Protecting the Sacred Forests:
Saving Kenya's Kayas

KAYA CHONYI, Kenya - At 86, Joel Gambo lives much as his forefathers did. With his two wives, three children and 15 grandchildren, he survives by farming coconut and mango trees and maize. Some of the women weave baskets and make roofing thatch, or makutis, while a few of the men occasionally find work in town, bringing much-needed cash back to the family compound. As chairman of Kaya Chonyi, the village's sacred forest, Gambo's words carry a lot of weight.

"When things go wrong, we go to the kaya and pray for protection," Gambo said, pointing his gnarled, aged finger at a peaceful woodland.

"When an outbreak of dysentery or cholera is predicted, we rush to the kaya and perform a ceremony. We get animals, a chicken, a goat, maybe a cow, we walk them around the kaya, and then we butcher them to appease the spirits."

Like other Mijikendo people of the Kenyan coast - Mijikendo means 'nine tribes' - the Chonyi also use their sacred forest to thank the gods when things go right, when they harvest a bumper crop, or when disaster is averted.

The forests are important in other ways. They serve as natural pharmacies, filled with plants to heal the sick. They are home to generations of ancestors whose bodies lie buried there. And Kenya's coastal forests shelter half the country's rare tree species.

But the balance between coastal tribes and their kayas is tipping as development catches up with the timelessness of tradition.

"These forests have been protected by local people for centuries but culture and customs are breaking down," said Quentin Luke, who heads the Coastal Forests Conservation Unit (CFCU) of the National Museums of Kenya (NMK). "Many upcountry tribes are coming into the area and we are seeing lots of development." This cultural erosion is hastened by the indifference of a younger generation that shuns old beliefs, considered obsolete.

Today, the scattered and sometimes tiny patches of forest face an uncertain future, their survival by no means guaranteed. Fuelwood is scarce, and kayas sometimes have the only trees around. As tourism booms along the coast, building poles are cut and land is cleared, both for development and to house job-seeking migrants from the interior. People who drift to the coast need farmland, so they too cut trees.

Until recently cutting trees in kayas was legal, so in the absence of any protective legislation, the National Museums of Kenya took a bold gamble. Like its name implies, the Ancient Monuments and Antiquities Act protects old buildings and ruins from destruction. The NMK argued that since kayas are historically important to local people, the forests have a cultural as well as a biological value.

"We came to the conclusion that the kayas could be treated as the equivalent of old churches and mosques," said Luke. The NMK applied to the government for protection of kayas under the antiquities act, and it won. So far, 26 of the 62 coastal kayas have been gazetted as antiquities.

"We are trying to marry the traditional ways of caring for kayas with the legal backing we have through the antiquities act," said Juma Omari Lumumba, CFCU project officer for Kwale district near Mombasa. "If anyone is found destroying a kaya, he is taken to a court of elders and fined maybe a black bull or a black chicken, in response to the defilement of the forest or as a cleansing sacrifice. If this doesn't work, we can now take him to court where he can be fined or put in prison."

The system seems to be working.

"There is less destruction in our forest because there is a guard now. Those who break the law go to court," said Joel Gambo. "And the boundary of the kaya is clear, so farmers know how far they can go."

While justice may indeed flow in the case of the minor offender, the scales become less even-handed as stakes go up.

Take the case of Kaya Diani, a corner of forest at the heart of a boundary and title dispute. According to local conservationists, legal titles secured by developers during the kaya's gazettment procedure may have been a high-level land grab in disguise, based on information leaked from within the government itself. Alarmed at the spread of development, local elders asked the NMK to fence the kaya. The NMK complied, and the owners promptly sued. The case is in the courts.

In Kaya Chale, gazettment was also underway when a foreign developer acquired rights to build a tourist resort within the forest's perimeter. By the time the kaya was gazetted a year later, most of it had been cut away and there was nothing left to protect.

Cases like these are all too common, threatening the survival of forest remnants even as conservationists fight to give the law a stronger bite.

Educating the legal profession about changes within its own ranks is part of the challenge. Recently, a judge threw out a case because he wasn't convinced a forest could be treated as a national monument.

Despite these hiccups and hazards, the kayas are in better shape than they were. Many are patrolled by guards, and the NMK is demarcating them so boundaries are clear. Gazettment is proceeding, albeit slowly, and if the law is not applied with any uniformity, at least it is on the books. Big money still wins over conservation, but the battle lines are clearly drawn.

"If the kaya were no longer there, if the forest were cleared, most of the things that protect us would disappear," said Joel Gambo. "We would have nowhere to pray for our needs, no way to ask our ancestors for protection. The kayas are a symbol of our culture. Destroying them would be like destroying our lifeline. We would all die."