The Last Visit to the Mouton Farm: A Minister Returns to the Plateau, July 1992
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 something Eybers might not have recognised: a school, a new church, student houses, a hospital. The old festival hall, where the Afrikaners had once gathered on their Day of the Covenant, had become a Bible and technical college. Its farm had taken in land that once belonged to Fanie Barnard, and the wheat on it looked very fine.
The farmhouses were another matter. Grobler's party visited three of them and wished they had not. "Better not go and look," he wrote. Trees had grown up where there had been none and others had been pulled out. In one house the living room had burned and the wooden floor had been lifted; maize was stored where a family once sat in the evenings. In another, one of his companions nearly stepped on a hen sitting on her nest. The big wheat farms had been divided into family plots of wheat, maize and pyrethrum, with a few cattle on each. Sergoit Hill still stood above green fields, and the Kruger farmyard below it was as neat as ever.
That night they drove into Eldoret, to the parsonage where he and Bets had started married life. It was dark and muddy. Two families lived in the house, another in the old library, others in the garage and the servants' room. A cow stood in a pen where the bananas had grown. The resident minister, a Kenyan, was away.
Then they went to Abraham Mouton's old farm.
The renovated Mouton farmhouse at Kapsengerut, now home to Sengerut's family. Photo: William Kiptoo.
The Moutons had left in 1962, in the same months the Groblers arrived. The man who met them on the farm was someone the settlers had called Vingerhoed, the thimble. His own name was Chebiego Cheserem Sengerut. He was about ninety, and he owned a hundred acres of what had been Mouton's land, bought from Mouton when the family sold up. He had worked for Mouton since he was a boy.
What he told Grobler that day is a rare first-hand account of how the Reformed Church of East Africa began among Africans, and it does not begin with a missionary. It begins with Sengerut as a young worker, sitting in a small thatched church near Plateau, and with the settler pastor M. P. Loubser, who talked to him about Jesus himself until he became a Christian. On 17 July 1937 a visiting minister from Thomson's Falls baptised him on the Plateau. No African had been baptised in that church before him. When Eybers came seven years later, Sengerut had already been asking for someone to be sent.
Grobler wrote all this down. Then the old man did two things that stayed with him.
First, he prayed for his visitors. A Kalenjin elder who had once been a settler's shamba boy prayed over the settlers' minister. Then he took them across the farm to Abraham Mouton's grave. It was thirty years since the family had gone. He had promised the family he would look after it, and he had.
The graves of Abraham Mouton and his wife, beside those of Sengerut and his wife, at Kapsengerut. Photo: William Kiptoo.
The second thing was a request. Sengerut told Grobler he had set part of his land aside for a church, and he asked that the Afrikaners now in South Africa send help to build it on the Mouton family farm. It is the last thing Grobler records from the visit. A church went up there that same year.
Grobler went home and published his notes in Habari, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa, read by the scattered families who had once farmed the plateau. Most of what he wrote is about loss: houses burnt, gardens gone, a congregation of six hundred reduced to memory. The page about Sengerut reads differently. It records a church that had outgrown its founders, run by Kenyans like Okonyene, and a man who had kept faith with a family long after they had stopped being his employers.
Sengerut died four years later, in 1996. His grandsons now live in the Mouton farmhouse. Beside the church of 1992 they are building a cathedral for about 2,000 people. The family says Sengerut used to tell them that people from South Africa would come to help finish it. In July 1992, one of them did come, with a notebook, and wrote down what he was told.
Sources
- Rev. Piet Grobler, "Kenia dagboek", Habari 1992 (Afrikaans), as retold in Memories of Uasin Gishu and Going Back: Return Visits to Eldoret, Sergoit, Turbo and Patatadraai
- Piet and Bets Grobler, memoirs in Habari 1983 and 2021, as summarised in A Young Minister in Eldoret: Piet and Bets Grobler, 1962 to 1963, on this archive
- William Kiptoo, interviews with the Cheserem family at Kapsengerut
- South African and RCEA publications in Afrikaans, translated by William Kiptoo
- Photographs: William Kiptoo
See also Joseph Cheserem (Sengerut): The Pioneer of the Reformed Church of East Africa and Kapsengerut: Birthplace of the Reformed Church of East Africa.
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