Hyrax Hill: Settler’s home that sat on ancient dwelling, burial site

A chance discovery in the early 1900s changed history for a lone settler, putting her farm front and centre in the discourse of human evolution.The owner of a pyrethrum and wheat farm stumbled upon what appeared like signs of early settlements and invited Louis Leakey, a paleontologist, to study the place.

In 1937, excavation on one side of the hill revealed evidence of Iron Age walled enclosures and neolithic burial mounds. In one such mound, there were found 19 adult bodies interred in what was a mass grave, but buried in a unique way. Ten male bodies faced the North while the remaining bodies — nine females — faced the South.

This is what is today known as Hyrax Hill Museum. It occupies 69 hectares that once served as part of a vast colonial settler’s farm before it was gazetted and placed under the management of the National Museums of Kenya.

Building

Visitors taking the windy dirty path to the museum soon come face-to-face with the imposing white colonial edifice. The three rooms, which once comprised the main house, have since been converted into galleries exhibiting different artifacts of archaeological significance.

The building’s hip roof slopes slightly on all the sides, with wooden supporting pillars — where concrete columns are lacking — supporting the verandah. The walls, made of quarry bricks, are reinforced in double, forming a thickness of 20 inches.

Curator David Machoka, now in his 50s, says this unusual thickness from double walling was to insulate the occupant from the cold, not from flying bullets as many have thought. This is curious as the temperature is almost constant throughout the year, except for a few cold months.

He says the house was constructed during the final stages of First World War around 1918. The settler was a British whose name is given as A-Seif and was said to have settled here around 1900 — when the railway line reached Nakuru — with her only scout son.

A few feet from the entrance is a stand that was used to feed and water the birds. It looks like a sundial without a gnomon. The settler had an interest in birds and studied them from the verandah.

Initially, the farm covered roughly 150 hectares and was a pyrethrum and wheat farm before a chance discovery altered the history of the place.

Early settlement

The earlier settlement of the place, according to archaeological evidence, dates back to about 5,000 years with the latest being at least 800-years-old. The inhabitants were a group of pastoralists going by the name of Sirikwa, and are believed to have emigrated from Egypt or along the Nile River.

The group had long since been assimilated into the Maasai and Kalenjin cultures, but evidence left behind shows evolving technological developments. Atop the Hyrax Hill are remnants of stone defence forts ringing all around the summit. Machoka says the warriors of these communities had to stay alert due to the marauding bandits from Kalenjin community and the Maasai morans.

Machoka says the settler’s son, whose name he does not know, met a tragic accident in Mombasa around 1936-1940. ”The settler farmer was traumatised by the loss of her only son and decided to leave the country in 1942,” he says.

She surrendered her land to the colonial administration with the latter gazetting and commissioning it as a museum in 1943. Machoka says the excavation of the place told the history of the Rift valley: “It is through excavations that the history was best known before it was told:”

Some of the fossils discovered ranges from the Australopithecus to the homo sapiens, giving a glimpse of the human evolution over the time.