Wonders of Sergoit Hills

Compiled by William Kiptoo from Christine Nicholls' account in Old Africa (Stories from East Africa's Past) and a 1962 interview with Gladys Hoey. First shared in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group on 9 November 2022. Arthur Cecil Hoey, one of the first white residents of the Trans Nzoia, was born in Wimbledon in 1883. After school at Farnham he went to sea, left his ship in South Africa to fight in the closing months of the Boer War, and stayed on to learn about breeding horses. In 1904 he came to East Africa as a big game hunter and trekked across the Uasin Gishu plateau to the Nzoia River, marvelling at the huge herds of game. The American writer W.S. Rainsford hired him for a year's safari to the Sergoit River, and like many hunters of the time he made his money mostly from ivory. In 1909 he trekked from Nakuru to Addis Ababa through unmapped country, and his maps went to the Royal Geographical Society. Hoey also dealt in land for would be settlers and opene...

This is a retelling of Parts II and IV of A.C. Hoey’s notes on the early Uasin Gishu, written around 1956 for a church magazine and later reprinted in The Kenya Scrapbook. The first part is retold in Early History of the Uasin Gishu . Colonel Swinton brought pedigree cattle and sheep to the Plateau, and many of them died. Hoey credited him all the same: the settlers who came after learned from those costly losses. Game was a constant problem too. Zebra broke down every fence and lions raided the cattle. As farms were taken up, many settlers engaged Nandi families who moved onto the farms as squatters, looking for better grazing and freedom from controls in the reserve. Hoey admired the Nandi warriors and described their lion hunts. The men would encircle a lion and close in slowly. When it charged, one murenik rose with a war cry, took the lion on his shield and drove in his spear, and the others closed in at once. Men were often mauled, so the settlers never went out without bandage...

A.C. Hoey, one of the first Europeans to hunt and farm on the Uasin Gishu, wrote down his memories of the Plateau around 1956 for a church magazine; they were later reprinted in The Kenya Scrapbook. This is a retelling of the first part. The rest is retold in A.C. Hoey Remembers . Before 1900, Hoey noted, hardly anyone outside had heard of the Uasin Gishu. The earliest mention he could find was by Major J.R. Macdonald, who surveyed a railway route from Mombasa to Uganda between 1891 and 1894 and wrote of the Plateau’s rolling downs and fine grass on his way from Naivasha to Mumias. In 1905 Hoey met an Afrikaner named Van Breda at Naivasha who wanted land in the far south of the Plateau, near the Elgeyo escarpment. Around the same time Hoey set out on a hunting safari, though he struggled to get permission: the government was then fighting the Nandi, who were resisting the railway near Fort Ternan. Once allowed in, he found the Plateau crowded with game: herds of three to five hundre...

Herman Landgrebe wrote a short memoir of H.C. Kirk in 1983, and it was published by Habari, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa. This is a retelling in English. Kirk’s story touches Sergoit directly. H.C. Kirk was known to friends as HC or Bert, and to Africans as Bwana Mrefu, “the tall one”. He came to Kenya in 1907, just before he turned twenty-one, and joined Russell Bowker of Mt Margaret Estate near Kijabe. The two of them, with Mrs Bowker and her sewing machine, went on a six-month shooting safari to the Uasin Gishu by ox wagon. Kirk drove the wagon and was paid nothing but his food and whatever ivory he shot. They made a base camp near the Nzoia River, close to what became Hoey’s Bridge. In 1908 Kirk moved to Sergoit and joined A.C. Hoey, who then owned a farm on the shores of the lake. Hoey ran a hunting and trading business called the Sergoit Stores, and Kirk ran safaris for clients and traded in ivory and trophies. In November 1909 the former American president The...

Compiled for the Wonders of Sergoit Hills archive, October 2026. Updated with the older issues, 1982 to 2008. Habari is the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa (Vriende van Oos-Afrika), the association of Afrikaner and other families who once lived in Kenya and Tanzania. Since 1979 its members have written down their memories of the Uasin Gishu Plateau, Eldoret, Sergoit, Moiben, Kaptagat and the farms around them. Every issue is free to read on the Friends of East Africa website . This page is a guide to the settler stories of our area that appear in those issues, with a short note on what each one tells us, so that readers can go to the original. The stories belong to their authors and to the Friends of East Africa. Many are written in Afrikaans. The first trekkers and the founding of the settlement The beginnings of the settlement (Habari, first issue, pages 1 to 4, Afrikaans). An early account of how the settlement began with the three Van Breda brothers in 1902. Piet van...

An overview of "Goeie ou dae" (Good old days) by Jurgens Joubert, published in Habari 1998, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa. The original is in Afrikaans. This is a summary for readers of this archive, not a translation. Jurgens Joubert grew up near Kitale, went to school in Eldoret and spent much of his working life as a Kenya Police officer on the Plateau, at Eldoret, Soy and Turbo. His short memoir mixes church weekends, schoolday names and the lighter side of police work. To communion by ox wagon Several times a year the family drove from Kitale to Eldoret by ox wagon for communion at the Vergenoeg church, usually leaving on a Wednesday and doing the last stretch on Saturday morning. On one trip they slept under the wagon at Hoey's Bridge, where he mistook a dishcloth flapping on a thorn tree for a ghost. With them were Loet von Maltitz and his wife Sofie, his mother's sister. At the church an old man went round greeting everyone, and Jurgens hea...

An overview of "Huldeblyk aan Thysie Davies" (A tribute to Thysie Davies) by Hermanus Steyn, published in Habari 1986, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa. The original is in Afrikaans. This is a summary for readers of this archive, not a translation. M.J. Davies, known to everyone as Thysie, was one of the first children born on the Uasin Gishu Plateau. His parents came to what was then British East Africa in 1908 and settled at Sergoit, and Thysie was born there on 27 October 1909. The Davies family is closely tied to Sergoit Rock. Other accounts in Habari say the Van Rensburg trek camped at the foot of the rock on the land the Davies family took up. A helping hand Hermanus Steyn remembers him as a much loved and helpful man. When a neighbour went out to his fields at harvest, Thysie's tractors and threshing machines were often already there, ready to help, without anyone having asked. He was a good jockey and polo player, and with his racehorse "Make...