Wonders of Sergoit Hills

By Ogw Limo HP, in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group. Full text with light spelling corrections. The derivations given here are the writer's own, drawing on the work of Dr Kipkoech araap Sambu; other explanations exist. First shared in The Wonders of Sergoit Hills Facebook group on 20 August 2025. The origin of Kip and Cheep in Kalenjin names is not difficult to trace. Cheep, as in the name Cheepkirui, is from the word tie (girl), which is remotely related to "teen" in English. Cheepkirui means Tieep, or tie ab (girl of) ku (sleep): a girl born when the family has slept. It was contracted to Cheep to let the tongue glide, although the Ogiek remain the only people to have retained the correct nomenclature, while the Tugen, Keiyo, Terik and Nandi have slid into an abyssal hole with their non existent "Jep" in their naming. In the Ogiek language, a girl born at midday is Tiebeet, and a girl born during the rainy season is Tieroop, or Roba in the Somali ...

Shared by William Kiptoo, adapted from an encyclopedia entry on the Kalenjin (Countries and Their Cultures). From the 1940s, young men from the Kalenjin speaking groups who went off to fight in the Second World War began using the term kale or kole, the scarring of the breast or arm of a warrior who had killed an enemy in battle, to describe themselves. During wartime radio broadcasts, the announcer John Chemallan used the phrase kalenjok, "I tell you" (plural). Later, students from these groups at Alliance High School formed a "Kalenjin" club. There were only fourteen of them, a small minority in a school in Gikuyu country, and they wanted an outward sign of a shared identity. Those students went on to become the Kalenjin elite. The identity was consolidated with the founding of the Kalenjin Union in Eldoret in 1948, and a monthly magazine, Kalenjin, in the 1950s. The movement was not only a people finding a name for themselves. According to this account, the col...