How Sixty Four Became Eldoret: The Post Office, the Boma and the Bank in the Mud

An overview of "The History of Sixty Four", published in English in Habari 1984, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa. The writer is not named. This is a summary for readers of this archive, not the full text.

The archive already carries several accounts of how Farm 64 got the name Eldoret. This piece from Habari 1984 adds detail on the years just before and after, from the first post office to the first bank, and it places Sergoit at the centre of the early Plateau.

A town that began as a post office

The writer says Eldoret is probably unique among the big East African towns in having begun as a post office. By 1910 the farms surveyed in 1909 by the Royal Engineers were filling up with British ex-officers and successive Afrikaner treks. Settlers complained that the district was being ignored, and in May 1910 a Farmers' Association was formed at a meeting at Sergoit. That year the Postmaster General, J. Gosling, toured the Plateau, and post offices were opened at Sergoit, at Farm 45 near Burnt Forest, and at Farm 64, which Gosling called Eldare River.

Farm 64 had first been allotted to Willie van Aardt, who gave it up because he thought it poor farming land. Van Aardt built the post office of rough stone, facing what became the public gardens, and it opened at the end of 1910. With that first building, the writer says, the history of Eldoret begins.

The boma moves three times

In 1908 the government decided the Uasin Gishu could no longer be run from Kapsabet as part of Nyanza. N.E.F. Corbett and Inspector Tanner marched up from Londiani and set up a temporary headquarters at Farm 45. Because development was then centred on Sergoit and Soy, Corbett found Farm 45 too far east and at the end of the year moved to Farm 84, south of the Sosiani, which was also badly placed. After failing to get a farm belonging to J.H. Engelbrecht, and seeing how many people wanted business plots at the post office farm, he moved to 64. Van Aardt built him a round stone and thatch house, a clerk's house, an office and a store for £167, and the boma moved early in 1911. A corrugated iron police station and District Commissioner's house followed.

Soy nearly became the town

When Governor Sir Percy Girouard toured the district in December 1911, he wanted one town to serve both the Plateau and Trans Nzoia. The best site by far, the writer says, was Swinton-Home's estate at Soy, which already had more solid buildings than Farm 64. Swinton-Home refused an offer of two farms, including 64, in exchange, and the chance of a central town at Soy was lost. The governor then called a large meeting at 64, where farmers slept under their wagons on "a windswept, treeless spot".

Names put forward included Sosiani, Sirikwa, Girouardfontein and "Bado Kidogo". When no agreement came, Corbett or Arnoldi suggested Eldare, and the governor proposed adding a "t" so that it sounded like a Nandi word. The Gazette notice of 1 January 1912 gave the name as Eldoret, possibly through a printer's error, and on 14 November 1912 Eldoret was proclaimed a township of 2,770 acres.

The first shops and the bank in the mud

Traders were there before the plots were surveyed. Juma Hajee's father, Noor Mohamed, who ran a store on Van Breda's land at Hajee's Drift, opened a branch at 64. Dhanji Madhavji, trading on Steenkamp's land at the same drift, was persuaded by an officer of the King's African Rifles to open a mud and wattle shop near the later Unga mill to supply troops in Eldoret for the Marakwet patrol. John Selby, after whom Selby Falls was named, built a large mud and wattle store near the post office with Jim Robinson, and soon sold it to H. Wreford-Smith and McNab Mundell, who had been trading at Sergoit. In 1911 and 1912 Smith and Mundell exported 10,000 lb of wool, the first big marketing operation recorded on the Plateau.

The same building housed the Standard Bank under J.C. Shaw. The Cape Town office approved the mud premises only on condition that bars were fitted to the windows. Once, the writer says, Shaw asked the office boy to patch the flaking wall, but neither man's Swahili was good enough, and Shaw came back to find the wall washed away and the safe standing outside in the mud. Travellers slept on the bank counter, and the manager dressed for work in Eddy's Bar next door. Smith and Mundell's rest house, twenty beds in one mud room, was known as the Rat Pit and became notorious for poker. The piece ends by promising more the following year and asking readers to send in their own stories.

Source: "The History of Sixty Four", Habari 1984, pages 19 to 20 of the PDF, Friends of East Africa. Read the original issue. See also the archive's posts Sisibo to Eldoret and Early Days in Eldoret: L.S. van Aardt Remembers Sixty Four, and the guide to settler stories in Habari.