Seventy miles southwest of Nairobi, the Loita Hills climb toward the sky from the red stone cleft of the Great Rift Valley. Situated beside the Serengeti and the Maasai Mara, the Loitas provide a vital watershed for migratory animals on the plains below. Forest pigs, bushbuck, black-and-white colobus monkeys, leopards, and Cape buffalo find refuge there, along with elephants that come to graze when the plains are dry. The Loita forest, one of Kenya’s last surviving stands of old-growth cedar, is sacred to the Maasai people, who call it Naimina Enkiyio—the Forest of the Lost Child, after the legend of a girl who followed wayward calves into the trees and never returned. Some twenty-five thousand Maasai live in settlements scattered through the lower valleys, where they herd goats and cows in sweeping meadows reminiscent of the Rocky Mountain foothills. The Loitas, rich in medicinal herbs and plants, are an irreplaceable resource for the laibon, the spiritual leaders of the Maasai.
Last fall, a laibon named Parmuat Koikai spent several days guiding Paula Kahumbu, a Kenyan conservationist, around the Loitas. Parmuat, a lithe man of fifty-five with a shaved head and drooping holes pierced in his earlobes, wore a traditional red shuka cloth and carried a rungu, a short club that Maasai warriors use for hunting. Kahumbu, though, was mostly interested in his defense of the local animals.
Kahumbu had come to the Loitas to shoot an episode of “Wildlife Warriors,” a popular television show in which she travels to wild places and meets Kenyans working to save endangered animals. An ecologist who has turned to storytelling, Kahumbu believes that one of the biggest threats to the country’s wildlife is that most of its citizens don’t see themselves as stakeholders in conservation efforts. “The problem is that Kenya is losing its wilderness, and conservation is not something Black Kenyans do—it’s a white thing,” she told me recently. The goal of her show, she explained, is “to have people of color talking about animals, handling them, and expressing compassion for wildlife.”
The daughter of a white Englishwoman and a Kikuyu man, Kahumbu is fifty-four, with an open, friendly face and an impish laugh. Her wardrobe is unself-conscious Outdoor Nerd: trekking shoes, baggy safari pants, a fly-fishing vest, a bright-colored bandanna holding back unruly hair. A bird or plant identification manual is invariably crammed into one of her many pockets. Onscreen, she projects the inexhaustible curiosity of a Kenyan David Attenborough. (“I’d never heard of a solar-powered G.P.S. on the back of a bird before! But how does it work?”) Each episode of her show focusses on Kenyans whom Kahumbu has selected as Wildlife Warrior “heroes.” One centered on amiable middle-aged women who work as elephant researchers at Amboseli National Park; others featured a voluble expert on vulturine guinea fowl and a young man who verified the existence of a rare black leopard in his area by rigging a nocturnal camera trap.
For the Loita episode, the hero was Parmuat, who had created a Maasai association to protect the forest. He told Kahumbu that the regional government was backing a plan to push a paved road through the Loitas, cutting the area in two. He and his fellow-laibon opposed the road, which they suspected was part of an effort by politicians and speculators to take over valuable parcels of land. A road would also bring outsiders, damaging the environment and rupturing the harmony of a place where the Maasai had lived since the nineteenth century. As it was, illegal cedar logging was encroaching on Naimina Enkiyio on all sides. Kahumbu feared the collapse of an ecosystem that supported countless species, many of them unknown to scientists but intimately familiar to people who for generations have used them for food and medicine. “Losing a place like the Loitas is like losing a treasure that we haven’t even realized that we have,” she said. “All that knowledge. That would be the greatest loss to Kenyans that I can think of.”
For decades, tourism has accounted for about a tenth of the Kenyan economy, largely driven by the country’s natural splendor. So many people come to see the Big Five—lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants, and buffalo—that in Kenya the minister of tourism and the minister of wildlife are the same person. But the wilderness is deteriorating, threatened by climate change and by an exploding human population. When I first visited, in 1971, seven years after Kenya won independence from Great Britain, it was a nation of eleven million. Nairobi was a city of half a million inhabitants, with flame trees lining the streets and lions prowling the near suburbs. It was a destination for hunters, who left town on safari and returned for Martinis and clean sheets; the unsuccessful ones bought leopard-tail hatbands from the hotel shops to take home. The herds of wildlife seemed too vast to disappear.
