Facing Mt Kenya: A ranch near Rumuruti where the rare meteorite fell and gave the town a place in history. Photo/File
On January 28, 1934 at about 10.45pm, the skies over Rumuruti were showered with stones from heaven — a hitherto unknown white settlers post and Maasai pastoralists grazing ground entered into the annals of history.
Today, if you have been a frequent visitor on e-Bay just Google the word Rumuruti and you will be amazed at how much some of the meteorite stones that rained from the skies in 1934 have turned to be big business.
One of the rocks is going for $2,000 (Sh166,000) and it measures only 168mm by 125mm.
When these stones rained from the skies, they had little commercial value then and one of the stones was picked and taken to the great museum of the University of Humboldt in Berlin where it lay in a collection until 1938 when it was identified as a rare chrondrite.
But still there was little study done on it until 50 years later when it was recognised as a very very rare and unique specimen.
Beside this one meteorite of 67 grammes there are no others in the public museums — although it is known that many other rocks, several kilograms at best — were picked from Rumuruti after the meteorite shower.
It is only by luck that the then Rumuruti District Commissioner, H.H. Trafford kept one of these rocks and later donated it to Mr E. Reuning, a collector of African minerals and meteorites who was then at University of Cape Town.
It was Mr Reuning who took this specimen to Berlin’s Museum of Natural History where it stayed among other collections and attracting very little interest.
During the Second World War, this museum was bombed during the 1945 bombings in Berlin. During the evacuation of the specimen some of the tags on the meteorites disappeared but luckily the Rumuruti rock was not among them.
There was something else about Mr Trafford.
He was the man who laid out the Rumuruti town as he awaited the arrival of the Nakuru-Rumuruti railway line which arrived in 1929.
Without him, perhaps there would be little of Rumuruti town and perhaps the Rumuruti meteorites would still be lost in the jungle.
It was Trafford who encouraged settlers into the Rumuruti area encouraging them to grow wheat and commercial dairy ventures.
But what he didn’t know when he was asked to store the Rumuruti meteorite is that he was holding a very rare rock from the outer space. Had he known, he would have kept it.
The Rumuruti variety is rare and every year, collectors usually visit this remote Kenyan town hoping to pick a sample of this rare meteorite rock.
From the geological studies done on this rare rock – if you get it you earn money – it was found that the Rumuruti rock is “chemically different” from the other chrondrites since they are highly carbonised.
While the Rumuruti type of meteorites have been identified from elsewhere — and which astrophysicists group in what they describe as the R Series — there is nothing similar to the Kenyan rock.
The only near variety was identified by Prof Carlisle Lake — he named them after himself — but which is said to be of a different type.
One question
The most interesting thing about these rocks is that they also interest NASA scientists who are troubled by the rocks from the outer space that could be dangerous to both planes and ships.
But there is still one question. While these rocks could be of interest to Kenya’s museums and while Rumuruti could attract thousands of visitors to search for these gems nobody appears to take advantage of this.
Yet Rumuruti meteorite has given this town a place in the global map – and businessmen are cashing in on them on eBay.
