Kipkigey arap Ayobei and the Beginnings of Kessup Girls
By Kiprop Kimutai, an excerpt from True Stories from Iten. Shared by William Kiptoo.
First shared in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group on 3 November 2023.
My mum went to Iten yesterday and met a teacher from Kessup Girls. The teacher told her he had seen her somewhere and asked whether she had ever taught at Kessup. My mum said no, and added that she had studied at Kessup Primary School in the 1950s. As they talked, the teacher mentioned a renowned man of Kessup in those days, a man called Kipkigey, who persuaded his clan to donate land for the secondary school. My mum smiled, because Kipkigey was her grandfather, the husband of Kabon, my great grandmother, whom I often speak of fondly.
His real name was Chebii arap Ayobei, and this is how he came to be called Kipkigey. Just after the First World War, the colonial government pushed the people of Elgeyo Marakwet to grow bananas. Officials considered the Keiyo lazy and in the habit of running away from manual work, and with world prices for wheat and maize falling, the Agriculture department was pressed to put them to use growing a viable cash crop. Agriculturalists went into the Keiyo reserve to test the soil and plant banana saplings. One of them was a botanist who walked around with Chebii, recording the native plants and their uses. The community grew fond of the English botanist and called him Kipkigey, and because Chebii spent so much time with him, they told Chebii he was another Kipkigey. Chebii would turn furious at this, which only made the name stick.
When the AIC church told Kipkigey of its plan to start a girls' secondary school, so that girls could study closer to home instead of travelling all the way to Kapropita, Kipkigey spoke to his clan and persuaded them to give a section of their land on the second escarpment for it.
Kipkigey loved my mum a lot. Once, when she was a young girl in class one walking from Sergoit to Kessup for school, she met him on his way to a wedding. He had smeared his face with white ochre and wore a headdress of ostrich feathers and a cloak of new vervet monkey skin. He smiled and told her he had nothing to give her just then, but she should wait for him before going home, because he would bring her honey and a little beer, as long as she never told her parents.
Mum visited him just after Kabon, his first wife, had died. Afraid of seeing his grief, she hesitated to go straight to his house and walked around Kessup instead, even buying mandazi. Eventually she went to his compound. Kipkigey's second wife saw her anxiety and ushered her in, saying Kipkigey longed to see her. He was frail by then, and mum found him alone in his hut, sitting on a skin mat with his lunch on a skin plate beside him. His eyes lit up when he saw her. He held up his hands and said, "Just greet me. I haven't touched her dead body. I am clean." Mum clasped his hands and found them bony, the flesh sunk in. Though he had eaten, he ate her mandazi heartily and asked her always to bring him more.
By the time he died, Kipkigey had become a Catholic. The priest at Iten told the family that every baptised person had to be buried at a mission, so his body was taken to Sing'ore and buried in one of the open graves dug there for Christians.
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