One Settler's Farming Tribulations: Laura's Farm on the Plateau

A summary of an excerpt from the memoir of Janet Forsy, who spent over five years at Kaptagat Preparatory School in the years before independence. The excerpt was published in the Daily Nation (DN Sunday) on 15 September 2013, updated in 2020, and was later shared in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group. Because it is a published piece, it is summarised here.

The settler Janet Forsy came to know best was Laura, the matron at Kaptagat Preparatory School. Laura and her husband had come to Kenya after the Second World War with their three boys, but they had divorced, and she was left to run a small farm about ten miles away on the Plateau on her own. A woman farming alone was unusual at the time. She found it hard to sell cattle at the Eldoret market, and to make ends meet she took the matron's job in term time, leaving the farm in the hands of her Nandi headman. Because she could not pay him well, he and the other workers kept their families and their own cattle on the farm alongside hers.

On weekends the two women would climb into Laura's clapped-out army truck and drive to the farm. The farmhouse was the typical early settler kind: a square of mud and wattle under a corrugated iron roof, divided into four rooms, with a lean-to kitchen holding a wood-fired iron stove. Water was carried up from the river that ran through the farm, and the toilet was a long drop. They ate hot maize cakes, eggs, chicken and beef, and drank coffee from bushes grown in the garden plot, where potatoes, carrots and other vegetables also grew.

Things went from bad to worse. The truck needed imported engine parts and new tyres that Laura could not afford. Although she dipped her animals regularly, as all the settler farmers did, too many of them died. Her eldest son, Patrick, left school at fifteen or sixteen to manage the farm. Then termites ate through one of the four posts holding up the house, and after a few weeks the whole house collapsed. With no money to rebuild, Laura made a one-roomed shelter of straw bales inside the Dutch barn. Cattle began to disappear through mysteriously broken fences, and one afternoon the farm hands dragged in a cattle thief. With no telephone on the farm, a worker had to run to a neighbour's farm to call the Eldoret police, who arrived at sunset.

Every season brought hard choices: whether to sell a treasured bull to buy wheat seed or plant their own poorer seed, whether to pay for artificial insemination when the vet bills were already unpaid. In the end, like many other settlers, Laura gave up. In 1963 she sent her middle son to England to finish his schooling with her sister. She and the other two boys loaded a vehicle with what they could carry, drove to Durban and sailed for Australia. The little farm on the Plateau was handed over to the Nandi headman in thanks for his help over the years.

Editor's note: this memoir is a useful reminder that not every settler was wealthy. Some, like Laura, lived in mud and wattle houses and struggled to keep their farms going, and the land sometimes passed directly to the African workers who had helped run it. See also the story of Kaptagat Preparatory School.

Source: Janet Forsy, memoir excerpt, Daily Nation (DN Sunday), 15 September 2013, updated 2020. Shared in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group.