Early History of the Uasin Gishu

A.C. Hoey, one of the first Europeans to hunt and farm on the Uasin Gishu, wrote down his memories of the Plateau around 1956 for a church magazine; they were later reprinted in The Kenya Scrapbook. This is a retelling of the first part. The rest is retold in A.C. Hoey Remembers.

Before 1900, Hoey noted, hardly anyone outside had heard of the Uasin Gishu. The earliest mention he could find was by Major J.R. Macdonald, who surveyed a railway route from Mombasa to Uganda between 1891 and 1894 and wrote of the Plateau’s rolling downs and fine grass on his way from Naivasha to Mumias.

In 1905 Hoey met an Afrikaner named Van Breda at Naivasha who wanted land in the far south of the Plateau, near the Elgeyo escarpment. Around the same time Hoey set out on a hunting safari, though he struggled to get permission: the government was then fighting the Nandi, who were resisting the railway near Fort Ternan. Once allowed in, he found the Plateau crowded with game: herds of three to five hundred Jackson’s hartebeest, eland in hundreds, zebra in thousands, many lions, and elephants moving between the Elgeyo forest and Mount Elgon.

He made his standing camp at Lake Sergoit and spent whole days on Sergoit Rock with binoculars, watching the herds. One day, looking towards Burnt Forest, he saw a white streak in the trees. It was not a river, and not smoke. After some hours he realised it was moving: the white tents of wagons, one behind another, cutting the first road onto the Plateau. It was the first Afrikaner trek. The next day he rode out to meet it, and met its leader, Van Rensburg, and the families who were the first to farm the Plateau.

Hoey remembered Arnoldi, who later raised “Arnoldi’s Scouts” in the First World War, and Mr Cloete, who brought up horses and a herd of Afrikander cattle from South Africa, only to lose many to disease. It soon became clear, Hoey wrote, that imported stock could not survive without dipping and fencing.

Retold from A.C. Hoey, “A few notes on the early history of the Uasin Gishu” (written about 1956), Part I, as reprinted in The Kenya Scrapbook. Hoey wrote from a settler’s point of view of his time.

William Kiptoo writes about peace, land and memory at Journeys of a Peace Worker.

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