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FROM KAREN TO KIBERA, A NAIROBI FOREST WALK

WITH HYENAS, TREE POACHERS AND OTHER DISTRACTIONS

hris1johnson/Flickr, creative commons

Jonathan Ledgard walked across the ancient forest of Ngong, in Nairobi, from the smart suburb of Karen to the sprawling slum of Kibera. His full account is in Intelligent Life magazine. Here is the final part of it ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September 2007

Even today, the real-life stories from the Ngong forest sound like dark fairy tales. A ranger described how he had seen a male lion in the forest only the week before. It had come in through a gate that carjackers had smashed open. Not so long ago, a woman slipped through the fence with her baby. She abandoned the infant at the base of a muthiga tree, wrapped in a dirty, wet cloth. A wild dog picked up the bundle and took it back to her litter of pups. A tree poacher found the baby huddled in among the puppies. The mother was arrested; the baby taken to the Kenyatta hospital. After a story ran on the Associated Press, hundreds of requests came in to adopt the child, and nearly as many to take in the dog.

Then there are the hyenas. Above all others, these are the animals I associate with Africa. They are nothing in a zoo, whereas in Africa they move freely and monstrously. There are several packs of spotted hyenas in the forest. If you listen closely at night in Karen you can hear them. Why so many? It used to be (and perhaps still is) that the very poorest in Kibera, the ones who could not afford any kind of coffin, let alone a plot to put it in, would carry their dead into the forest and bury them in light soil, thereby feeding the hyenas. It was a curious return to the funeral rites of the Kikuyu, the people who populate much of Kenya’s highlands. They used to leave their dying relatives in little grass huts. There were two doors, one to push the faint-breathing elder or child in, another for the hyena to drag the body out. This wasn't long ago.

Indigenous hardwoods take a century to mature, but are felled here in minutes by armed men--who often steal under cover of a thunderstorm. The men take only the tree trunks, for which they earn $5 a metre. The muhoho, silvery prince of the forest, is under particular threat. Wood carvers value muhoho's smooth working; it rarely splits. The little polished giraffes and elephants sold in the tourist curio shops in the hotels and at the Jomo Kenyatta Airport are cut from muhoho stolen from Ngong. If the poaching continues, it will be gone in a year or so.

Arresting tree poachers is a thankless task. They are immensely strong, carrying out lengths of trees in darkness, in wet, through the mud, wearing only flip-flops. Even if they are not carrying a gun, they struggle fiercely, slashing out with daggers. Under Kenya's new laws, wood poachers should get a $700 fine or a prison sentence. Most get out of jail after a day or two, having paid a bribe of $30. Some have been arrested in the Ngong forest ten times or more.

Still, there have been successes. The herbalists coming out of Kibera to gather bark, roots and plants for traditional remedies used to strip trees and kill them. Now they harvest them, taking only small pieces of bark and covering the wounds with cow dung. We happened upon Arnest Lime, a 77-year-old herbalist. He was walking back to Kibera with two plastic bags stuffed with roots, flowers and leaves. He specialises in liver ailments and swollen limbs, as well as tuberculosis, grinding his ingredients to be served in clear soups. "There are too many herbalists now," he said. "We are careful but we take too much. Soon I will not find any medicinal plants in this forest."

The sounds and smells of Kibera were in the trees for a long time before I could see it. The intensity of human life is awesome, the squalor appalling. It is a warren subject to any number of clichés. Here HIV-positive prostitutes charge 25 cents, while the use of a latrine costs five cents. John le Carre's book, “The Constant Gardener”, made much of it. It was filmed along the railway line in Kibera--the open bit of the slum where foreign dignitaries gingerly step. Coming from out of the forest you are really walking up into the arse of Kibera, where everything is shat out. The river ran clear over a few metres of open ground and then turned grey, sickly, and was swallowed by the shacks. Vestiges of the forest were there in the alleys. Among the rubbish and faeces were stumps of great trees, serving as stalls for street vendors, or tables inside a shack.

In Kibera it is about survival. You see this early in the morning on the Karen side of the forest. The polo ponies exercise there, exquisite, snorting, softening trails into black sloughs, while out of sight on the slopes you can hear the Kibera women hacking at trees with sharpened machetes. They gather as much wood as they can carry and walk back to Kibera, selling the wood to vendors cooking mandazi, a local doughnut, or brewing busaa, an alcoholic porridge that men gather around and suck up with straws until they keel over.

I came across Lillian Mwaniki, a 32-year-old single mother of three, carrying a load of firewood. She had gathered it through the dawn hours, she said, cutting off branches, and had carried it 5km, over three miles, from the Karen side. She expected to be paid 80 cents. She was child-sized, gaunt, dressed in rags, but her load was too heavy, even with all my effort, to lift off the ground. The rangers didn't have the heart to give her a dressing down, or to confiscate the pathetic hacksaw she held behind her back, like a treasure. She put an old flip-flop to her forehead and adjusted the rope around it. She lifted the bundle. It seemed like some kind of miracle how she managed to get it off the ground, but once it was on her back gravity reasserted itself, the weight bent her double, the rope cut into the flip-flop. I worried that her knees would give way. She moved very slowly down the path, towards Kibera, and I was halted by the hardness and invisibility of her life. Who could begrudge her? Yet, what would become of the forest?

I finally climbed down a steep ravine to the Miotoni river. There was only a trickle of water at the bottom; in the rainy season it raged deep. The electric fence on both sides of the ravine was cut to ribbons. Even by Nairobi standards it was a black spot--a peculiar feature of the city is that the criminals keep to the rivers and streams. "We can't stay," one of the rangers said. "This is a place for murderers."

Walking back into the forest, we passed a Masai camp. The Masai had been given the right to graze their animals along the fence in exchange for patrolling an oil pipeline that ran directly underneath. The men carried spears and dressed traditionally. "Water is a problem, so is food," said John Mbaka, a 30-year-old herdsmen with sharpened teeth. "And leopards, of course." Leopards? "They take our sheep and calves."

I had started my microsafari that morning at the Dormans coffee shop in Karen--with a newspaper and a latte. I walked some way and came across extremes of wealth and poverty. Such disparities are common in the developing world, as they were in Dickensian England. But what amazed, the difference in Nairobi, I think, is the resistance of nature. It's hard to think of another city in the world where wild beasts still have such a presence.

Which brings me back to the leopards. They get protective when they're pregnant. They don't like open spaces then, so they come through the drainage culverts dug under the Langata Road and on into the Ngong forest. They give birth in the Miotoni gorge, in the robber caves. The forest shelters the cubs through their first year. My question is: for how much longer?