In the latest move by the Kenyan government to gain greater control over its forestlands, authorities in Narok District have issued local Ogiek communities a 14-day notice of eviction from their homes in Enoosupukia. District commissioners claim that the land where these communities have resided since time immemorial is trust land and belongs to the government. Any attempts to resist eviction will result in forcible relocation. The decision could amount to ethnocide for the Ogiek of southwestern Kenya.
The Ogiek, well-known as Kenya’s “honey-hunters” for their traditional bee-keeping techniques, have practiced their hunting and gathering lifestyle in the highlands of Kenya for hundred of years, supplemented over the last decades by some farming and livestock rearing. They are recognized by social scientists to be the original inhabitants of Central Kenya’s highland area, having settled in the region long before the arrival of other Bantu and Nilotic tribes who now dominate the country’s political and economic scene. Yet over the last decades they have time and time again been forced to fight for their rights to remain in their ancestral homeland and use its resources in a traditional manner. One of the most common justifications posed by governmental authorities to remove Ogiek from their land is that their lifestyle violates environmental conservation as stipulated by the constitutional Forest Act.
The contradictions inherent in governmental policy regarding the forest region are egregious. Three multinational timber companies have been permitted by the President to continue logging in the “protected zone” even as the Ogiek controversies unfold, because the companies are considered “important to the economy.” In addition, 167,000 acres of reallocated land for resettlement are intended to be cleared for tea plantations and other agricultural pursuits. Although the Environmental Minister has declined to comment on the environmental destruction caused by these activities, Chief Conservator of Forests Joseph Mutie has stated, "I would not classify the ongoing logging as damage to the forests. This is legalized harvesting.”
The Ogiek hunter-gatherer tribes of Kenya’s Mau Forest are suing the Kenyan government for its decision last autumn to remove large tracts of their homeland from the protection of the Forest Act, allegedly for the resettlement of “landless Kenyans.” Kenyan Minister for Environment Joseph Kamotho signed the agreement to alter forest boundaries on October 8 last year, despite the fact that several cases filed since 1997 by the Ogiek Welfare Council, Greenbelt Movement, Forest Action Network, and the Kenya Human Rights Commission challenge the right of the government to do so and have yet to be heard. In October 1997, the Kenyan High Court ordered a decree that “there shall be no further allocation of the suit land until the issues in dispute are resolved in court.” The Mau forest court case is scheduled to begin on April 19.
