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17 July 1937: The Day a Farmworker Became the First

By William Kiptoo

The Reformed Church of East Africa dates its beginning to 1944, when the Rev. B. B. Eybers arrived on the Uasin Gishu plateau as its first full-time missionary. Its own first member was baptised seven years earlier, by a minister passing through, in a church that was not built for him.

Mzee Joseph Cheserem (Sengerut). Photo: Cheserem family collection.

On 17 July 1937, a visiting minister from Thomson's Falls baptised a farmworker named Chebiego Cheserem Sengerut on the Plateau. Sengerut was about thirty-six. He worked for Abraham Mouton, one of the Afrikaner farmers who had come north from South Africa after the Anglo-Boer War, and the Afrikaners knew him as Vingerhoed, the thimble. He could not read. He held no office. There was no mission yet, no African congregation, no catechism in Swahili. There was a settler church, and a man who wanted to belong to it.

The church was the Dutch Reformed congregation of Vergenoeg, founded for the Afrikaner families of the plateau. Its people met in Eldoret and at the farm settlements around it, at Broederstroom and Sergoit, and near Plateau there was a small thatched church. That is the building Sengerut remembered more than fifty years later, when he told the story to a visiting South African minister in 1992.

He also remembered who had taught him. It was Ds M. P. Loubser, the congregation's settler pastor, who talked to him about Jesus himself until he became a Christian. Loubser had not come to Kenya as a missionary to Africans; he came to serve the Afrikaners. But on the farms, among the workers, the two worlds met, and Loubser and some of the farmers began a ministry among the people who worked their land. Sengerut's family remembers that Mouton too spoke to his workers about his faith.

What the day itself was like, we do not yet know. We do not know who stood with Sengerut, whether Mouton was there, what words were said, or in what language. We do not know the name of the minister from Thomson's Falls. These are the questions the Afrikaans church records may answer. What we know is the date, the place, and what came after.

What came after was a request. Sengerut began preaching to other workers on the farms, in their own languages, and the gatherings grew. A man baptised into a settler church started asking that church to send someone for the Africans. In 1944 it did. Loubser had left money for mission work, and the Vergenoeg congregation used it to call the Rev. B. B. Eybers, who arrived on 27 October 1944, bought the old school at Broederstroom, and named it the Bwana Loubser Mission Station. From that station grew the Reformed Church of East Africa, self-governing from 1963.

In most tellings, Eybers is where the story starts. Seen from 17 July 1937, he is the answer to a question Sengerut had been asking for years. The first convert came before the mission, and the mission came, at least in part, because the convert asked for it.

Sengerut lived to see the church he had asked for outgrow the people who sent it. When the Afrikaners left in the early 1960s, he bought part of Mouton's farm, including the farmhouse and the family graves, and promised to look after the graves. He kept that promise until he died in 1996. In 1992 a church went up on his land. His grandsons are now building a cathedral there for about 2,000 people.

When he died, the moderator of the church said of him that he was its history. That was more literal than it sounds. For the first seven years of its African life, the Reformed Church of East Africa was one baptised farmworker on the Plateau.

Sources

See also Two Graves Under the Cedars on this journal, and The Last Visit to the Mouton Farm on Wonders of Sergoit Hills.

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