Juliet's Kenya Days blog

This incident has been re-told many times in our family, but we can find no written documentation of it dating from the time – we suppose perhaps it was not something to write home to grandparents about, and by then (we think it was around Sept 1976) diary writing had become sporadic. But Helen found a school book dating from 1978 in which she wrote the story under the heading ‘Real?’ In order to try not to be influenced by each other’s stories, I wrote my recollection below before reading Helen’s story, as did Graham.

The story as written by Helen for school homework Nov 1st 1978:

My family and I were going on an outing for the day. We used to go there about once or twice a month as it is a good place for rock-climbing. We used to meet lots of friends and other people from the MCK (Mountain Club of Kenya) there and we kids usually played ‘Block’ (One, Two, Three, Releaster) in the bushes and rocks. We had driven off the Mombasa Road onto a murram (dirt) road, on either side was a ditch with dry, brown grass on its sides. Then there was a barbed wire fence and beyond that the open land. It had smallish thorn bushes and acacia trees which have thorns and small fluorescent green leaves. The top of the trees are flat, I don’t know why, and the only other plants are the dry, brown grasses and the various cactuses that grow in this area. If it is the rainy season the grass would be green and there might be some flowers. About a quarter of a mile away there are some hills and on the side facing the murram road there are cliffs (the ones we climb up). The highest cliffs are about 150-200 feet and you have to have quite a long rope ! Down the bottom of the different sized cliffs are boulders big, small, tiny and lots of rocks as well.

This land is for cattle or goats and every few miles there might be a farm which is just a bungalow usually made of wood with a veranda and sometimes a place for the dogs or chickens or whatever they own. They don’t have any actual gardens just a dust yard with a track to the road and a fence around the house. There are two places we used to go to; one at the bottom of the upcrop of rocks and the other was at the top further to the left, on the hill. We used to camp up there with other friends and sometimes the MCK had a barbecue. We never went there for the day though, we always went to the bottom and if we wanted to climb we walked up. Down the bottom there were a few acacia trees which we used to sit under because most times it was really hot. There were no buildings or anything like that because to most people Lukenya Hills (that is the name of it) are just some of the numerous hills around. The track up to the top is a thin murram road with little ditches that the water has made on either side. There are hardly any animals there, I suppose it is too near Nairobi and the smaller villages but you normally see some rock hyraxes and sometimes baboons. They are a bit like rats but their nearest relations are elephants. They live among the rocks and when you put food on the ground they come out quickly and eat it. As I have said, we had driven off the road and were on the one to the bottom place. When we got there we saw that there were some people there already, some that we knew. We piled out of the van and Mum started making some tea. The only kids there were Kari and Roy, a four year old and a two year old. We left Fiona (my younger sister) to play with them and we (myself and my older sister Juliet) went off to explore. We walked up a little path made by climber’s feet when they go to do their climbs, which took us to the bottom of a vertical stretch of rock. We watched the people climbing for about 5 minutes but it is very hard to watch with your head staring upwards when the sun is in your eyes so we went on. We had been here lots of times before so we knew most of the rocks that we could climb and hide in. Walking around the back of a rock we heard the voices of Fiona, Kari and Roy so we quickly climbed up a little path through lots of bushes which brought us to a jutting out piece of rock. It was like someone had tried to cut a slice off the bottom of the cliff and hadn’t managed to cut right through to the ground. It was a good vantage place to spy, as the children weren’t likely to look up. They called our names but we didn’t reply so they soon went away and we came down. Looking around we noticed a little cave-like thing with a smallish tree in the middle of the entrance. Looking in we saw some bones which we took to be an animal and Juliet, being Juliet, didn’t take them out but told me to. I gingerly pulled it and the part I held came off – I found that it was a tooth ! I didn’t dare to pull it again so we tried to look in and we were almost certain it was a human skeleton. Climbing on top of a flat rock a little way away we called to Mum who was down at the bottom, which was quite a long way. She couldn’t hear us so we went further down and shouted that we thought we had found a skeleton of a human. She shouted back ‘of course it isn’t, it’s probably a baboon’ ! However, in the end a man that we knew came up and said ‘yes, that is a human skeleton’. You would have thought it was very exciting but all we did was to go back down to the bottom and I think one of the men got the police to come later. They found that it was an Asian man (he had an Asian bracelet on) and he had probably been murdered or left there as he had rope twisted around his wrist bones. It might have been in the paper but nothing was said about us, the ones who found it (cheek!). Whenever we go back to that spot we say ‘look that’s the place where we found the skeleton’ and if we have friends with us we go through the whole story.

Reminiscence by Juliet:

One day while we were scrambling around high on the rocks at Lukenya, Helen and I discovered a little cleft in a big rock face. As it was partially grown over with tree roots in the entrance, the way in was rather narrow. Maybe because we come from a caving family, or maybe because children are naturally curious, we decided to check it out. I encouraged Helen to squeeze inside as she was much skinnier than me. She wriggled part way in and then called to me that there was a baboon skeleton in there because she could see the skull. I suggested she pull it out so I could have a look and confirm it’s identity. With trepidation she pulled it by a front tooth – which promptly came out making her shriek and leap backwards ! She was definitely a bit spooked ! So I agreed I’d try hard to wriggle myself into the cleft to enable me to look at the skeleton in situ. When I did so I knew straight away that what I was looking at was a human skull, not a baboon one. Oh ! That changed how we felt instantly, from excited to sober. Helen wanted to look again and she agreed with me – all the bones were clean and dry, but we also spotted some rope and some long black hair muddled in with dried leaves. We agreed we must go and tell some adults – we knew some of them were likely to be down at the Picnic Tree which wasn’t far away down below us. We called down to Fiona and some of the other small children who hadn’t come up the big cliff with us but were playing nearby, to ‘go and get some adults’. I can’t remember who came, but they calmly agreed with our finding and said they would report it as needed and we could go on playing and exploring, which we did. We were awed by what we’d found, and it did become a family story, but there was no sense of ‘awfulness’ or trauma of any sort. In fact, we later found out that the skeleton was identified as that of a young Sikh man – determined by the long hair and a bracelet (of a type traditionally worn by Sikhs) found with the body. It was confirmed he had been murdered and that the body had probably been there for 1-2 years. We never heard of an identity or any subsequent police investigation or prosecution. 

Reminiscence by Graham:

On one of our day trips for climbing at Lukenya with the Mountain Club the children went off exploring at the south end of the hillside in an interesting wilderness of long grass, thorn trees and rocks. Their curiosity led them to peep into a narrow cave-like rift in a cliff which might have been big enough to sit in and escape from the heat of the day. However not far inside on the floor they saw a human skeleton which struck them as very strange but not frightening. They came back down to tell us what they had found and show us where it was. The skeleton had been lying there for a long time we assumed so there was no urgent need to go to the Police. One of the MCK members made the helpful suggestion that he should report the finding of the skeleton to a high ranking police officer whom he knew and that was duly done. Later on we heard that the skeleton’s identity wasn’t discovered but the person had straight black hair and was assumed to be an Asian man.