Dead Trees and Dying Traditions in Kenya’s Last Tropical Rainforest

When Milton Ayoyi was a young man, his father didn’t speak to him for three days—all for cutting down a tree. 

“Here in Kakamega, you can’t do that,” Ayoyi, now 80, said. 

The Kakamega is Kenya’s last tropical rainforest, an undulating terrain of 238 square kilometers in the nation’s west. As you penetrate inward from the margins, the flora morphs, getting more dense, more diverse. It’s home to hedgehogs, bush pigs, tree pangolins, and colobus monkeys. Here, you can find some of the continent’s rarest trees, 60 species of orchids (nine of which are exclusive to Kakamega), 367 bird species, and about 500 butterfly species, many of which remain under studied.

The Luhya community that lived under its canopy once looked to the forest for nearly everything: It provided clean water, shade, serenity, and medicinal herbs. Downing the trees that gave them life was taboo. But in the past century, things have changed. 

Myriad political, developmental, and environmental factors have distanced local Luhya communities from their environment. There was British colonization until 1963, the rather turbulent emergence of a multi-party system in the 1990s, and Nairobi’s entrenchment as the technological capital of East Africa in recent decades. 

Places such as Kakamega County, although still relatively remote, nonetheless pulsed with change. Communal values fragmented with forced transformation by the colonial administration, then development. In turn, recognition of the natural world’s capacity for knowledge and power ebbed in societal importance. 

Today, as loggers pillage the land, only an estimated half of the area is native forest—the rest have been displaced by the likes of eucalyptus, cypress, and wattlewood. It’s a fragment of a once-giant rainforest that traversed enormous tracts of the continent, from Guinea in the west through the Congo to the Indian Ocean.

I hop onto a motorbike that I’d arranged at the airstrip to take me to Shinyalu, a town nestled on the western edge of the rainforest. It’s far calmer up here. The fresh air and slow pace feel like a balm compared to Nairobi’s frenetic, hustler energy. Many young people, some garbed in flashy streetwear, dream of moving to bigger towns or cities. 

Here, I met community members who have witnessed the forest’s disappearance—both physical and cultural. These days, government management dictates how the forest is used. Many elders pass away without passing on generational knowledge to younger generations. Some destitute youth migrate to cities for better jobs, while others chop trees for cash—a feat unimaginable to Ayoyi’s father. 

But Ayoyi and members of his community are parts of a grassroots collective championing the old ways. They harvest medicine from the forest and pass on traditional knowledge. Even with all the cutting that’s going on, quite literally closing in on their world, they’re determined to keep outsider loggers at bay. 

They won’t let their forest fall without a fight. 

56-year-old Patrick Lumumba inherited land from his father, a veritable 10 hectares of rolling slopes and natural rainforest mixed in with a couple of patches of tea plantations, a living vestige from the colonial era. “I’m one of the only people living here, right next to the forest,” he says as we march down a muddy path toward the Kakamega. “It’s very interesting here.”

Land here otherwise belongs to the government, which unilaterally decides what to do with the forest and who’s allowed inside. This is despite how the forest thrived for thousands of years under social pacts that communities respected and abided by, yet has declined in size and become increasingly fragmented under the national and regional government regime. Conflicts between community members and the state can easily become violent. It’s common to hear grapevine tales of extrajudicial killings carried out by government officials and police against those caught illegally harvesting timber.

The nearly two million people in Kakamega County are some of the most impoverished in the nation, with half living beneath the poverty line. For years, extreme economic destitution has driven young men in particular to log native and plantation trees alike for pennies, to burn into jiko (charcoal). It’s estimated that upwards of 21% of the overall forest cover has been lost since the late 1980s. Deforestation may soon accelerate, as this July, President William Samoei Ruto lifted a six-year ban on timber logging, purportedly to employ destitute youths. 

“KFS [Kenya Forest Service] doesn’t come to visit, they don’t know [what’s going on],” says Lumumba as we loop around his backyard, through the tea plantations and into the little gully where he plants maize and pumpkin, past pockets of shade where his handful of cows are chewing their cud. “They should come to teach awareness about why biodiversity and the forest are important.”

At one tangle of dense vines, where his section of the rainforest ends and his neighbor’s begins, we encounter a man from a nearby village gathering loose sticks for firewood. The man describes his hunt as increasingly difficult over the past couple of years, given KFS’s strict patrol of its territory and the fact that forests seem to only dwindle with time.

Even Lumumba, who owns land and seems particularly resourceful, struggles with the endless expenditures that come with raising a family. In addition to farming, growing tea leaves, and raising a few cows, he also harvests honey—averaging 40 liters a year, which he sells at the local market in Shinyalu. Just a few months ago, he started germinating tree saplings upon learning about their potential demand by NGOs. Lumumba has also dabbled in digging a fish pond (it didn’t go so well, there was sabotage by envious neighbors). But last year, he was forced to cut around 15 bluegum trees growing on his mother’s property. “I had a problem with school fees,” he tells me. The trees sold for 6000-8000 KES, around $40-$55 each. 

