The clumsy origins of Eldoret; once a boer town

By John Kamau
Eldoret is out- may be for a short period after witnessing the exodus of its second wave of investors.
Of all the fancy and clumsy stories about origins of some Kenyan towns that I have come across, Eldoret beats them all: Nine-zero.
This was the only Kenyan town that ostensibly had a bar that was never manned! Revelers would just go, take beer and leave the money at the counter- and if they needed change they would take the exact amount and stagger to the hyena-laden fields of Farm 64 as the emerging town was known then.
The story is told of how two thirsty revelers found that one of their own had accidentally locked the padlock and they broke the door, took their beer, paid as usual and left. For years, the story goes on, the bar operated without a door.
But that is as far as the juicy stories of Eldoret go. Perhaps it happened, or it is one of those Happy Valley tales.
I doubt it happened for one reason. Eldoret is one of the only towns in Kenya that was founded by South African and British rogues, renegades and perverts! So, one might just ask: at what point did they acquire this civility of taking beer, paying and taking the exact change. Total lies.
But what we know is that Eldoret was the epicenter of colonial notoriety, murders, rape and chicanery. What is currently amazing is that the town, or just “Eldy” as they call it, has managed to hide this notoriety and past and soldier on rising to become the fifth largest town in Kenya.
It all started in 1909 when about 280 Boers arrived in Kenya from South Africa with prefabricated houses, wagons, ploughs, cattle and sheep and started a mighty trek to the highlands looking for a place to settle. Something akin to the velds of South Africa where they had fled from fearing to be colonized by the British.
Led by Meneer Van Rensberg the group left Mombasa – where they arrived aboard a chartered German Boat “Windhoek” – on June 1908 and reached Nakuru on July 18, 1908. It was at Nakuru that the47 families dispersed to different routes but most veered towards modern day Eldoret with some 42 wagons.
It was in the Uasin Gishu plateaus that the group, interestingly aided by gun totting British rogues, that they managed to push out the Maasai to create what they called “breathing space” .
Colonial writer, Elspeth Huxley in her book "No Easy Way" captured the drama: "To get heavily-loaded wagons up this steep escarpment along the rough, narrow, treacherous track, with inexperienced oxen and in a wet year, was a truly remarkable feat, and only Afrikaners could have performed it...."
Famous American travel writer Negley Farson, in his 1947 book "Last Chance In Africa" says that Eldoret to the Boers looked like “ their beloved kopjes in the Transvaal -- they out-spanned at once, saying: 'Here is a land where our women can breed in space' ...
But why did they pick Eldoret? There is one story that has been passed on for generations.
It is said that one of the wagons that made it to Eldoret was carrying a heavy safe that collapsed at the site of Eldoret. An attempt by the Boers to lift it back to the wagon failed and they decided to build a bank around the safe!
By this time most of the best land had been grabbed by the whites who had christened the entire area “white highlands” and wanted to lock out ownership from everyone else. That is how the Nandi’s lost most of their land here.
Of course the boers were no ordinary settlers but cowards (fleeing Anglo-Boer war!) perverts, and racists. It was the Nandis who paid a heavy price dealing with them.
The british also had no time for the boers who had taken up farms here that had been surveyed by the Royal engineers.
Farm 64 had been allocated to a boer named Willie van Aardt and it was him who built the first post office since he could not make a living out of the farm. Thus, the story of Eldoret township started after Aardt started getting applications for business plots on the farm.
The British administration sent one of its administrators, N.F. Corbett to build a stone house opposite the New Lincoln Hotel. It was opposite here that they build a corrugated iron police station and a District Commissioners residence from the remaining material.
All this time Eldoret had no name and was just Farm 64 and farmers had to be summoned by Governor, Sir Percy Girouard to give it a name.
The names suggested included Girouardfontein, Sirikwa, Sosiani, Bado Kidogo, and finally, Eldare. It was the governor who suggested that a ‘t’ be inserted at the end to read Eldaret but due to a typing error in the official gazette the name was spelt “Eldoret” in the gazette notice of January 1, 1912 and it was never rectified!
The Bank built by the boers became The Standard Bank but the Cape Town office allegedly refused to approve the premises unless bars were fitted in the windows. Historian, A.T. Mason captures what happened: “ all the paraphenaria of city banking arrived, including a brass plate which was quickly affixed to the mud and wattle wall. On one occasion its manager J.C Shaw told the office boy to patch the flaking mud but the Swahili of both the manager and the worker was meager with the result that when Shaw returned he found the wall had disintegrated under repeated onslaughts with buckets of water and the safe was outside in the mud!”
It is said that because there was no accommodation in Eldoret, some of the customers slept at the counter and took their morning bath at the bank or at a bar next door known as The Eddy’s. It is the Eddy’s that had been broken into by the revelers to have a beer.
Unlike other towns Eldoret used the Kruger coins as its currency and its District Commissioner had very little hold of the boers and the town was basically neglected and the public works department did not encourage stone buildings hoping to remove the corrugated iron and go elsewhere.
The DC had to refer all decisions to Naivasha or Nairobi and had no powers and in 1913 the first DC resigned in protest.
But it rose to service the agricultural farms with fuel and as a post office and by 1924 the railway arrived connecting the town to the coast.
Even today, the Boer legacy on this town can be seen in the old buildings and churches.