Going Back: Return Visits to Eldoret, Sergoit, Turbo and Patatadraai

An overview of three accounts of return visits published in Habari, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa: "'n Droom of werklikheid" by Ria McCulloch (Habari 1992), "Kenia dagboek" by Ds Piet Grobler (Habari 1992), and an account of a family visit to Eldoret, Turbo and Patatadraai in December 2002 (Habari 2003). The first two are in Afrikaans. This is a summary for readers of this archive, not a translation.

From the 1990s onward, settler families began to come back to see the farms, churches and graves they had left around independence. Their accounts in Habari are bittersweet, and they also record what had become of the old places, often in the hands of Kenyan churches, schools and families.

Ria McCulloch, 1992

Ria McCulloch, daughter of Wolfie Wolmarans, the principal of the Broederstroom school, came home "on the last stretch" through Timboroa and Ainabkoi, where the little station still looked as it had. At the old Van Rensburg house the garden was gone, but an old man by the road remembered every member of the family by name and sent a message by video to Adam van Rensburg that he was still "looking after Hennie's huts". At her family's farm just outside Eldoret, where the house had burned down in 1978, the windmill, cement dam, spray dip and bread oven were still there, and the Kalenjin owner gave them coffee.

Eldoret had grown far beyond what they expected. They found the old and new cemeteries neater than they feared and put fresh stones on the family graves. The highlight was a Sunday service at the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, formerly the Hervormde Kerk, now used by five congregations. She found the pew where her family had sat as children, and above the pulpit, in Swahili, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord". "Four whites and a church full of Kenyans," she writes, "all Christians." She also visited Ambram's old shop, by then a bookshop, the giraffes near Soy station, Patatadraai, Turbo and Kitale, and noted that Bokkie von Maltitz's grave still lay beside the road at Plateau and that Sergoit Kop was "once again a landmark".

Ds Piet Grobler, July 1992

Ds Piet Grobler kept a diary of his visit from 18 to 26 July 1992. At the old Bwana Loubser Mission, by then the Reformed Church of East Africa, he was introduced to the church council by Pastor Festo Okonjene, who had been trained by the Rev Eybers between 1944 and 1948 and still spoke warmly of him and of farmers such as Abraham Mouton, the Barnards, Schalk Steyn, Jimmy Davies and Adam van Rensburg. The mission had grown into a large complex with a school, a new church, student houses, a hospital and staff housing. The old Day of the Covenant hall at Plateau had become a Bible and technical college, farming land that once belonged to Fanie Barnard. At Ainabkoi the Reformed Church had added a secondary school to the clinic started by Adam and Hennie van Rensburg, and Ainabkoi had become a town.

The old wheat lands from Ainabkoi to Plateau and Broederstroom had become small farms with wheat, maize, pyrethrum and a few cattle. Sergoit Kop still stood above green wheat fields, with the neat Kruger farmyard below. The farmhouses he visited were neglected and hard to recognise. On Abraham Mouton's old farm he met Joseph Sengerut, born in 1901, who had worked for Abraham Mouton, remembered the thatched church near Plateau and Ds Loubser, and was the first convert and first baptised member of what became the Reformed Church of East Africa, baptised at Plateau on 17 July 1937. Joseph now owned part of Abraham Mouton's farm, had set land aside for a church, and still cared respectfully for Mouton's grave.

A family visit, December 2002

The third account is by a woman who returned with her aunt Winona, then 87, and Canadian relatives, flying to Eldoret in December 2002 when the town's hotels were full of delegates to the Somali peace talks. They found the Hill School, still much the same, and opposite it the Reformed Church in Africa, which they had known as the Gereformeerde Kerk, now greatly enlarged. The Dutch Reformed church with its blue roof was in good repair, though the organ no longer worked and drums had taken its place, and the old communion camping ground was now a road. Her grandmother's house towards the Sosiani, in the old Ortleppville area, was gone.

At Turbo, under military escort at what was then a youth centre, they found the house her grandparents had built in 1907 and the graves of Engela, who died aged two in 1922, and of Grandpa Hennie Wessels, who died of blackwater fever in 1928. Turbo station, she notes, still had its original signals. After lunch at the Soy Club they reached her father's farm at Patatadraai on 12 December 2002, forty years to the day after the family left in 1962. The house was well built and still standing, now serving a primary school, with the family's kitchen table still in the sitting room. "For them," she writes, "it is just a roof."

Sources: Ria McCulloch, "'n Droom of werklikheid", and Ds Piet Grobler, "Kenia dagboek", Habari 1992, pages 10 to 11 and 16 of the PDF; family visit account, Habari 2003, pages 12 to 15; Friends of East Africa. Habari 1992, Habari 2003. See also the archive's post Joseph Cheserem (Sengerut): The Pioneer of the Reformed Church of East Africa and the guide to settler stories in Habari.