Wonders of Sergoit Hills

By William Kiptoo In July 1992 an Afrikaans minister came back to the Uasin Gishu plateau after thirty years away, carrying a notebook. The Rev. Piet Grobler had first arrived in January 1962, newly married, with ten pounds in his pocket and a congregation that was packing up to leave. Now he wanted to see what had become of it. He would write that everything was different. He would also write that the most moving hour of his week was spent with an old farmworker beside a grave. He came onto the plateau by way of Ainabkoi. His first stop was the old Bwana Loubser Mission at Plateau, where a pastor named Festo Okonyene met him and introduced him to the church council. Okonyene had been trained at that mission between 1944 and 1948 by the Rev. B. B. Eybers, its first missionary. Forty-four years later he still spoke warmly of Eybers, and of farmers whose names Grobler knew: Abraham Mouton, the Barnards, Schalk Steyn, Jimmy Davies, Adam van Rensburg. The mission had grown into somethin...