmaster-General, Mr. Gosling, made a safari to the Plateau to establish a post office and after touring the area and studying the position of the farms not yet taken up for development, he chose Farm 64 as a central place for a district post office.

In the early days, with the exception of those places through which the Uganda railway passed, every settlement and out-station depended tor its mail upon the system of "runners". Many nations used postal runners to deliver mail to remote places. Starting from the principal stations on the railway the "runners" were posted, sometimes as much as thirty miles apart, and the mail was passed from relay to relay until it reached its destination.

The Eldoret Panel shows the "runner" postman with his cleft stick in which the letters were carried, and his spear for protection against the wild animals which roamed the countryside. Only recently have the runners been entirely replaced by mail trucks, a water-shed change in postal communications history.