Eliud
Kipchoge’s young children were never supposed to be in Vienna on the morning of
Saturday 12 October 2019 to witness their father marathon his
way into the front page of human achievement, the last publication of which occurred
in 1969 with Neil Armstrong’s Giant Leap for Mankind. Coming to think of it,
neither was Eliud himself and, in the humble opinion of the British Empire—on
which, we were duly informed, the sun never sets—he was not even there on that cold
European morning to begin with.
It
all begins on Monday 22 October 1934, which beginning is really an
ending, a veritable death knell, the day the British purged the Talai people from
their ancestral homeland in violation of British law, as well as incipient
international law under the League of Nations Charter and Talai Human Rights. Descended
from the Maasai Oliobon clan of diviners and reigned over by their sovereign
the Laibon, the Talai were the ruling clan of the Kipsigi nation, wielding both
spiritual and temporal authority when the Conquerors of Peaceful Tribes materialised
unannounced at their doorstep in 1903. They are still reeling under the weight
of that colonial-era expulsion order, victims of a wholesale round-up once it
became apparent to Coloniser that they could not be "controlled."
At
first, the British and the Talai got along just fine, what with their
potentate, Laibon Kipchomber Arap Koilegen, even accepting a colonial
appointment as Paramount Chief over the Kipsigis. (Or, pejoratively, the Lumbwa,
as the British preferred to call them). This nomination dovetailed with
Britain’s early approach to colonial administration, indirect rule—where existing
local leadership was co-opted to impose Pax Britannica on unsuspecting natives.
But the arrangement began fraying at the seams in 1911 when the Talai noticed a
curious sort of assertiveness germinating in their white guests who,
imperiously and seemingly on a whim, would assume to summon their monarch to
appear before the District Commissioner at Kericho for nothing more than petty
errands. It then dawned on him that the usurpers were bent on weakening his
leadership and he henceforth disregarded the District Commissioner’s summons.
 |
| Koitalel Arap Samoei |
As
it turns out, Kipchomber was the elder brother to the legendary mystic Koitalel
Arap Samoei, Orkoiyot—supreme chief and spiritual leader—of the Nandi nation,
who led them into the bloody eleven-year Nandi Resistance against British rule.
The resistance began with scuppering the building of the Kenya-Uganda railway
through Nandi-land and ended with his assassination at 11 a.m. precisely on 19th
October 1905, shot in cold blood at point-blank range by a cowardly Colonel
Richard Meinertzhagen as he stretched out a hand for greetings. The British then
decapitated the body and carried the head back to London. Meinertzhagen had
invited him to negotiate a truce but instead used that ruse to lure him into an
ambush.
Koitalel
was born to Kimnyole Arap Turukat—the great Orkoiyot who prophesied the coming
of Europeans (“the white tribe”) and the railway (“the Iron Snake”)—at Samitu
in Aldai, the last of four sons and the closest to his father because he
displayed the greatest proclivity to prophecy. So it transpired that when
Kimnyole divined his own demise, he summoned his sons and asked them to consult
a traditional brew in a pot. Koitalel, upon gazing into it, drew his sword in
protest – he had just seen the coming of the white man. Kimnyole sensed a premonition
in this reaction and, out of concern for his safety, sent Koitalel to live
among the Keiyo and Tugen, and his three brothers among the Kipsigi. After
Kimnyole was publicly executed by his own people in 1890, a section of the
Nandi sent for Koitalel. But Kipchomber also lay claim to the throne, leading
to a succession struggle. Factions formed around the two and minor skirmishes broke
out, but the dispute came to a close with Kipchomber’s defeat in 1895, after
which he fled back to the Kipsigis to become their first Orkoiyot. That then,
is how Kipchomber finds himself at the supremacy of the Talai when the British
colonial monster rolls on Kericho in 1903.
