JOURNEY OF A PEACE WORKER

 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 ...

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...