From the Newspapers: Eldoret and Uasin Gishu in the Press

Short summaries of newspaper articles shared by William Kiptoo in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group. The full articles belong to their publishers; look them up for the complete text.

"Exit White Man" (East African Standard, 1977)

Reported that Britain had made a final payment in its buy out of settler farmers, bringing the total spent since independence to about R60 million, mostly in grants. Farms were transferred to the Kenya Government for sale to Kenyans and cooperatives. Settlers of South African origin with British passports were the last to be offered terms; by then only three South African farmers were still farming, two at Eldoret and one at Kitale, all of them Kenyan citizens. One was Ernest Kruger, born in an ox wagon on the trek. The article noted that the Uasin Gishu plateau had been renamed Wareng, that some large farms had been broken into subsistence holdings by cooperatives against government policy, and that 2,600 British farmers had held about two million hectares at independence.

"Life was a big struggle for many white farmers" (Daily Nation, 26 August 2013)

Janet Dorset came to Kenya in 1961 as a 26 year old teacher and taught for five years at Kaptagat School and Kaimosi TTC. She described the Kaptagat settlers as nothing like the Happy Valley set: mostly post war arrivals, trained at Egerton, without inherited money, working from dawn to dusk with mainly Nandi labour. The school, opened by Zoe Foster in 1936, had about 130 children aged five to 13. There were some 18 farms on the Kaptagat ridge at 8,000 feet, growing pyrethrum, wheat, potatoes and barley. Settlers still remembered Mau Mau, kept African staff out of the main house at night, and locked their guns away.

"Wheat: Why grain was heavily protected" by Peter Ndege (29 June 2020)

Traced wheat from the first Australian varieties (Gluyas, Thew, Bobs, Florence) through rust and the breeding of Equator, Marquis, Kenya Governor and others at Kabete and Njoro. After the highlands, the best yields came around Hoey's Bridge, Kipkabus, Turbo, Sergoit and Plateau; attempts at Kitale and Cherangany failed. Among the growers were more than 50 Boer families led by J. Jansen van Rensburg, and Boers such as Ben Viljoen, A. Cloete, Jon de Waal and Frans Arnoldi. A 1922 tariff of Sh5 per 100 pound bag on imported wheat, pushed by Delamere and Grogan, lifted the acreage from 7,858 in 1921 to 43,763 in 1926.

"Boer origins of Eldoret town, its bar with no door" by John Kamau (14 August 2020)

Retold the tale of a bar that was never manned, where drinkers left their money on the counter, and which ran for years without a door after two thirsty men broke the padlock. Kamau gives the van Breda brothers as the first Boers on the plateau, from 1903, and repeats the story of the safe that fell at Farm 64 and the bank built around it. Willie van Aardt, allocated Farm 64, opened the first post office when he could not make a living from farming. Names proposed for the town included Girouardfontein, Sirikwa, Sosiani, Bado Kidogo and Eldare, and a typing error in the gazette, Kamau says, gave the town its spelling. Kamau's tone is sharply critical of the Boers, and he notes that the Nandi paid the price of settlement.

"Eldoret Express vs North Rift Shuttle" (Daily Nation, 2021)

Told how Eldoret Express, whose Scania buses ruled the western routes in the 1990s and early 2000s, collapsed as 14 seater shuttles took over, its buses left to rot in a yard in Juja. Former staff and traders blamed erratic fares, poor service and the rule that a bus must be full before leaving. North Rift Shuttle, started in 2004 by investors who left the collapsing Crossland Sacco, grew to about 120 vehicles and more than 400 staff.