Scaling the rocks of God

It’s the day before Christmas and I’m scaling the rocks by the side of the road that runs between Chemelil and Songhor and onwards to Nandi Hills and Eldoret.

It’s a stunning panorama from where I stand – up on the rocks of Mawe ya Mungu or God’s rocks in the green sugar belt lining the famous Nandi Hills. It is an area rich in history and natural sciences.

Under the hot sun, matatus and boda bodas speed past us. I survey the rocky scene in front of me. It is a stack of rock columns piled up a hillock, as if someone chiselled them and then piled them up and forgot about them.

“When the Chemelil-Songhor road was being cleared for construction in the 1950s, the surveyors found the rocks. The wazees (the Luo and the Nandi) called them mawe ya Mungu because they believe it is God who put them there,” narrates Harjeet Singh Pandhal, who was born and bred on the slopes of the hills.

It’s a nice story. I wish the rocks could talk as we climb higher up, stopping every few minutes to check the shape and patterns on them – and at the same time being careful not to step on any snake that might be sunning itself. We see none, but I wonder what could be in the crevices that are deep in the rocks.

These are no ordinary rocks. They remind me of the petrified forest in Sibiloi National Park on the shores of Lake Turkana where the ancient forest dating millions of years has turned into stone and the fossilised trunks strewn around the ancient land that barely supports a tree today.

Digging into some literature, these rocks could date from the Precambrian era, a period in the earth’s history spanning from the beginning of the earth’s life 4,600 million years ago to the beginning of the Cambrian period.

It accounts for 88 per cent of geologic time. According to literature, relatively little is known about this period because many Precambrian rocks are heavily metamorphosed, obscuring their origins, while others have either been destroyed by erosion, or remain deeply buried beneath the later layers of rock.

Prehistoric site

It is during the Precambrian period that huge hard-shelled animals appeared in abundance. I can’t see any remains even though I search keenly for the odd fossil lying around.

A few minutes’ drive away is Songhor prehistoric site. It’s a Miocene site dating back to about 19 million years according to the National Museums of Kenya literature.

There were a large variety of animals living there. The fossil hominoids collected from this site range from small to bigger apes. Eight species of hominoids have been identified.

There is enough evidence that the proconsul africanus – an early primate that lived some 18 million years ago – also lived at this site.

Scanning the plains that are now covered in large green fields of sugarcane, it’s an area that was once decked in forests and in these forests, the apes arose and diversified during the Miocene epoch, becoming widespread.

Further reading into this period reveals that by the end of this era, the ancestors of humans had split away from the ancestors of the chimpanzees to follow their own evolutionary path. Grasslands continued to expand and forests to dwindle in extent.

Back down from the short climb up the rocks, we pop into some local homesteads of the Luo to find out more about the rocks. It seems that the generation of old men who could have told us something about them has passed away taking with it the tales of old.