The ‘murmuring and weeping’ ghost stones of Kopere

James Onyango, a resident of Kopere says the stones have been lying on the Chemelil-Nandi road for years with the numbers printed on them.  [Photo: Abenea Ndago/Standard]

By Abenea Ndago

Nandi, Kenya: There was a time when walking past the stones at Kopere Centre along the Chemelil-Nandi road in the evening was unthinkable. Passers-by even spread rumour that if one went near the stones, he could hear ghosts murmuring or even reprimanding their own children.

So scary were the tales that it was even said sometimes it would be the noise of banging pans, and the wafting smell of an evening meal, which the spirits were busy preparing.

‘Kopere’ is the contracted form of ‘Ka Opere,’ (Dholuo for ‘Opere’s place’), in reference to ‘Opere,’ a name given by the Luo to the white man rumoured to have lived at the centre during the colonial times, all the way till 1965.

It is a small border town in Muhoroni constituency just before you plunge into the lonely wilderness and towering hills of Tinderet constituency. To those who have lived in Kopere for long, the mystery surrounding the ghostly stones may be tied to the origins of Songhor Settlement Scheme, an area whose bloody story keeps flaring up every election year and when the two neighbouring communities find themselves in opposing camps.

“White people used to live here before we moved here in 1964,” says Mzee Jacob Ominde, an elderly Kopere resident in his 90s.

Some of the stones lie on Mzee Ominde’s piece of land. The stones are huge and of a unique design. An aura of deep history hangs above them. They were pushed there by the road-builders sometime in the 1960s before tarmac arrived in the 1990s.

Flashback

“Seeing the changes that have taken place in Kopere since 1964, I sometimes laugh at myself. During the rainy season, it was so quiet, cold, and so dark such that at night, you could not swear about the arrival of another day,” recalls Ominde.

The old man says the condition of daily life was worsened by the presence of wild animals, which used to roam freely in the area. Moreover, white people lived in the settlement scheme, and their brutal distaste for Africans was not a secret.

“It was one Mr Opere who lived here in Kopere,” says Mzee Ominde.  “Mr Poto Poto lived near the hill,” he continues, pointing at the foot of the Nandi Escarpment. “And then there was Mr Mek and Mr Tatni in Songhor. Another Mr Opere lived near Tamu. Mr Amila lived in Achego, and Mr George near Abuoro.”

But the above names were mere corruptions of white names by the Africans. The real names were: Perry, Potter, Meclaud, Titon, Miller, and George Martin respectively.

It is said that the activities of the white people may have contributed to the myth of the ghostly stones on the Songhor Hill.

“White people did not want anyone crossing their land,” Ominde says adding: “If you did, they either whipped or shot at you. When a white farmer was fed up with his servant who constantly made mistakes, they arrested the servant and handed him over to Mr Oliewo, who then sucked the servant’s blood to sell.”

He says servant deaths from blood sucking were common. After the death, the servant’s relatives were called to carry the deceased’s clothes back home with an explanation that the victim had died in the course of work. And because Africans really feared white people, no questions were ever asked about these deaths.

But Ominde believes that the corpses were thrown on top of the Songhor Hill and their presence may have contributed to the myth of the ghostly stones.

Hunting

“When we came here in 1964,” he remembers, “we used to hunt the apol antelope on top of this hill, and I remember two things; one day while hunting, we saw a dead antelope hidden up the trunk, amongst the leaves of a very big tree. We ran away because we knew it was a leopard that had hidden it there; another day we found two bodies “stretching from here to there – very tall and rotting.” The hunters immediately suspended the hunt and went back home.

But Ominde knows exactly how the stones acquired their ‘ghostly’ tag. He says the first people who arrived in the settlement scheme to work as servants for the white people included Olal, Otunga, Oluoch, and Ochola. These people came from all over Luoland.

He says the man called Ochola once told him that hunting had been a pastime for African servants during the colonial period. And then, one day as people were hunting, one man was selected to guard the game that had already been killed and placed near the stones. On that day, the man who had been selected heard someone else talking to him – someone he could not see.

“You, why don’t you give me some meat?” Ominde claims the voice asked the man who was keeping guard. The guard looked around, but he could not see the speaker. And then he sped away like wind, leaving the meat behind.

When he and the other hunters returned to inspect what the voice was, they found no one. So the hunters concluded that the voice must have been a ghost that lived amongst the big stones.