Every story has a place where it begins. For me, that place is Sergoit. At first glance it is simply a hill on the Uasin Gishu plateau, about twenty kilometres from Eldoret, surrounded by wheat fields and farms. For me it is a landscape full of memory, both bitter and formative. I was born there, and my family lived there for two generations as squatters on a settler farm. To write about Sergoit is not to dwell in the past for its own sake. It is to bear witness to lives that were rarely seen, to name an injustice I did not understand as a child, and to honour the resilience that made survival possible. This piece is my way to remember.
The Coming of the Krugers
The Kruger family arrived from South Africa in 1908, at the height of British colonial rule, and settled at the foot of Sergoit Hill. For them the land was opportunity: vast, fertile soil waiting to be tilled. For the people already living around it, it meant loss, with land taken, boundaries redrawn and freedoms curtailed. As children we heard the elders put it simply: "Hawa wazungu walikuja zamani" (these white people came long ago). We saw what that meant in the big farmhouse that sat apart from our camps, its iron roof glinting in the sun.
By the time my parents migrated from Endo in Elgeyo Marakwet in the 1960s to work as labourers, the imbalance had hardened into a system. Africans worked; Europeans owned. The farm was a miniature highland society with its own rules and hierarchies.
Independence Without Freedom
The anti-colonial struggle and the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s sent panic through the White Highlands. Many settlers sold their farms cheaply and left, fearing reprisals for how they had treated African workers. Jan Ernst Kruger left briefly for South Africa in 1956, but he came back, took Kenyan citizenship in 1963 and bought up land from settlers who were leaving. While others fled, he consolidated.
Kenya gained independence that year. People danced in the streets of Nairobi. But on the farm, freedom was mostly a word. My father put it in his own simple way: "Uhuru ulikuja, lakini si kwa maskini" (independence came, but not for the poor). Families like mine received no land, no title and no chance to reclaim what had been lost. When Jan Ernst died in 1983, his son Fanie inherited the farm, and the order that colonialism had built passed on with it. History does not always end with independence. Sometimes it simply changes managers.
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| Our house in Kabao, 1976–78 |
Life in the Kambis
Workers lived in clusters of houses called kambis (camps), set well away from the main farmhouse: Kambi ya Juu, Kaprison, Soin and Kabao. We lived first in Kabao (1975–1978) and then in Soin, in a large round grass-thatched house, from 1978 until 1995. Of the seventeen houses in Soin, all were grass-thatched except four three-roomed brick houses reserved for the farm "managers." Most houses were small, crowded and poorly ventilated, with an average of six people to a household.
The rules were strict. We could keep chickens, but no other livestock. Cutting trees for firewood was forbidden, so families cooked with maize stalks and dry wood. Until 1993 there were no toilets for residents at all; disease outbreaks followed every rainy season as water sources were contaminated. Only after a public health official intervened was a communal toilet built, and even then several households shared it. Water came from a shallow well and a nearby river that dried up in the dry season. Deaths among young people were common. Women faced childbirth with little access to medical care, and accidents claimed many lives.
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| Farm housing units in Kabao |
Labour Without Reward
There were two kinds of workers. Permanent workers received a house and a small kitchen garden, though even its use was controlled. Casual labourers received nothing beyond their pay. Men worked long, draining days, up to seventeen or eighteen hours in harvest season, cleaning stables, milking cows and caring for livestock, often six days a week. Most herdsmen, dairy workers, drivers and watchmen earned less than Ksh 300 a month; a dairy manager, near the top of the ladder, earned about Ksh 350. Wages were set not to reward effort but to keep families dependent. At Christmas, Kruger sometimes gave out maize, meat and milk from the farm's stock. After my father died in 1980, those gifts stopped coming to us.
My father's hands tell this part of the story: hands that tilled acres of wheat and maize but never filled his own granary.
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| Wheat harvest season at the farm |
My Mother's Choice
Women were not employed on the farm except as domestic servants. Most stayed home caring for children, tending gardens and washing clothes. To survive, some brewed chang'aa and busaa and sold them to men who earned wages. My mother was among them. She brewed not because she wanted to but because survival left no other choice, and that brewing paid for our education.
It came at a cost. Police raids were frequent. Officers demanded bribes, and those who could not pay were taken to court. Kruger was himself a police reservist, and, fearing political reprisals, he paid the police to arrest brewers and idle young men on his farm. My mother carried the weight of criminality for choices that were forced on her, always one raid away from ruin. Her silence was part of a larger silence: the invisible labour of women who hold families together while history fails to count them.
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| Casual workers at work |
A Childhood of Contrasts
And yet Sergoit was also home. We lived in a paradox of belonging and exclusion: bound to the only place we had ever known, yet always aware that it was not ours. The farm brought together families from different communities, and out of proximity grew friendships and shared languages. We hunted in the bushes, though it was forbidden, and climbed Sergoit Hill pretending to be explorers. From the top we could dream beyond the wheat fields.
Education was both privilege and battleground. Many children never finished school, but my mother was determined that we would. I walked to school barefoot on cold mornings, often on an empty stomach, and each step was an act of hope. Sundays at the Reformed Church of East Africa were more than services; they were a social lifeline that held families together, and it was in church youth activities that I first learned to lead.
Pushed Out
As I grew older, the reality of being squatters became harder to ignore. Second-generation squatters like us, born on the farm and knowing no other home, made the owner uneasy, especially families no longer working for him. After my father's death none of us was employed on the farm. Intimidation followed: night police raids, arrests and threats. On one night in December 1994, police arrested twenty-two people, most of them women, my mother among them. In 1995 my family finally left Sergoit and moved to our ancestral home in Marakwet. It was an ending, and a beginning.
Why I Remember
Today I see Sergoit as a microcosm of something larger. Land meant permanence and wealth for one family, and uncertainty for the rest of us: a borrowed place where we could build huts but never a home. That pattern repeats across the world, from the reservations of North America to the plantations of the Caribbean and the estates of colonial Kenya. Labour built fortunes that the labourers never shared. Women carried the burdens no one counted.
Sergoit taught me how inequality is structured, how power protects itself, and how poverty is kept in place not by chance but by design. It also taught me resilience: the laughter of children in the camps, the quiet strength of mothers, the stubbornness of fathers who kept working when hope was thin. Those lessons shaped how I see the world and how I understand justice.
The question is what we do with such stories. We can bury them, ashamed of their pain, or we can tell them as testimony and warning. I choose to tell. Remembering is a form of justice. Perhaps one day children born in places like Sergoit will inherit hope rather than hardship. When I picture Sergoit Hill against the sky, that is the future I imagine, and the one worth working toward.
Photos of the Farm at Various Times
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| Giraffes at the farm |
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