Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [32]
The Uasin Gishu plateau on which the town of Eldoret now sits had been occupied in precolonial times first by the Sirikwa, then by the Masai and finally by the Nandi. In other words, the British considered it “unoccupied,” a perceived emptiness that irked them. Consequently, they offered it to the Zionists as a temporary refuge for Russian Jews until a homeland in Israel could be established. But the Zionists rejected the offer, some of them weeping openly at the 1903 sixth Zionist Congress and quoting from Psalm 137, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”
So in semidesperation the British offered the land to British-abhorring Afrikaners from the Transvaal, and in 1908 more than two hundred Boers arrived by ship in Mombasa, Kenya. They took trains as far as Nakuru, where they purchased native oxen, which they trained to pull wagons all through the long rainy season of March, April and May. At the end of May, they began to climb from the Rift Valley, up the escarpment to their new homeland. It took them two months to cover one hundred miles, the wagons churning through mud up to the tops of their wheels and the forest dense and impassable in places. The trekkers cut bamboo to make causeways across swamps. The drivers stayed near the oxen, urging them step by slithering step.
In a wetland at the top of the escarpment a wagon loaded with sugar sank up to its axles and all the sugar melted. While the trekkers struggled for days to free the wagon, a two-year-old girl died of pneumonia. The young men planted poles and created a rudimentary sacred site for the funeral, and the Afrikaners grieved in the way of stoical people, tight lipped and moist eyed. They buried the girl in a place which they called Suiker Vlei—Sugar Vlei—and the next day they freed the wagon and continued the journey to the Sosiani River.
“There was at that time,” Mum says, “a hunter called Cecil Hoey who lived on the other side of what would become Eldoret. He saw what he thought was a long stream of smoke snaking its way up the escarpment onto the highlands. And then he realized he was seeing the pale canvas of covered wagons winding up to the plateau. It was the trekkers arriving.” Mum says, “Cecil took one look at that lot and predicted the end of the wildlife. He was right because when those Afrikaners first got there they had nothing to live off except what they could kill, and they finished off all the animals in no time.”
The Afrikaners made harrows from branches and thorns bound with leather thongs made from zebra skin, they made soap from eland fat and they made shoes from the hides of giraffes. They ate what they could snare or shoot and they lived in grass-thatched houses made from their own mud bricks, baked in the high-altitude sun. “A lot of them were very basic,” Mum says. “They weren’t educated and they didn’t read anything except the Bible. But they were tough and resourceful and they could live off nothing, those people.” And then she sniffs and I can tell that it wounds her to make this next admission. “Well, that was most of them. But some of them were quite posh. One Afrikaner family was so posh that the Queen Mother stayed with them when she came to Kenya in 1959.” Mum pauses to let me absorb