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From hotbed of crime to joggers’ paradise: Nairobi forest thrives
NAIROBI, Oct 24, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – “We would collect dead, dumped bodies.
Some were decomposing… others were fresh,” said John Chege of his early
days policing Nairobi’s Karura Forest, back when thieves and murderers
outnumbered joggers and dog walkers in the woods.
Karura then was the stuff of urban legend, a fearsome place invoked to
scare misbehaving children. Chege and his scouts, stumbling on corpses by
day, kept white-knuckled vigils by night as they scanned the darkness for
intruders.
“It was hell,” Chege told AFP of his hair-raising first months as Karura’s
inaugural chief scout, back in 2009 when efforts began to reclaim the forest.
“But today we celebrate, because there is nothing of the sort.”
In the space of 10 years, Karura has gone from a dangerous no man’s land to
one of Nairobi’s safest and most popular destinations, a verdant refuge in a
city that has long carried the unfortunate moniker “Nairobbery”.
Karura is also a symbol against land-grabbing, having been saved from
developers to become the world’s second-largest forest that is fully within
city limits, conservationists say.
Kenya’s forests are cleared at a rate of 5,000 hectares (12,300 acres) a
year, the environment ministry said in 2018. But Karura has survived, even as
green spaces are being swallowed by concrete in one of Africa’s fastest-
growing cities.
From zero visitors in 2009, today Karura attracts up to 30,000 nature
lovers a month, with 10-year commemorative events planned in October to mark
its striking transformation and storied history.
For many years, hardly anyone came, said Karanja Njoroge, who chaired
Friends of Karura Forest, a community group that co-manages the reserve, from
2011 to 2018.
– Bad reputation –
Shaking its reputation was a challenge, even after an electric fence was
raised around the perimeter.
“Karura Forest in 2009 was a place where no one would even want to be
threatened to be taken. It meant either you were going to be killed, or that
you were going to be punished,” Njoroge said.
MORE/FI/ 0840 hrs
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Chege and his scouts, who were trained by the British army, could not
convince nervous joggers they would be safe, and so ran alongside them in
khaki fatigues.
“Perhaps a visitor wanted to run 10 kilometres? My guy was to run 10
kilometres,” he said.
Slowly, visitor numbers grew as the criminals were flushed out. A
clubhouse, long abandoned because patrons kept getting mugged, reopened its
doors. Women felt safe enough to run on their own, Chege said.
Local communities were vital in bolstering security.
Chege, a former illegal logger, was recruited from Huruma, a slum on
Karura’s northern fringe. The community used the forest for firewood, and as
a rubbish tip and open toilet.
Today, they are its custodians, planting saplings, clearing weeds and
policing its borders.
Karura narrowly escaped destruction in the late 1990s when, crawling with
bandits and ravaged by logging, developers gifted parcels of forest to
politically connected elites.
The upland forest is a developers dream: 1,000 hectares of prime land,
straddled by Nairobi’s most exclusive suburbs.
Wangari Maathai, the late founder of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, and the
first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, rallied church leaders,
lawyers and students to Karura’s defence.
In January 1999, armed thugs attacked Maathai as she tried to plant
seedlings in an act of protest, landing her in hospital.
The violence made international headlines and outraged a public tired of
corrupt elites grabbing state land.
The protesters won the day: development was halted.
– Green icon –
The forest still bears the scars of this violent past. Bald tracts of
forest cleared for mansions abut thriving black wattle — a tree whose growth
was spurred by fires from the days protesters burned tractors in defiance,
Chege said.
But its tranquility is not assured.
Other forests, such as Oloolua in Nairobi’s south, have suffered from
rampant encroachment. Even the city’s iconic national wildlife park is being
sliced through with a railway whose construction began last year in defiance
of a court order.
Though Chege worries more about dogs off leashes these days than dealing
with dead bodies, a road being widened on Karura’s eastern border has raised
concerns.
Land grabs are not a distant threat. In July, a court ruled against a
private company trying to claim 4.3 hectares of Karura.
“If everybody who wants to build keeps chipping away, there will be very
little left,” Njoroge said.
Karura persists as a conservation triumph. Native trees are taking back the
forest from species introduced by the British to fuel their railway to
Uganda, notably eucalyptus trees.
Before conservation efforts began, non-native trees, many of them invasive,
made up 60 percent of the forest. Eucalyptus in particular inhibit the growth
of other plants and monopolise the water supply with their voracious thirst.
The forest contains rivers, waterfalls and caves used by anti-colonial
rebels. Joggers encounter bushbucks, hornbills and Syke’s monkeys.
Maathai’s daughter, Wanjira Mathai, said her mother would be proud of what
Karura has become, “and maybe even surprised at just how much people love
it”.
“She had hoped her children’s children — my generation and our children —
would enjoy this forest, and that’s what has come to pass,” Mathai told AFP.
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