Kenya banned hunting in 1977, yet the threats to wildlife only grew. The population began surging, and by the mid-nineties the growth rate was among the highest in the world. Since independence, Kenya’s population has quintupled, to fifty-two million, and the U.N. estimates that it will reach ninety-five million by 2050. Nairobi is now a sprawling city of four and a half million. Right next to the downtown is the packed slum of Kibera, Africa’s largest informal urban settlement, with a population some fifty times as dense as London’s.
Since 2000, the government has pushed the country toward economic growth, with backing from the West and sweeping infrastructure deals with China. On visits in the past decade, I found Chinese contractors bulldozing Nairobi’s old colonial streets to construct freeways, which seemed to fill with gridlocked traffic as soon as they were built. The roads are lined with billboards advertising cell-phone data packages, new housing developments, and KFC dinner buckets. American-style malls have sprouted everywhere. When I visited this fall, bulldozers were uprooting century-old shade trees to make way for yet another overpass.
Fifty years ago, Kenya had a hundred and sixty thousand elephants. Today, there are thirty-five thousand. A population of twenty thousand black rhinos is down to about a thousand, and only two northern white rhinos remain. Lions, cheetahs, giraffes, hyenas, and wild dogs are all endangered. Those animals which poachers and cattle-herders have not killed off, using guns and snares and cheap poisons, are being wiped out by new roads, power lines, mushrooming towns, and overgrazed, shrinking rangelands.
Kenya has twenty-three national parks, but the habitat they offer is not enough to sustain the animals. In recent years, some of the indigenous communities that control much of the country’s undeveloped land have made leasehold agreements with conservation groups and private safari companies. These arrangements have helped protect an estimated sixty-five per cent of Kenya’s wildlife, while also aiding pastoralist groups like the Maasai. But they are precarious—a patchwork of thousands of contracts, each one subject to renegotiation whenever a local leader raises his rate or a nonprofit loses funding. Where they fail, the wilderness habitat will disappear, and the animals will, too.
In Nairobi, the renowned conservationist and paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey told me that he did not expect most of Kenya’s wild animals to survive past mid-century. “I am not persuaded of the prospects for wildlife unless something gives,” he said. “And I don’t see it.”
Leakey, the son of the paleoanthropologists Mary and Louis Leakey, has been at the center of Kenyan conservation for decades, and his pessimism has upset the community. Paula Kahumbu admires Leakey, but she thinks that his frustration is tinged with an increasing sense of his own mortality. At seventy-six, he has endured kidney and liver transplants, and lost both legs in a plane crash. “He is locking himself into a narrative of hopelessness and discouraging a huge number of conservationists,” Kahumbu said. “I fear his words give weight to decision-makers—people who, when they hear him, might well say, ‘Why fund conservation when it’s too late?’ I personally think he is out of touch with what Kenyans want, think, and aspire to. Over fifty per cent of Kenyans have watched my TV series. They support our campaigns, help us challenge the government, plant trees, defend parks and forests, and are starting conservation organizations of their own. I am aware of the challenges. Government is in the way. But we select our governments. So we have power.”
One morning, Kahumbu and her crew climbed to a meeting place high in the Loitas. Parmuat was waiting for them, wearing a hide around his neck and carrying a switch made from a cow’s tail; he had walked that morning from his village, an hour’s drive away. After a brief greeting, he led the group into a grove of Elgon olive and podo trees, stopping at a huge strangler fig, a tree as hefty and durable as a cathedral. Carrying a calabash full of milk, he walked slowly around the trunk, shaking its contents onto the bark and muttering an incantation. In Swahili, he explained to Kahumbu that he was blessing the tree and asking its permission to extract plants from the forest to make medicines.
