A Sacred Lake Is Swallowed

By: John Mbaria on December 23rd, 2008

“Who on earth would dare cultivate inside this sacred lake? Would such a person ever escape the wrath of our God, ancestors and spirits? Where do they expect all these birds to migrate to?”

As she desperately stares at the receding waters of the sacred Lake Mbututia in eastern Kenya, Mama Janet Kingwa Mboroki cannot understand the way today’s world thinks. Every question she puts across brings more tears to her eyes, yet, not a single straight answer can take away her pain.

“Who did this to us?” she asks. Before anybody can answer, she asks several other questions: “Who on earth would dare cultivate inside this sacred lake? Would such a person ever escape the wrath of our God, ancestors and spirits? Where do they expect all these birds to migrate to?”

As Mboroki asks each question, she pokes the ground with her blunt knife. The silence is disturbing. A number of birds venerated by locals play at a distance. A few fishermen try their luck and boys graze large herds of cattle. The octogenarian is straining to see the farthest edge of the lake from where she is seated.

As Mama Mboroki narrates her horror, it becomes clear just how messy and complicated it is to tackle environmental problems that have climate change implications.

A community of people was at peace with the lake: it cherished the birds that flew there, and knew those that left in the morning would come back to their nests at dusk. Whenever the rains failed, sacrifices were offered at the lake’s shore. But now, things are no longer the same.

The people of this community by the Lake Mbututia in eastern Kenya have been displaced and re-settled by a rich and powerful elite. Its elders are aghast. They cannot think of moving: do they not live because the Gods accepted their offerings and showered them with rain? Surely, the sacred lake must be spared the senseless environmental degradation going on in most parts of Kenya? Fortunately, the United Nations, the National Museums of Kenya and a local NGO, Porini Association, agree. Working in partnership with the elders, these organisations hope to salvage what remains here and in other natural sites around Africa’s second highest mountain, Mt Kenya. They hope this will help reduce the gravest consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change.

Situated in Kianjai, Tigania District, eastern Kenya, the vast 1,000-acre sacred lake of Mbututia is internationally famous. But, since 1984, Lake Mbututia has been at the centre of a raging controversy over a flawed land amalgamation and consolidation process, which saw poor peasants moved from their ancestral land and, instead, allocated land on the lake’s marshy stretches. According to locals, the area was declared an adjudication zone in 1961. But they only came to realise that they had been dispossessed of their land in the mid-1980s.

“Mbututia is like a mortuary where people who cannot get money to bribe the district lands and adjudication officers are put away,” says one elder, Sabastiano Itaru, whose 1.5-acre piece of land is now on the lake. He points at a heron standing on the water to approximate where one of his land’s beacons could be standing if the water had never been there. Itaru, like all the other elders, has no bone to pick with the existence of the sacred lake. The community wants the lake to be protected, but they want their land returned as well.

“Over the centuries, this sacred lake has been our temple of traditions and spirituality,” says another elder, John Mutema.

He concurs with other elders that protecting the sacredness of Lake Mbututia lay squarely in the hands of the six clans who are its owners and guardians. As the story goes, the Amatu, Amakia, Thing’amburi, Mwiganda, Mbuya and Antu-a-iiya clans became the stewards of the lake after the Maasai left the area and moved towards Laikipia. It is said that the Maasai left the region about a century ago, after being chased out by the locals. But they still have some blood-ties and cultural affiliation with the locals.

“In fact, some families in Kianjai are still in touch with their Maasai relatives to this day,” says Mzee Fredrick Mugwika.

It is also apparent that Urru, a shopping centre near the lake, got its name from the Maasai, although locals do not seem to know its exact meaning in the Maa language.

Mbututia was a cathedral not only for the Maasai and the Ameru, but also for other communities. It is said that elders from the Borana and Somali communities used to make a pilgrimage to the lake for prayers and sacrifice. In times of drought, spiritualists from the four clans gathered and slaughtered a sacred sheep. The sheep was asymmetrically cut into two equal pieces with the ’right’ piece being given to the morans (warriors) who took it to the deepest part of the lake, to be fed to God. The climax of the ceremony was when elders scattered millet seeds into the lake’s waters, chanting prayers. “Before the end of the ceremony, clouds darkened and heavy rains came the same day,” says Mzee Itaru.

“In recognition of the great historic and bankable natural and cultural heritage of the lake, the department of sites and monuments in the National Museums of Kenya gazetted Mbututia as a national monument in December 2003,” says Njuguna Gichere, a former curator at Meru National Museums in Eastern Kenya. The survey to earmark the best-suited sites in the Mt Kenya region for notification in the gazette was sponsored by the UNDP’s Small Grants Programme through the Community Management of Protected Areas Conservation (Compact) programme.

Over the last few years, the latter programme has been facilitating communities to conserve forests around Mt Kenya, so as to avoid the gravest consequences of climate change and biodiversity depletion. It is feared that unless drastic, radical and widespread effort is made, Mt Kenya (which has the second highest peak in Africa) will lose its entire glacial cap in 20 or so years, which will gravely affect the supply of water to millions of people who depend on it. The partners in the programme have been facilitating local people to ’remember’ the traditional, religious, mythical and spiritual significance of the relevant natural sites for purposes of rehabilitating and protecting their natural diversity.