Before Lumumba’s father passed away, he had been honored with a conservation prize by the Kenya Forest Service. “But it was in vain,” Lumumba said. “The government will help with South Sudan, but not here.”

His life in Kakamega with his wife and bright-eyed grandchild, their first, is quiet, in a good way. I ask for his WhatsApp but he shakes his head: He doesn’t have a smartphone. Over mugs of sugary tea—brewed with his own leaves, of course—he shares how decades ago, he’d lived all across Kenya, working in arid northeastern Garissa, and the muggy climate of Mombasa. But he declares the Kakamega, with its serenity and abundance, as the most blessed: “God loves us very much here. There’s rain and a good environment.”

Lumumba hopes his children, some of whom have gone to Nairobi in search of better employment opportunities, will return here to live in and take care of the forest. “I want them to live here in our history because I’m still following in the footsteps of my father.”

Pius Khalumi lives on generational land, where his grandfather was raised, where he and his cousins are drying maize from this season’s harvest. From boyhood, he learned how every tree and plant in the forest has a purpose—some medicinal, some religious, and others hold powers of justice. The Omurembe, a sacred tree, was known as “The Court,” where elders would make important deliberations. 

“I learned that [the Omurembe] was not a joke,” he says over tea and bread. It was a community gathering point—people accused of crimes such as stealing or killing were summoned there for justice. Those found guilty could be excommunicated.

In the 1920s, Khalumi explains, when Europeans came in, they introduced an administrative system that erased local mechanisms for justice. “When these colonial systems took root in the 1940s, they diminished ours.” The Luhya have 18 subtribes, all with different dialects and custom variations, but all bearing the same cultural erasure from the British.

“The generation who knew these things, those old men are dying and aren’t passing it on. The gap means that young generations don’t understand the forest’s importance.”

Not all hope is lost with younger generations, however. Amidst the changing forest community and cultural values, Abraham Shiramba, 40, stands out. He is a self-taught botanist and ecologist, an environmental educator and chairperson of a community-based organization, Kakamega Environmental Education Programme (KEEP).

We stroll into the forest, stopping every so often to observe. He points out how a strangler fig has killed its host (Zanthoxylum gilletii, an East African satinwood), listens for the trill of a yellow spotted barbet, and asks me to taste a certain fruit (Piper capense–just taste it, he says, and the plant will explain itself to you. The oval fruits have a bitingly tart flavor—it heals asthma and colds). He knows the Latin, English, and Luhya names of seemingly every plant in the forest.

Not many people of Shiramba’s age love the forest and marvel at its quiet offerings the same way he does. At the base of a Pouteria altissima, nearly 50 meters tall, a clear basin of water has gathered in its cupped roots. Animals come here to drink, he explains as he scoops up a handful. I ask him to do it a couple more times so I can take some photos, which he obliges. “But I can’t do too much, or else there won’t be water left for animals!”

Stopping at an ancient sandpaper tree (Ficus exasperata), he explains Luhya forest-dwellers used to approach it for wisdom and advice. “Believe me, it’s a holy place. People came here before churches.” New leaders elected by the community were brought here to be blessed. After long droughts, rainmakers would come before the tree to perform coveted rituals to invite back the rains. Without fail, that would work.

But the sandpaper tree also served as a point for communication. Shiramba demonstrated by banging a stick stolidly against its roots, the sound reverberating throughout the forest. “I’m just hitting it randomly, but people used to communicate through these sounds, which could mean that someone is hurt, they have a hunt that needs help carrying, that they’re safe,” he explains. “It’s perhaps a 300-year-old tree. It takes that long to grow—and less than an hour to cut it down with a power saw.”

Shiramba often leads school children from all across Kenya on rainforest walks, where they learn why the ecosystem is vital to human flourishing. KEEP is just one of several local organizations that have sprouted over the past decade advocating for the Kakamega’s protection. These community-based organizations facilitate barazas (community conservations), train community scouts to report illegal logging, and build and maintain electric fences along the forest’s perimeter to discourage encroachment and livestock entry.

Ernest Shikanga Liseche, a researcher studying social behavior of the blue monkeys of Kakamega, believes that the efforts to re-engage communities with their environments are indeed taking root. “We’ve changed the perception of many communities through barazas,” he tells me. By addressing the economic benefits that come from the forest, youths in particular are understanding what the Kakamega can do for them.

“We have to learn how to work with KFS,” says Shiramba, “Even with all of their flaws.” Their institutional backing is critical to navigating an increasingly bureaucratic world. Although on paper, it might seem that the government and community have analogous conservation goals, the Kakamega will always matter most for people who live there: those who can trace their familial roots back through stories and traditions, at once beautiful and painful.