Fort Ternan: A tunnel to Kenya's mixed colonial past

 Kenya’s Fort Ternan town in Nandi Hills is home of the prehistoric discovery of Kenyapithecus, the ancient ape fossil found by Louis and Mary Leakey in 1961.

John Kiprui Langat, the guard at Fort Ternan prehistoric site also doubles up us our guide to the picturesque ancient site on a hill, nestled in coffee farms and local homesteads overlooking Fort Ternan. In the distance is volcano of Tinderet and the Nandi Hills. On a clear day, Africa’s largest lake, Victoria, shimmers in the sun, 50 km to the West.

Up the hill is a flat grass patch that was excavated to reveal 10 million-year-old ancient elephant and rhino fossils.

“The elephant was then a four-tusked woolly mammoth, meaning that back then Fort Ternan was a very cold place and covered by a thick forest.”

Simple rooms house the fossil find.

There are also plant fossils like the Euphorbia abyssinica or ‘desert candle’ locally known as Kapkures, the original name of Fort Ternan.

A long bridge shimmers under the midday heat. It was the longest bridge in East Africa when it was built in 1903. Today that honour goes to Egypt.

A mound of stones catches our eye. It is a cairn with the remains of the Nandi warriors killed during a revolution led by the Nandi chief, Koitalel Arap Samoei. He led armed resistance against their land being taken to lay the ‘iron snake’ (Uganda Railway). Koitalel was killed in 1905 and buried here at the museum dedicated to him in Nandi Hills town .

Fort Ternan was named after Maj Tern an, the engineer in charge of the steel bridge and a tunnel through a hill for the steam locomotives — both engineering feats at the time. He was killed in 1904 during the Nandi Resistance and the town named after him.

We drive down a hill to an armoury built in the hill in 1939, which was served by a nearby airstrip at the time, which gives the town its name, Kendege.