Eldoret could’ve been any dorpie on the platteland in the 1930s. The Afrikaner trekkers who’d settled here in Kenya’s western highlands played jukskei in the dusty streets; they baked koeksisters and melktert and braaied under acacia trees.
”My grandmother says the kaburu [Boers] were very tough people. They made houses by burning clay to make bricks. They made soap from animal fat, and shoes out of cattle skins,” says Sarah Kurui, inside what used to be the Dutch Reformed Church but today rings with the sounds of the African Gospel Church choir.
”The kaburu taught us how to farm,” recalls Joseph Tirop, a mzee (elder).
But now, in a side street in the chaotic town, blank-eyed street children, faces streaked with snot and glue, gather where once the boerevrouens held kerkbasaars. In the afternoons, drug dealers replace the street children. At night, near-naked prostitutes replace the drug dealers.
Eldoret, the town the Boers built as the centre of their ”Promised Land”, has become just another place in Africa where the rural poor migrate to survive.
Up the road, at the foot of a hill ringed by golden fields, another man is surviving … Fanie Kruger: the solitary remaining descendent of the Boer trekkers.
Kruger’s forebears arrived here in 1906 — part of the first of four waves of Afrikaners to move to Kenya after the Anglo-Boer South African War.
Legend has it that these Boers were too proud to live under British rule, so they trekked northwards in wagons to courageously conquer Africa.
”What a load of rubbish,” says Kruger. ”The Boers [who came to Kenya] were ‘joiners’. They cooperated with the British in the war. They ran away to escape the revenge of their own people in the Transvaal.
”And another thing: the Boers came by ship, to Mombasa, not by wagon …”
The sunburned bull of a man has little time for romance: ”You don’t survive in Africa by being romantic. You survive by being pragmatic. If your idea of this place is Out of Africa [the movie starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford], then you won’t make it here.”
In 1956, when Kruger was born, more than 1 000 boers lived in Eldoret. It was a time of ”blind panic”. Stories of the rape and murder of white nuns in the Belgian Congo had reached the Afrikaner’s ears. In Kenya, the Mau Mau were rising up against the British, killing 32 settlers: the signal for the exodus to begin.
”The Afrikaners thought the blacks were gonna butcher them all in their beds,” says Kruger. His father, Jan Erns, was one of the first to leave.
”So, he arrives in Pretoria on a July morning and he takes one look at the dull, barren, frozen land. The old man jumps back in the truck and drives back to Kenya, for four days. When he gets back, he says, ‘Nee, ons gaan nie. Ons bly [No, we are not going. We will stay].”’
Jan Erns Kruger ”tossed the coin” and became a Kenyan citizen.
Says Fanie Kruger: ”He said to me, ‘If we want to keep our land, we must respect the black man and he will respect us.’
”Both of us always said, ‘If they take our land, so be it; we will accept it.’ And this is still my attitude today.”
Today, finding someone in Kenya who is willing to admit to support for the ousted Kenya African National Union (Kanu) regime is like finding a syrupy koeksister among the filth in Eldoret.
But Kruger readily admits to forging alliances with Kanu — a party that under President Daniel arap Moi tortured and murdered its opponents and plundered Kenya’s economy.
”If I didn’t support Kanu, I would have lost everything. And I love my land. So I had to compromise, and I am not ashamed of that. I have survived. All the other boere are gone. Now it’s just me here,” says a defiant Kruger.
Yet his support for Kanu was ”never blind”. In 1997, he and his fellow farmers blocked Eldoret with trucks, tractors and combine harvesters ”to protest against cheap imports and low prices”.
Moi was deeply embarrassed, and furious. After all, the town was — and remains — his Kalenjin tribe’s powerbase.
”The aftermath of the blockade was horrific,” recalls Kruger. ”The authorities blamed me and tried to end me … [sic]. You’d be speeding along the road and suddenly a massive sand lorry pulls out in front of you! A couple of times, I nearly came short.”
But Kruger believes his ”good relations with the local leaders” eventually saved him from possible assassination, and his land from confiscation.
”I am a supporter of AGIP: Any Government in Power,” he says blandly. ”Farmers in Africa who believe they can do well these days without becoming involved in politics live in a dream world. We have to … make sure that the politicians are friends of agriculture.”
Kruger says white farmers in Africa have made ”a big mistake by thinking ‘we’re indispensable; the savages can’t live without us’.
”The African — whether white or black — is a survivor. But just think how much easier this survival will be if we all pull together.”
Kruger has had to ”bend” in a land where few white farmers remain, to do what it takes to ”survive” — a word he uses often.
But is he ”the last Boer” in Kenya?
”I’m not so sure,” laughs Kruger, who speaks Afrikaans with a heavy English accent. His kids can’t speak a word of the language; his wife hates the boerewors and biltong he sometimes begs her to make.
Yet, standing solidly in his yellow-brown maize field at the bottom of the hill, Kruger exudes all the qualities of a bittereinder: stubbornness, fortitude, love of the African soil.
Which is why, for Joseph Tirop, Kruger will always be ”the kaburu who did not run”.