A Bittereinder in Kenya: Fanie Kruger of Sergoit (Mail & Guardian, 2004)

A summary of a newspaper article shared in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group by Hillary Kipruto under the title "Boers in Kenya". The article was first published by the Mail & Guardian of South Africa on 6 April 2004 as "A bittereinder in Kenya". Because it is a published newspaper article, it is summarised here rather than reproduced, and the full text can be read at the link at the end.

The article set out to find what was left of the Afrikaner presence in Eldoret, the town the trekkers had once seen as the centre of their promised land. It recalled an Eldoret of the 1930s that could have been any small South African dorp, with jukskei played in the streets, koeksisters and melktert baked at home and braais under the acacia trees. By 2004, the writer found, only one family of Afrikaner descent remained in Uasin Gishu: the Krugers of Sergoit Farm, along the Kerio Valley Road.

Local memory of the Boers still ran deep. Sarah Kurui, speaking inside the building that was once the Dutch Reformed Church and is now used by the African Gospel Church, said her grandmother remembered the kaburu as very tough people who burnt clay to make bricks, made soap from animal fat and made shoes out of cattle hides. Joseph Tirop, an elder, said simply that the kaburu taught them how to farm.

Fanie Kruger's forebears arrived in 1906, part of the first of four waves of Afrikaners who moved to Kenya after the Anglo Boer War. Kruger himself had little time for the romantic legend of proud Boers trekking north by wagon to escape British rule. In his telling, the Boers who came to Kenya had been "joiners" who cooperated with the British during the war and left to escape the anger of their own people, and they came by ship to Mombasa, not by wagon.

Kruger was born in 1956, when more than a thousand Boers lived around Eldoret. The years that followed were a time of fear among the settlers, with news of the violence in the Belgian Congo and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, and the exodus began. His father, Jan Erns Kruger, was among the first to leave. He drove to Pretoria, took one look at the cold, dry winter country and drove straight back to Kenya. The family stayed, and Jan Erns became a Kenyan citizen, telling his son that if they wanted to keep their land they must respect their African neighbours, and that if the land was ever taken they would accept it.

Kruger was open about having worked with the KANU government of the day to protect his farm, saying he would otherwise have lost everything. Yet he also described joining other farmers in 1997 to block Eldoret with trucks, tractors and combine harvesters in protest against cheap imports and low prices, which embarrassed and angered President Moi, and he spoke of the pressure he felt afterwards. He described himself as a supporter of "any government in power" and argued that African farmers, black or white, survive best when they pull together.

By then his children did not speak Afrikaans, and he himself spoke it with a heavy English accent. The article ended with Joseph Tirop's description of Fanie Kruger as "the kaburu who did not run".

Editor's note: Kruger's view that the Kenya Boers were "joiners" differs from other accounts in this archive, which describe the trekkers as a mix of former fighters and families looking for a fresh start. Both views are given so that readers can weigh them. For the history of the family, see the other Kruger stories under Settler History.

Source: "A bittereinder in Kenya", Mail & Guardian, 6 April 2004, mg.co.za. Shared in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group by Hillary Kipruto.