The Asian Families Who Helped Build Eldoret

By William Kiptoo

A street in Eldoret town centre, 2010. Photo: Daryona, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Eldoret's story is usually told through the Boer trekkers, the settler farms and, later, the runners. Running through all of it is another thread that is easy to miss: the Asian families who opened the first shops, ran transport businesses and mills, sat on the early town councils, and built places of worship and schools. Many of them left around independence. Some stayed, and a few found other ways to come back.

The first shop

Before there was a town, there was Farm 64 on the Sosiani River. Juma Hajee, an Ismaili trader born in Veraval in British India, kept a small iron store at the river crossing that is still called Hajee's Drift. When Farm 64 was laid out as a township in 1912, he was the first merchant to move in. He went on to run about a dozen shops across Western Kenya, served on the Eldoret Municipal Council, presided over the Indian Association and led the town's Ismaili community as Mukhi of the Jamatkhana. His name is still on the Juma Hajee building at the corner of Elijah Cheruiyot Street and Stendi Kisa Yala Road. (Juma Hajee: The "Aga Khan of Eldoret" and His Frontier Legacy)

Early settlers remembered Indian traders on the side streets and along the Soy road, in an area known as the Indian Bazaar. L.S. van Aardt, recalling the early days of "Sixty Four", wrote that Juma Haji baked the school's bread, the Bhogal Brothers kept a shop, and a shoemaker named Ambram made shoes by hand for ten shillings a pair. (Early Days in Eldoret: L.S. van Aardt Remembers Sixty Four) When Eldoret's first Municipal Board was set up in 1930, it included Asian as well as European members. (Eldoret Jubilee Celebrations, 1962)

Transport, timber and land

The Lochab family shows how far these businesses reached. Hira Singh Lochab came from Ishapur in Punjab in 1887. His son, Ghumand Singh Lochab, worked for the railways in Uganda and Kenya until 1939, rising to second engineer, a post usually kept for Britons, and then started a sawmill in partnership at Kaptagat. In 1941 he moved to Eldoret and started a transport business, adding a quarry in 1952. He was a founder member of the Sikh Union Club, started in 1954. (The Lochab Bros family company, Eldoret)

Around Sergoit, Asian names are part of the landscape. Kelji sublocation takes its name from Velji, an Indian farmer who once owned part of what is now Kap Eskin farm. (Kelji Sublocation, Sergoit, Moiben) When the Boers left in 1962, Tarlochan Singh Rai and the Rai Brothers bought the 1,900-acre Tugen Estate and Ray Farm. They grew wheat and maize there through the 1960s and 1970s, before moving into timber and setting up Rai Plywood in 1985. (History of Tugen Estate)

Faith, schools and neighbourhoods

The Sikh community first worshipped in a rented room. In 1946 they bought land along what is now Arap Moi Street and built the Gurdwara that still stands there. (The Sikh Gurdwara in Eldoret) The Ismailis replaced their tin-roofed wooden prayer hall with a stone Jamatkhana in 1934.

Uasin Gishu Primary School began in colonial times as the Government Indians School, and the first African children enrolled there in 1963. (Five Short Histories from Around Eldoret) A writer who lived in Eldoret from 1985 to 1995 remembered studying at UG Primary alongside Kenyan Asian classmates, first learning about Diwali from them, and a town centre where Asians owned most of the shops, especially along Uganda Road. Many Asian families lived in West Indies estate, where some old buildings still show Indian styles. (Eldoret Town Estates)

Mills and jobs

Around independence, Indian capital helped turn Eldoret from a farming town into an industrial one. Raymond Woollen Mills, set up in the early 1960s as a subsidiary of the Indian textile firm Raymond, processed wool from the highland farms into suits, blankets and uniforms. At its peak in the 1970s and 1980s it was among the town's largest employers. (When Raymond Dressed the Nation)

Leaving, and giving back

Dipak Hindocha, writing for Sikh Heritage East Africa, describes the years before independence as a time when Asian families ran much of the civil service, the railway and the shops, and supplied the settler farms. After independence, many of those families moved abroad. (Eldoret '64 (1900–1964): The Golden Era)

Vijay and Bhikhu Patel were among those who left. Vijay grew up in Eldoret, where their father was a timber merchant. He died when Vijay was five, leaving the family, in Vijay's words, "living hand to mouth". Bhikhu moved to England and studied architecture at Bristol University. Vijay followed in 1967 for his A-levels and university, and qualified as a pharmacist in Leicester in 1973. Together the brothers built Waymade Healthcare, a pharmaceutical company based in Essex. In 1997 they paid for a new school in Eldoret, half a mile from where they had been educated. "It is a debt we wanted to repay," Vijay said. Their giving now runs through the Shanta Foundation, named after their mother, Shantaben, whose values both brothers credit for their success.

The school stands in a long line that runs from Hajee's iron store at the river crossing, through the Lochabs' lorries, the Gurdwara on Arap Moi Street and the classrooms of UG Primary, to the mills on the edge of town.

If you have memories of Eldoret's Asian families, their shops, schools or places of worship, please share them in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group so they can be added here.

Sources and thanks

This piece draws on stories already on this blog, linked above, and on the people who first shared them, including Dipak Hindocha (Sikh Heritage East Africa) and the recollections of L.S. van Aardt. Other sources: "Diwali and an iconic town once called 64", The Star, October 2022. For the Patel family: "Leading pharmacist to receive honorary degree", Manufacturing Chemist; the South Asian Britain oral histories of Vijay Patel and Bhikhu Patel; and "From Ksh70 to Ksh103B", Kenyans.co.ke, citing The Telegraph (2014).

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