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Tbt# School Culture and Resources Back in the ‘80s

The schoolyard of Sergoit primary school (UG) in the 1980s was always alive with the shuffle of bare feet and the chatter of children arriving from distant villages of Kapnyangi, Chembulet, Kaptuli, Kaplogoi, Chemanywes... Some had walked seven, even ten kilometers, their faces flushed from the morning cold, their clothes thin against the biting wind. We carried our lunches (mostly mkarangoo ) in tin containers, hanging them on the branches of a great tree outside the classroom. By midday, goats would sometimes wander in, tearing down the tins and feasting on our food, leaving us to laugh bitterly or walk home hungry. Inside, the classrooms were little more than shells. At Sergoit Upper, three brick-walled rooms stood side by side, their floors dusty and uneven. The headteacher’s office was squeezed between Standards Five and Six, a cramped space where books were marked and milk packets distributed. Every Tuesday and Friday, the Nyayo School Milk program transformed the atmosphere. C...
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Childhood on a Settler Farm: Growing Up in the Shadow of Power

 My childhood began on land that did not belong to us. It was in Sergoit, on a vast, mechanized farm owned by the Kruger family, Boer settlers who had made Kenya their home decades earlier. By the time I was born, the rhythms of the farm were already established: who owned, who worked, who decided, and who obeyed. My father was a laborer there.  We lived in what were called  kambis,  clusters of workers’ houses spread across the farm: Kabao, Soin, Kambi Ya Juu, and Kaprison. Each had rows of small, closely spaced houses, built not for comfort, but for function. Our first home in Kabao was a single-room brick structure near the school, exposed to the harsh winds that swept down from Sergoit Hill. At night, the wind could tear at the iron sheets, and my father would place stones on the roof to hold it down, an act that felt both ordinary and symbolic of how fragile our place there was. The farm was not just where we lived. It defined how we lived. Work, movement, even ...
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Rev. M. P. Loubser (1876–1947): Settler Pastor and Foundational Figure in the Origins of Reformed Work in Eldoret

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Rev. Marthinus Petrus Loubser was born in 1876 in the Cape Colony, South Africa, and ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church within the Afrikaner Reformed tradition. His life and ministry must be understood within the wider historical movement that followed the Anglo Boer War, when many Afrikaners migrated to British East Africa in search of land, autonomy, and the preservation of their religious and cultural identity. Loubser was part of this migration and arrived in the Eldoret region in the early twentieth century, where he would become a central figure in the emerging settler church. Rev. Loubser. Photo: Europeans in East Africa By the 1920s, Afrikaner settlers in the Uasin Gishu Plateau had established the Vergenoeg congregation, a name that reflected both geographical distance and a conscious separation from British colonial influence. Loubser was called as its first permanent minister and served across a wide and scattered farming community. His ministry focused on Afrikaans speak...
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From Soldier to Peacebuilder: Lessons from Basilan

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A Quiet Christmas Pilgrimage on Sergoit Hill Faces Pressure from Development

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Every Christmas Day and on December 26, thousands of children and young people converge on a cluster of rocky hills in Kenya’s North Rift, about 20 kilometres northeast of Eldoret along the Moiben road. There are no posters, no social media campaigns, and no official organisers. Yet for more than four decades, the annual climb to Sergoit Hill has continued—an unspoken tradition passed from generation to generation. Locals describe it as an annual ritual, even a pilgrimage, though it carries no formal religious or cultural meaning. What sustains it is memory, habit, and the simple pull of the hill itself. “It was like a must-do thing,” recalls Sammy Bungei, who participated frequently in the late 1970s and 1980s. “Every Christmas we would walk from Kuinet, nearly 20 kilometres, to climb the hill with other children.” Roots in a Simpler Time The tradition is believed to have begun in the early 1970s, when entertainment options in rural Uasin Gishu were limited. With no television, video ...
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