Episode 121 - – The Kenyan Trek Boers of Eldoret & Smuts goes swimming

The Anglo-Boer War

General Jan Smuts is making merry in the Cape, trying to stoke uprisings, while Lord Kitchener’s been more successful in clearing the Eastern Transvaal, forcing General Louis Botha to shift towards Vryheid and along the border between the Transvaal and Natal. General Christiaan de Wet is active in the Free State, while General Manie Maritz has continued his low level harassment of the British across the Free State and Cape. I haven’t spent much time on Maritz mainly because there is not a great deal of documentation about exactly what he got up to on a daily basis – unlike the other generals we’ve been following for two years. He is also one of the most bigoted, warped and psychotic men who held a weapon during this terrible war who tended to lie quite a bit in his memoirs. During the Anglo-Boer war he was the only Boer General we know about took a great deal of pleasure in killing blacks instead of British. He seemed inclined to shoot all blacks he found. His most heinous act was lining up all 35 men of a Khoi village at the end of the war and shooting them down in cold blood in what became known as the Leliefontein Massacre. I will have more detail about this in later podcasts. Maritz evaded execution at war’s end for what were really war crimes. After all, the Australian Breaker Morant the Australian was executed by the British for a similar spree as he went about executing at least a dozen Boers in cold blood. But back to 1902. General Koos de la Rey is also still free, roaming the veld in the far west of the Transvaal and he has been particularly successful around Rustenburg, Mafikeng, Marico, Zeerust and other smaller towns in the region. We will also hear about how Trek Boers ended up founding the Kenyan town of Eldoret. It was established by the Boers in the midst of the farms they created, and known by locals as Sisibo because of the main farm number 64 – or Sisibo in the local language. Sixty more Afrikaner families arrived in 1911, by then it had a post office and was officially named as Eldoret which continued to prosper. Eventually the railway line reached Eldoret in 1924 accelerating growth, then in 1933 electricity arrived along with an airport. By the 1950s the town was literally divided in two along the main street now called Uganda Road, with Afrikaners living in the north of the divide, and English speakers on the South.