Eliud Kipchoge’s Kids Were Never Supposed to Be in Vienna. Here’s Why.

Back in the U.K., one is only as important as
the topic of the day (top left).

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 19^th 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 6^th 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.