Kerit: The Many Guises of the Nandi Bear (a summary of Elsie Cloete's account)

A summary by William Kiptoo of an article by Elsie Cloete, "The Story of Kerit, The Many Guises of the Nandi Bear."

First shared in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group on 4 April 2022.

Elsie Cloete traces how the creature known to the Elgeyo as the keriet, and to settlers as the Nandi Bear, entered the record. Shortly after the last British punitive expedition against the Nandi in 1906, Geoffrey Williams saw an unknown beast near Sergoit, though he only reported it in 1911. By then, she writes, conversations with Elgeyo elders and workers had already told the first Plateau settlers of a large, furred, whiskered animal that could stand on its hind legs and had been known in the district since time immemorial. At night it gave out an eerie wail that some compared to a locomotive whistle.

Farmers, a District Commissioner, a game warden, a train driver and a Dutch Reformed Church elder all reported a beast with a bear like head, sloping hindquarters, no visible tail and small ears, which could sit back on its haunches and move at a fast sideways canter. Its tracks showed claws that did not retract. In 1919, Sonnie Cloete and a tracker called Kirongosh are said to have followed its spoor from the Elgeyo Forest past Sergoit to where the Eldoret creamery later stood, and on towards Nandi. Shots were fired at it, but no animal, living or dead, was ever found.

She distinguishes the keriet, a word that once carried real terror, from the chemosit, which among the Nandi, Kipsigis, Elgeyo and Marakwet is a bogeyman of folklore used to frighten naughty children, and suggests that settlers who were told the beast was a chemosit may simply have been talked to as children. Many sightings by newcomers, she notes, were probably hyenas, honey badgers, aardvarks or other animals, and the name Nandi Bear lives on in the Nandi Bear Club at Nandi Hills.

As far as she could establish, the last keriet was seen in the Uasin Gishu in the 1920s, when most of the game, especially zebra, was shot out to make way for fenced pastures and wheat, and she suggests that the creature may have died out with its food. Among local people, the memory faded as the generation that knew it passed on, and in each retelling the beast seems to grow smaller: one grandfather described it as a kind of tiger, his son thought it might have been a serval. Meanwhile it has fascinated outsiders, from the naturalist Bernard Heuvelmans in the 1950s to a 2001 BBC programme that linked it to the extinct chalicotheres.

For a Keiyo telling of the same creature, see The Chebokerit: A Keiyo Tale of the Nandi Bear, and The Nandi Bear: A Legend of Sergoit Hill.