Jurgens Joubert's Good Old Days: Communion at Vergenoeg and a Policeman at Soy

An overview of "Goeie ou dae" (Good old days) by Jurgens Joubert, published in Habari 1998, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa. The original is in Afrikaans. This is a summary for readers of this archive, not a translation.

Jurgens Joubert grew up near Kitale, went to school in Eldoret and spent much of his working life as a Kenya Police officer on the Plateau, at Eldoret, Soy and Turbo. His short memoir mixes church weekends, schoolday names and the lighter side of police work.

To communion by ox wagon

Several times a year the family drove from Kitale to Eldoret by ox wagon for communion at the Vergenoeg church, usually leaving on a Wednesday and doing the last stretch on Saturday morning. On one trip they slept under the wagon at Hoey's Bridge, where he mistook a dishcloth flapping on a thorn tree for a ghost. With them were Loet von Maltitz and his wife Sofie, his mother's sister. At the church an old man went round greeting everyone, and Jurgens heard him say "Dag, Gentlemen" to the boys, so to the children he became "Oom Gentlemen". It was Gert van Rensburg, father of Lena, who married Willem, son of Bokkie von Maltitz. He remembers Bokkie von Maltitz's Sunday school, where a question such as "Who was in the basket on the Nile?" would be met with silence until Oom Bokkie began, "It was Mo, Moo, Mooo...", and the children shouted "Moses".

He also tells of an Easter camp at the soda springs at Keben in the Nandi reserve, and of Rooi Piet Kruger creeping behind a man playing guitar at the fire and growling like a leopard.

School and the war

In 1935 he moved from school in Kitale to Eldoret, where Mr Hunter was principal and his first teacher was Miss Cloete. He remembers Miss Tunstal, Mr Louw and Miss Blair, who taught them Scottish dances, and a nursery rhyme concert in which Margaret Arnoldi played the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. In 1939 he went to the Prince of Wales School in Nairobi, which was moved to Naivasha for safety after the Second World War began. He served in the Kenya Regiment.

A policeman on the Plateau

He joined the Kenya Police in 1945 and was stationed in Eldoret, then after two years at Soy, which lay about eight miles from Eldoret across "old Douglas's land", a favourite spot for a little game meat. One night, driving from Eldoret to Soy with his lights off, he heard a shot ahead and found Anna von Maltitz beside a car with a flat tyre and a pump with no rubber tube, while her husband Faas climbed out of a ditch. They all went to his house at Soy for tea. Another evening a friend shot a buck on the Soy road, and Jurgens joked at the Soy police station that the askari should cut off the four hooves as evidence for the court, which nearly ended the friendship.

From Soy he served in the Kitale district at Kimilili, back at Eldoret in 1951, and during the Emergency of 1952 at Nakuru, Solai, Subukia and Nairobi. He married Ria in 1953, returned to Soy in 1959 and later moved to Turbo police station. When they moved, his worker Manuel tied one of Ria's pink bloomers to the radio aerial on the lorry in place of a red flag. He ends with thanks for the 44 years he and Ria had together.

Source: Jurgens Joubert, "Goeie ou dae", Habari 1998, pages 3 to 5 of the PDF, Friends of East Africa. Read the original issue (Afrikaans). See also the guide to settler stories in Habari.