In the effort to protect the forest, Parmuat was collaborating with Rob and Sarah O’Meara, a white couple in their fifties. The O’Mearas had moved to the area in 2014, after several years in the Maasai Mara, where they had set up one of the first wildlife conservancies. Sarah had known the Loitas intimately since childhood; her father, a Kenyan-born Englishman, had led safaris there, and had often taken her along.
When the O’Mearas arrived in the Loitas, the Maasai elders invited them to reclaim Sarah’s father’s old hunting camp. They found a spot next to a rushing stream and erected a minimally intrusive camp: a few tree houses, some tents, an open-air kitchen and living room. They hired Maasai as rangers, guides, and camp staff. Their visitors were mostly foreign bird-watchers and nature lovers, who were happy to pay generously to spend a week in an unspoiled setting.
If, like many of the O’Mearas’ clients, you set your baseline for wildlife in rural New Jersey or the outer suburbs of London, there was plenty to see. During the night I spent there, baboons marauded around the camp, bellowing and crashing through the trees. In the morning, Sarah explained that they were agitated by a leopard, which had been prowling the woods. In the forest, we were trailed by black-and-white colobus monkeys, which peered at us curiously as they leaped from branch to branch. But the O’Mearas were increasingly worried about the threats to wildlife. A few decades ago, Sarah told me, the forest was full of black rhinos, but they had long since fallen to poachers. Now animals were increasingly threatened by the development of their habitat—what conservationists refer to delicately as “human-animal conflict.”
One afternoon, Rob drove me up a ridge in his stripped-down Land Cruiser, with forest bushbuck scattering as we lumbered along the trail. From the crest, he pointed out an expanse of lowlands: the Serengeti, just over the border in Tanzania. In the other direction was the Maasai Mara. For aeons, in the East African wildlife migration, millions of wildebeest, zebra, and other animals moved from one range to the other; a smaller migration moved between the Maasai Mara and the Loita plains. In recent years, though, most of the open land had been sold off and fenced—using cedar illegally logged in the nearby forest—and the Loita migration had been halted.
Rob was conscious of the land’s precarity. He had grown up on a farm near Lake Nakuru, which once belonged to the aviator and author Beryl Markham. When he was in his twenties, his parents sold the land and moved away. Returning for a visit a few years later, he found that the farm had been subdivided into fenced plots; the forest that had spread beyond it was gone.
On the ridge, Rob drew my eye to some clearings and tin roofs glinting on a hilltop, and explained that the government was privatizing land across Kenya. The process was begun by the colonial British, and has persisted since independence. Known as adjudication, it has now extended to areas where humans and wildlife have lived alongside one another, without roads or fences, for thousands of years. Land that has always been held communally is split into individual plots—but the new owners often find that their parcels are not large enough to maintain their traditional way of life, so they sell to speculators or developers. For a herdsman who suddenly lacks access to a range, the offer of a few thousand dollars may seem reasonable; it’s enough to build a cinder-block house and buy a Chinese motorbike. But even a small bit of fencing—let alone a cement factory, as I saw at the edge of Chyulu Hills National Park—can disrupt habitat. Driving through the plains below the ridge, I had seen the last of the Loitas’ great migratory herds: three or four hundred animals, grazing aimlessly between the fences of a hundred-acre plot.
For conservationists, the challenge is to convince indigenous people that tourism and eco-business can earn them as much as selling their land or leasing it to commercial farmers. Parmuat’s community, where adjudication was still pending, favored a model that would keep most of the land in an unfenced wilderness trust, while providing income through leaseholds. But Maasai leaders were aware of the dangers.
Away from the cameras, I asked Parmuat if he thought the Loita forest would survive. To answer, he said, he would need to undertake the laibon ritual of “throwing the stones.” He drew geometric figures on his face and arms with white paint, and then retrieved his charms—quartzes and smooth river stones, as well as cowrie shells and a few old coins—from a cow’s horn. He tossed them onto a cloth, moving them around deliberately. The answer, he told me, was effectively “Ask again later.” As outsiders came into the Loitas, the stones would warn against bad people, and tell him which medicine from the forest could stop them.
