Rewilding the World by Caroline Fraser

Author:Caroline Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Kenya and “the Government’s Cattle”

Kenya is divided by the Great Rift Valley, a wide plain formed thirty million years ago when tectonic plates collided and then heaved apart. To geologists, the Great Rift is a fault line stretching some four thousand miles from the Dead Sea to East Africa. But to Kenyans, it is the defining physical feature of their country, giving rise to its most stunning and dramatic spectacles, high escarpments and volcanic mountains—including Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya—overlooking enormous vistas across the valley below, once covered in acacia forests and dotted with depressions that became soda lakes, shallow-water pools with no outlet. Constant evaporation leaves the lakes with a high mineral content that feeds clotted masses of algae, insects, and crustaceans. In turn, those creatures draw brilliant flocks of pink flamingos and white storks. From the deserts surrounding Lake Turkana in the north to the grasslands of the Masai Mara in the south, the Great Rift Valley sheltered early man: fossils belonging to extinct hominid species, such as Australopithecus afarensis, have been found here, suggesting that our early ancestors divided their time between walking the Great Rift and climbing its trees.

Kenya is a small country, only a little larger than France, with uninhabitable desert taking up much of its northeastern region bordering Somalia. It lacks the resources, infrastructure, or arable land to support its population, which has a 2 to 4 percent growth rate, one of the highest in the world. Arable land measures only 8 percent, compared with 18 percent in the United States. Over the past few decades, many citizens looking for work have flooded into the cities, principally Nairobi and Mombasa, where they sleep rough or crowd into enormous slums that lack clean water and have no sanitation or sewage facilities. Unemployment is at 40 percent. In the 1950s, Kenya had a population of six million; it now holds thirty-nine million. With a population nearly twice that, France boasts a life expectancy of around eighty. Kenyans can expect to live to a ripe middle age of fifty.

Most challenges to conservation in Kenya arise from these cramped conditions. Land distribution, for instance, has been endlessly contentious. After the British wrested the territory from Germany in the 1880s, British settlers seized the best communal farming and grazing land in the Rift Valley and subjugated the Kikuyu, who were forced to work the land in exchange for the use—not the ownership—of ever-shrinking plots for their huts and crops. The 1952–1960 Mau-Mau uprising of the Kikuyu against the British led to independence, which arrived in 1963 but did not resolve the social inequities. Since independence, the Kikuyu, 22 percent of the population, have held greater political power than any other group. Of the three presidents since 1963, two have been Kikuyu (Jomo Kenyatta and the current president, Mwai Kibaki); the third, Daniel arap Moi, a de facto dictator for twenty-four years, belonged to the Kalenjin tribe but was beholden to the Kikuyu. The ruling tribe has long received a

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