The Embobut forest in Kenya is misty during the rainy season, filled with fresh, sweet air and chirping birds, rich biodiversity and flowing rivers — a gorgeous, lush landscape. It’s also the ancestral home of the Indigenous Sengwer people, who have lived throughout the forest for generations, stewarding and safeguarding its natural resources — until Kenya’s government began evicting them from their homes.
After years of advocacy and activism, AJWS grantee Sengwer Indigenous Community Trust (SICT) recently won an important victory in court halting further evictions and acquiring the rights to 10 acres of land to start a sustainable tree nursery. The Sengwer will raise seedlings in their nursery to support the restoration of the Embobut forest’s water springs and riverbanks.
“This is a big win – it is a win for conservation and a win for securing rights to our ancestral lands,” explains Yator, Executive Director of SICT. “[The government said that] this is a pilot project, and when we succeed with this small piece of land, then we’ll be able to expand with time.”
The Kenyan government has previously claimed that they need to control the forest to protect it, but the Sengwer people conserved this land for generations and have vast traditional knowledge. In fact, the government has been responsible for much of the forest’s destruction —siphoning off natural resources for profit or public use.
Over the last century, both the colonial British government, and later independent Kenya through its Kenyan Forest Service, have violently attacked the Sengwer. They have arrested, beaten, and killed community members, even burning their homes to the ground with people inside. These violent efforts have long been government attempts to try to intimidate and force the community out of their land, which they are still constitutionally entitled to.
The Sengwer people do have legal protections. In 2013, and again in 2021, the Sengwer won court orders protecting them from evictions, but the Kenya Forest Service continued their violations. In recent years, about 3,000 Sengwer families have been evicted, forced to live in makeshift tents instead of their traditional homes. In the morning, they deconstruct the tent and hide it, because if the Forest Service finds it during the day, they’ll remove it.
“People are not free to live in their homes,” explains Yator. “People live in fear because the Kenya Forest Service can come in and they arrest you, they torture you, they harass you, they even harass schoolchildren. The government is not respecting the court order [that is] in place. The order clearly states that Sengwer living inside the forest should not be evicted. That is the most painful thing because we go to court, and we feel that court is a place to protect [us], but we are not getting protected.”
SICT works to protect both the Sengwer people and their ancestral lands from further harm. Many Sengwer have been displaced from their land; some have retreated further into the thick forest, forced to live as squatters. Families are deeply impacted – children may be separated from their parents, and some have made the painful decision to sell their livestock to afford a home outside of the forest.
To advocate for themselves, SICT has connected with Kenyan journalists, some of whom have come with them into the forest and into court, exposing these human rights violations to the Kenyan public. The Sengwer have reached out to many government officials, including organizing a march to the capital city of Nairobi and presenting a letter to the office of the president. They have also used the power of their traditional music and dance to disseminate information, through thought-provoking lyrics and distributing literature to their audiences.
Yator and his team at SICT see the recent win, allowing the Sengwer community’s use of 10 acres of land to create a tree nursery and halting any further evictions, as a step towards government acknowledgement that they are the true protectors of this delicate ecosystem. Still, the struggle continues.
“I’ve been in the struggle. That is part of me. I have passion for the community, and I’m looking forward to one day when the Sengwer people of Embobut Forest live in, manage, control and own their ancestral lands and conservation conditions,” Yator says.