Of
course, he had no way of knowing that the menial in his backyard whom he had
just rebuffed was but a mere cog in the ruthless British military machine when
he decided to evacuate his 600 Rupees per annum ‘royal’ appointment to lead the
Kipsigis in a resistance of his own. But Coloniser, a keen student at the feet
of his little brother back in Nandi, had lost appetite for more of the same. So
they promptly arrested him and, along with his influential brothers Kiptonui
and Kibuigut, banished him to faraway Kikuyuland in a mistaken assumption that
uprooting the trio would quell the resistance. Of course, they had no way of
knowing that the influence the Talai clan exerted over Kipsigis socio-political
life was not drawn from one single individual. Whereupon the Laibon, being a hereditary
institution, a new one punctually emerged to carry on Kipchomber’s work, and
the resistance prospered still, coming to a fever pitch in 1930 with Kipsigis
warriors attacking white farms, wanton looting of livestock and firearms, and sabotage
and utter devastation of colonial physical infrastructure. Coloniser had completely
failed to decrypt the spiritual facet of the Laibon. In one memo, a frustrated colonial
factotum, Sir George Beresford-Stooke, describes it as “. . . the
intangible power of the Talai.” Apparently, no physical presence was necessary
to guide the resistance.
Having
had it up to here with continuously being one step behind the Talai, Coloniser
now devised a cunning plan to eliminate them for posterity. The
Attorney-General brought before the Legislative Council a Bill to debate the
creation of a specific law to expunge them. The result of his labour was the
Laibon Removal Ordinance of 1934 which finally afforded the British the
wherewithal to forcefully remove the Talai and be rid of them altogether. The
entire clan was to be deported to distant Gwassi in South Nyanza, with a living
hope and the long game that they would in no time flat be assimilated by the
dominant Luo community there. In the meantime, they were held in a gulag for
several months leading up to their exile.
 |
| British troops during the Mau Mau uprising. |
At
the inescapable sunset of the Empire in Kenya, the British destroyed all their records as they retreated, among them annals of their barbaric occupation. On the way
out, just before switching off the lights, they perfunctorily attempted to
reinstate the Talai to their former homeland but quickly discovered that time
waits for no man: the land was long gone. In the end, they were temporarily resettled
on a sliver of land in the outskirts of Kericho town awaiting full restoration,
where they remain squatting to this day. But the truth is a hard thing to
conceal, particularly when a sloppy job is done of it. And so on 6th
of June 2013, William Hague, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, did the unthinkable.
. .
Reading
from a prepared statement, he addressed Parliament with these words: “The
British Government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other
forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration. . . the
British Government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and they
marred Kenya’s progress toward independence.” He then announced a compensation
package totalling £19.9 million payable to 5,228 claimants, hot on the heels of
the British Government hastily settling out of court with their lawyers after the
landmark court ruling of 2012 in which three Kenyan litigants won the right to
sue Her Majesty’s Government for crimes including but not limited to torture,
beatings, rape and castration as they brutally put down the Mau Mau rebellion.
Meanwhile, back in Little Britain, Jeremy Corbin, the Labour leader, is calling for children to be taught about suffering under the British Empire. "Perhaps we could
do a little bit more about how history is taught in our schools,” he recently
told a group of young Labour supporters. He added that the British national
curriculum should be re-written to teach children about how the Empire expanded
at the expense of people, emphasising that every child should be taught about
the negative impact and suffering caused by the British Empire and how people
around the world suffered because of the rise of the British Empire. "The history of European expansion is important, but there are two other
things that need to be added to that. One is the expansion of one empire at the
expense of people where that empire is expanding. You need to get the story
from the people where that empire is expanding into rather than those that came
there to take control of it," he said. The Talai may be beaten, but their resilience
may yet see them back at their homeland one day.
 |
On 12 October 2019, Eliud Kipchoge achieved the first
pre-2-hour marathon in history. |
It
is from this pedigree that Eliud Kipchoge emerged on that optimistic Saturday morning,
exactly ten days to the 85th anniversary of the purging of his people from their ancestral lands by the British to alter the course of human history as we knew it; just as he had done on four occasions erstwhile to rule London. Of the 13 marathons he has entered so far, he has won a gobsmacking 12. He is simply the greatest marathoner in the history of the sport and is both officially and unofficially the fastest marathoner in history, and the only human to do so sub-two hours. The Talai were never meant to survive life itself, let alone prosper in European capitals. Eliud Kipchoge was not even supposed to be in Vienna that day, and, had the British had their way, he well may never have been. But as Mike Tyson famously observed, everybody has a plan...until they are punched in the mouth.
Comments