The Van Rensburg Trek Remembered: A Settler's Tape from the Early Days

An overview of "Early Days in Kenya, with some information about the Van Rensburg Trek", a settler's memories tape recorded by Piet Roets in conversation with Mitford Bowker around 1971 and edited by Gareth Mitford-Barberton in 1986. Published in Habari 1994, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa. This is a summary for readers of this archive, not the full text.

Few records of the Van Rensburg trek come from someone who was actually on it. This one does. The speaker is not named in the printed text, but he tells us he came to Kenya as a young man with his family, married into the Van Rensburg family, and was still living on a portion of his father in law's farm when the tape was made. His story covers the journey, the first years on the farms and the long hard work of carting goods up from Londiani.

The call to the Plateau

Back in South Africa his father farmed maize, cattle and sheep, moving the stock down to the bushveld every winter. A few years after the Boer War, advertisements appeared in the English papers asking for farmers to settle in East Africa. In 1906 Jan van Rensburg and another man went by boat to Mombasa and on to Nairobi, where they met the governor. The governor told them that if Van Rensburg could bring thirty families, the Uasin Gishu Plateau would be opened for them to choose where they wanted to settle.

In 1908 Van Rensburg brought 47 families, 402 people in all. They came on the German ship Windhoek to Mombasa and by train to Nakuru, camping at Solai and near Nakuru station, while others went to Molo. They brought no cattle, but they brought horses, wagons, ox carts, some horse carts and, as he says, nearly every family had one or two dogs.

The scouting party and the road through the forest

From Nakuru an expedition of eleven men on horseback went ahead, among them Van Rensburg, Prinsloo, Steenkamp, Du Plessis, Erasmus and Enslin. They came back pleased with the Plateau: open plains, enough rivers and water, and game everywhere, zebra, kongoni, topi, oribi and reedbuck, with lions sometimes sixteen together. While they were away the families bought oxen from Somali traders and others and began training them.

The wagons went by way of Rongai, Molo and Eldama Ravine. From Ravine they had to cut their way through heavy forest, the first belt about five miles wide, the second three and the third two. At a stream they named Brusspruit they outspanned for a day, and from there they saw Sergoit Hill and the Plateau for the first time. There were no bridges, so at nearly every river the men had to make a drift. From a place they called Diploff, near Kipkabus, they reached the Elgeyo forest and branched off onto the Plateau, carrying a week's firewood on the wagons.

Arrival at Sergoit

Twenty seven wagons reached Sergoit, travelling in three columns of seven, ten and ten. They outspanned at Sergoit Rock for lunch, then went on past Nandi Hill to the Sergoit swamp, where they stopped for a few days. From there the families spread out, some downstream, some upstream and some across the river, and every man camped where he wanted his farm.

Later the government sent a surveyor, a Mr Scobie, to survey the farms. The settlers were told they would get the land only if they developed and improved it. About eighteen months later they asked the governor to inspect their work, and he sent someone to value the improvements. Not a single farm was taken back. They became tenants, and in time they worked for their title deeds.

Making do

The first houses were of mud, grass or, for the more permanent ones, stone and mud. Not knowing the seasons, they broke land late in November and planted maize and oats they had brought with them. A little rain came and the crop came up, but it did not ripen. Some families dug water furrows from the rivers and grew good gardens.

Food, sugar, coffee and tea all had to come from Nakuru, which had the nearest shops and post office, a journey of three or four weeks there and back by wagon. They bought "Indian Superfine Flour" at 37 rupees a bag. What saved them, he says, was the game, and the finger millet (wimbi) they bought from the Nandi and ground in small hand mills. Short of shoes, they tanned eland hide for soles and kongoni for uppers, used oribi hide instead of cotton cloth and made shoe nails from bamboo pegs. When the coffee ran out they roasted potatoes or maize, and when the lamp oil ran out the mothers made candles from eland or kongoni fat poured into marrow bones or bamboo.

The first ploughs went about nine inches deep, and the first harrows were poles with olive wood pegs driven through them. Wheat sold for four and a half rupees a bag and maize for three. After the second year they had enough to eat from their own fields. A few families went back to South Africa, but most stayed.

Wild animals and disease

He remembers his wife, then a girl in a tent, seeing a "big pig" in the morning fog, which turned out to be a rhino that her father shot. Elephants crossed between Mount Elgon and the Elgeyo forest in wet weather, sometimes more than a hundred in a day. Once at Sergoit about a hundred and fifty passed right by a homestead and left two calves behind. But the worst damage came from leopards. Near Kipkarren, on the Nandi border, a leopard got into a stone walled boma through an air hole and killed two good rams and fifty ewes in a night. Zebra trampled crops, and night guards put up white flags to scare them.

The first rinderpest came in 1912, then East Coast fever, and in 1913 and 1914 an unknown disease killed sheep by the hundred. Cattle farming only improved from about 1937 and 1938, when the farmers began building dips.

Transport riding

For years he did transport work from Londiani to Eldoret and as far as Mount Elgon. When the sawmills started he carried boilers of over five tons. On the big slope at Timboroa a boiler rolled off his wagon. With no crane, the men dug a trench beside it, ran the empty wagon into the trench, jacked the boiler up and loaded it again, which took a whole day. In very wet weather the trip from Londiani to the Elgeyo sawmills could take 27 days. He also tells of helping English newcomers whose Scotch cart had broken down near the road, and of a night journey to Londiani beyond Burnt Forest when a loaded wagon overturned off a bridge and was pulled out, reloaded and on its way again by sunrise.

Why it matters

This is one of the few first hand accounts of how the trek actually reached Sergoit, and it places Sergoit Rock, Nandi Hill and the Sergoit swamp at the centre of the settlement. It also shows how much the first settlers depended on the Nandi for food. Readers should remember that it is one man's memory, recorded more than sixty years after the events, and some names and numbers may differ from other accounts. Florence Bouwer, for example, remembered about seventy families.

Source: "Early Days in Kenya, with some information about the Van Rensburg Trek", Habari 1994, pages 5 to 10 of the PDF, Friends of East Africa. Read the original issue. See also the guide to settler stories in Habari.