Skip to main content

Two Graves Under the Cedars: Sengerut, the Moutons and the Beginnings of the RCEA

By William Kiptoo

The graves of Abraham Mouton and his wife, beside those of Joseph Cheserem (Sengerut) and his wife, at Kapsengerut. Photo: William Kiptoo.

On a low rise off the Eldoret to Eldama Ravine road, just past Naiberi, four graves lie close together beside a church compound. Two belong to Abraham Mouton and his wife, Afrikaner farmers who came north from South Africa in the years after the Anglo-Boer War. The other two belong to Joseph Cheserem, the man everyone here calls Sengerut, and his wife. The Moutons left Kenya in 1962. Sengerut stayed, and for more than thirty years he kept their graves.

The place is named after him. Kapsengerut means "the home of Sengerut." His grandsons live in the old Mouton farmhouse, renovated now, with the settler's storeroom still standing and his tractor rusting in the yard. Beside the church he helped build in 1992, a new cathedral is rising, built to hold close to 2,000 people. The family says it is the church Sengerut saw before he died.

To understand why a Kalenjin elder spent his last decades tending the graves of the man he once worked for, you have to go back to the farm, and to a request that nobody expected from a farmworker who could not read.

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

Sengerut's Elgeyo name was Chebiego Cheserem Sengerut. He was born around 1901, the year the railway reached Kisumu, though like most Africans of his generation he had no birth record. The Afrikaner farmers had their own name for him: Vingerhoed, the thimble. As a boy he went to work on Mouton's farm, herding and labouring like many young men from the escarpment who came up onto the plateau in those years. It was there that he first heard the gospel. His family remembers Mouton sharing his faith with the workers. The notes of a South African minister who met Sengerut in 1992 add another name: Ds M. P. Loubser, the settler pastor of the Vergenoeg congregation, who, Sengerut said, talked to him about Jesus himself. He still remembered the small thatched church near Plateau where he first worshipped. On 17 July 1937 a visiting minister from Thomson's Falls baptised him on the Plateau. He was the first person baptised in the work that became the Reformed Church of East Africa.

The family also remembers an illness that nearly killed him, and a recovery he took as a sign. After it he began preaching on the farms around him, to other workers, in their own languages. The gatherings grew. Then, as a baptised Christian with no office and no schooling, he did something that the official histories of the Reformed Church of East Africa pass over in a line or leave out altogether. He asked the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa to send a full-time missionary to the Africans of the plateau.

It was an unusual request. The Vergenoeg congregation existed to serve the Afrikaner settlers, not their workers. Yet in 1944 the congregation called its first full-time missionary, using money Loubser had set aside for mission work. On 27 October 1944 the Rev. B. B. Eybers and his wife arrived. They bought an old school building at Broederstroom, now Plateau, and named it the Bwana Loubser Mission Station. The church that grew from it became the Reformed Church of East Africa, self-governing from 1963. Church histories date its founding to Eybers' arrival. Sengerut's family, and the people who knew him, date it to his appeal.

The renovated Mouton farmhouse at Kapsengerut, now home to Sengerut's family. Photo: William Kiptoo.

The bond between the farmer and the farmworker was real, and it was not equal. Mouton was the bwana and Sengerut the shamba boy, and nothing in the faith they came to share changed who owned the land. That makes what happened in February 1962 more striking. As independence approached, the Moutons sold up and prepared to leave for South Africa. Before they went, Sengerut and another Christian worker gathered with the family at Chebore for a farewell prayer. Sengerut reminded God of a promise made to the old Mouton, that He would look after Abie, the son, and asked God to take over now where Sengerut himself no longer could. Mouton sold him part of the farm, including the farmhouse and the family cemetery with its cedar trees, and Sengerut promised to care for the graves.

Thirty years later, in July 1992, the Rev. Piet Grobler came back to Kenya. He had arrived in Eldoret in January 1962, newly married, for his first congregation, in the same months the Moutons were leaving. Now he toured the plateau with a notebook. The farmhouses he had known were neglected and hard to recognise. On Abraham Mouton's old farm he found Sengerut, by then an old man who owned 100 acres of Mouton's land. Sengerut told him he had set part of it aside for a church. He prayed for his visitors and then walked them to Mouton's grave, which he was still keeping with care. Before they left he made one more request of the Afrikaners: that those now living in South Africa send help to build the church on the Mouton family farm.

A church went up there that same year, 1992. Sengerut died in 1996. The moderator of the Reformed Church of East Africa said of him that he was not only a master of the church's history, he was its history. He held no office, never studied theology and never preached from a pulpit, but he could recite long passages of scripture and tell the story of the church's beginnings in detail.

The new cathedral rising at Kapsengerut, built to hold about 2,000 people. Photo: William Kiptoo.

His family remembers him saying, more than once, that people from South Africa would come to complete the church. The building rising beside the graves today is being put up by his grandsons. Whether anyone from South Africa comes to finish it, the land under it changed hands at a farewell prayer in 1962, and it has been looked after ever since by the family of the man who asked for a missionary.

Sources

See also: Joseph Cheserem (Sengerut): The Pioneer of the Reformed Church of East Africa and Kapsengerut: Birthplace of the Reformed Church of East Africa on Wonders of Sergoit Hills, and Kapsengerut: A Sacred Ground Where Africa and the West Met in Faith on this journal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Quiet Christmas Pilgrimage on Sergoit Hill Faces Pressure from Development

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, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Seed That Fell to the Ground: The Gospel According to Rose Barmasai

When Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces many seeds,” He was speaking of His own sacrifice. Yet throughout history, God has raised men and women whose lives echo this Gospel truth. Rose Barmasai was one of them. Rose Barmasai in 1998, a year before her death. Twenty-seven years after her tragic death at Chembulet trading center, along the Iten-Eldoret road, her story still stirs the conscience of the church. She died returning from Chemalingot, where she had spent the day mediating between the Pokot and Turkana, two communities locked in cycles of revenge, cattle raids, and generational trauma. Her life ended in the very work she had given herself to: reconciling God’s children. Born in 1957 in Turesia, Keiyo South, Rose grew up in a region where ethnic tensions, political manipulation, and cattle‑raiding violence shaped daily life. She trained as a theologian at a time when few women in the Reformed Churc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tibanga, Lugumira, and Wamukota: The First African Ministers of the Reformed Church of East Africa (RCEA)

Background: The Beginnings of an African Church By the early 1940s, the Dutch Reformed Church missionaries under Bwana Loubser had established a mission presence primarily among the Boer white settler community in Uasin Gishu, focusing their ministry on European farms. The African population, though living and working around these farms, remained largely outside the church’s evangelistic focus. The turning point came with the arrival of Rev. B.B. Ebiyers (Eybers) in 1944, a visionary missionary who believed in extending the gospel to the African communities. Eybers recognized the need to train indigenous leaders who could communicate effectively in Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa, and relate culturally to the people. He established a small Bible Training Centre at Plateau, near Eldoret, marking the beginning of theological education for Africans within the Reformed Church mission. It was here that three African men, Hubert Tibanga, Jeremia Lugumira, and Jason Wamukota, wou...
Post a Comment
Read more