The Uasin Gishu Puzzle: Boers, Squatters and the Plateau

Shared by William Kiptoo, adapted from an academic study of settlers and squatter labour in the Kenya highlands.

First shared in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group on 19 October 2022.

The first settlers on the Uasin Gishu were Afrikaners. Many trekkers came from South Africa in 1907 and 1908, led by wealthy stock farmers with cattle and sheep. Despite cross breeding with local stock and constant dipping and dosing, their 70,000 sheep fell to a mere 5,000 within five years, and of all the imported cattle only "a very small herd of Africander cattle" was left by 1919.

With stock disease rampant, the Boers turned to wheat. That came naturally to the van Rensburg trekkers of 1908, Transvalers who had grown wheat at Ermelo and left soon after the Swaziland partition, which had cost them winter grazing and raised fears that their Swazi labourers would leave for the new reserves. The Uasin Gishu suited them well: far from the seat of government, perfect for wheat, and close to plentiful squatter labour.

The western highlands also drew English speaking South Africans, whom the East African Standard wrongly, but tellingly, lumped together as Boers. Settlement spread across the Nzoia, a place so isolated that a cartoonist in the Leader called the new district "Trans-Nowhere."

The Uasin Gishu was regarded as the most racist corner of the colony; a visitor in 1950 called it "Boer country." Colonial officials looked down on the Boers. In 1939 the Chief Native Commissioner called them "ignorant Dutchmen" for resisting measures on squatter stock, and District Commissioners kept a confidential file on them, blaming them for right wing views and sympathy with apartheid and contrasting Boer farming with the supposedly progressive British. In 1921 the Uasin Gishu Farmers Association even had a "Dutch branch" and an "English branch." Many Boers were poorer than the British service pensioners and leaned more heavily on squatter labour. Yet even before the Second World War they were becoming anglicised and active in the District Council, and from 1939 to 1948 the plateau was represented in the Legislative Council by an elected Afrikaner, W.A.C. Bouwer. By the early 1940s, one historian noted, there was no more talk of a "poor white" problem.

The Squatters

The Nandi and other Kalenjin groups supplied most of the labour on the plateau. Nandi families signed squatter contracts in growing numbers just before the First World War, grazing their zebu cattle on the large western estates. Part of the reason was the confiscation of Nandi land and cattle after the 1905 to 1906 campaign, but mostly they sought to escape colonial controls on raiding, collective punishment for stock theft, and taxation. Settlers and administrators encouraged it. In 1911 the Uasin Gishu DC wrote of the settlers' hope that the Nandi would leave the reserve and settle among the white farmers with their cattle and families as employees. They were also the only neighbours from whom cattle could be bought.

Squatter numbers rose after the war, with famine and the excision of another 100 square miles of supposedly guaranteed Nandi land. In the cereal boom of the 1920s, helped by favourable tariffs and freight rates, plateau farmers planted ever more wheat and maize and drew more and more labour from Elgeyo Marakwet.

Squatters had no legal title, but early on access mattered more than title, and it was extensive. In 1944 a Settlement Committee reckoned squatter stock was using two to three million acres of European farms, at least 30 per cent of the white highlands. In 1947 Nandi squatters were grazing at least 150,000 head of cattle, perhaps 40 per cent of all the cattle in the Uasin Gishu. Squatting gave a cattle keeping people stability and kept alive the kaptich system of managing herds. In 1952 the Soy to Hoey's Bridge area had 4,280 acres under cereals, 5,140 acres of maize and 9,800 head of stock.