Gertrude Mary Kuhn

Today I went to pay my respects to Gertrude Mary Kuhn, nanny to my mother and her two sisters, who was shot and killed by my grandfather on 18th September 1929 –– apparently he thought she was a leopard. Gertrude Kuhn was buried in the Kitale cemetery at 5:30 p.m. the following day. I knew this from my grandmother’s letter to her father four days after her death.

We did not know how to find the cemetery, but a red-jacketed boda boda motorcyclist did. We followed Red Jacket and his girlfriend who swayed decorously, perched sidesaddle behind, while texting. We headed north. The town turned to shanty on one side and a eucalyptus plantation on the other – this cannot be the right direction, we were now five miles out of town. Our driver Martin waved his hand out the window and Red Jacket pulled over, ‘Yes, he knew of another cemetery’. We headed back into town, dropped off girlfriend and went through the maelstrom of the town and out the other side – to the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery. A beautifully kept place but not the right place of course. We needed an earlier one.

We pay off Red Jacket and decide to use logic – the Settler’s cemetery would be in consecrated land beside oldest Anglican Church in Kitale, wouldn’t it? We head for St Luke’s Church. Logical but wrong. At the church we were told that the foundation stone for this church was not put in until 18th March 1929, six months before Gertrude Kuhn died. The settlers needed earthen homes before then.

Martin asks again. Same instructions; head north out of Kitale. After six miles and another enquiry we turn into a narrow lane and pull up by a stone arch leading into an scruffy rectangular grassy area with tombstones. There must be a reason the settlers chose this place, but that is not apparent now. This unkempt place was remote then. Graves from 1910 until 1939 and beginning of World War II were at the far end of the cemetery where the grass was longer and many gravestones had toppled, mostly wording face down. From those still standing I saw British, German and Boer names, presumably of different Christian creeds and denominations, which is probably why no church was built here. Eternal rest had to be irrespective of race or creed – but not colour – that barrier was not removed until after independence in1963.

Four decades later, the 1960’s Settlers graves map could only name Gertrude Kuhn’s grave as GK amidst other unnamed graves and nine decades later, her headstone was among those that had fallen over, wording face down.  I knew where it was from that 60’s map I had seen the night before. I stood there and apologised for the harms my family had given her.  I remember her; she lives on among the untended graves in long grass. There appeared to be few left to care or remember these people buried so very far from home. Indifference and time are erasing these people .

The cemetery is still in use though and a man was employed to look after it. He trailed after us, curious as to why two foreigners are looking at  gravestones at the unfashionable far end of the cemetery. Newcomers to this commune of souls inhabite the area nearest to the car park; their red mounds like slashes between the green old graves and the pathways between. It’s a puzzle quite why these newcomers are forced on the older inhabitants, because the cemetery has plenty of space on the far side in an identical rectangular space, but only two graves, neither recent, lie there with a track beside.