Other such sites include the Giitune Sacred Forest, the Sacred Lake Thaai, the Nkunga Sacred Lake, and the Narumoro Caves — they were gazetted in the same government notice. But today, Mbututia, unlike the other sites, is facing a big problem, the source of which, according to the locals, is the deplorable corruption of powerful people in the former government of President Daniel Arap Moi.

According to Francis Kithure, co-coordinator of the Meru Wetland Conservation Initiative, Mbututia has over 200 bird species. Some of these are resident while others are non-resident. Every morning, thousands of birds migrate to places as far away as Isiolo (about 60 kilometres) to feed, only to come back to Mbututia late in the evening to sleep. Birds like turacos, crowned-hawk eagles, flycatchers, hornbills, wood owls, starlings, yellow-billed stocks, African cranes, sacred ibises, Egyptian geese, white necked cormorants, herons, little egrets and marsh harriers are to be found here.

“Due to the complicated nature of land crisis in Kianjai area (that replicates itself in most parts of Kenya), locals are fast losing their long-cherished attachment to the lake,” notes Kithure.

He says that in the late 1980s, local people set ablaze the papyrus, reed and sage bushes, which were the breeding ground for many of the birds, and grew naturally around the lake. Today, the edges of the lake are bare and birds are migrating to alternative breeding areas. Birds that cannot manage the migration are in danger of extinction. Their young ones cannot survive in an environment full of such human activities as grazing and fishing. As a result, birds like the gargany, south pochard, great white pelican, crown crane, saddle billed stock, African spoonbill, hammer kop and tern, which appear once in a year, are endangered.

With a tinge of sadness, Kithure says that this is a disaster for birds in Africa and not merely a loss for Kenya.

The destruction of the three hills neighbouring the lake — Nyambene, Keiya and Chura — due to poor farming methods, has compounded the situation further owing to the reduction of water levels and siltation. A study done by the Kenya Wildlife Services in 2003 described Mbututia as the richest biodiversity wetland in the larger Meru region. Besides birds, Mbututia has over 92 reptile species. Indeed, there was an attempt to convert Mbututia into a community park with a Ksh 14 million ($182,000) grant from the European Union’s Biodiversity Conservation Programme, which has, however, collapsed under unexplained circumstances.

By 2003, 148 peasants had complained that well-to-do people had manipulated the local land adjudication officers to have the native community displaced from the mainland and allocated land inside the lake. Many of them could not afford the Ksh 200 ($2.5) needed to formally lodge a complaint in order for the allocation to be revoked. Some, like Itaru, were courageous enough to confront officials at the Ministry of Lands in Nairobi’s Ardhi House. He says that he sold his only two sheep and set out on the over 300-kilometre journey to the city to meet the Eastern Region’s Director of Lands. He was lucky to get a letter, which he presented to the Maua lands officer. The officer in Maua referred him to a lower office in Urru. He says that he got a rude shock when the latter officer accused him of going from one office to another, and that he had ended up resolving nothing.

Rukunga Michira is quite famous in Kianjai. And this is not because he is well off. It is because of the courage he has demonstrated in the face of extreme difficulties he has been through. He was reduced to a beggar when his 0.73 acre piece of land was placed on the swamp. He says that his ’ancestral’ land was taken over by a new owner forcefully. Today, he is a displaced person, residing in his brother’s farm. He has been reduced to begging for food and money in the Kianjai market. When his wife died recently, he says that he had no place to bury her. Michira says his brother was generous enough to allow her to be buried in his small piece of land.

“This lake is not like a blanket that one can steal. We need to restore our sacred lake,” says Mzee Mutema, whose 3.5 acres are ’floating’ in the lake. He adds that the last ceremony to take place at the lake’s shores was during the infamous drought of 1984 that affected most parts of Kenya, and calls for the revival of traditional sacred ceremonies and rituals performed there. “No one wants this lake subdivided; no one wants compensation. We are just asking for justice as human beings and want to be given land elsewhere. We want to obey the traditions of our forefathers and let these birds and reptiles continue multiplying.” Today, Mzee Mutema has only one acre left of his old farm.

Fredrick Mugwika is poor but lucky. He got 6 acres and lost only 1.5 acres. “During the campaign period, President Mwai Kibaki came asking for votes in this village. Our area MP, Kilemi Mwiria, spoke about the problem of land in respect to this lake. It is now one year down the line but nothing has come forth.” To him, “Politicians are merely politicians… they hunt for votes from the rich and the poor and soon forget all the promises they made.”

“What do I have to tell you? When you take land from people who are already poor, what else do you expect them to become? You see, in the history of the Ameru people, it is a taboo to feed on wild birds. But today, young people are killing every bird in the lake, including sacred birds like the crane. They are fishing using mosquito nets, killing countless numbers of frogs and fingerings. What have they been reduced to?” ponders Mama Mboroki. She cannot tell the exact size of her land, which is currently submerged in the lake. To her, what is left of her dry land is as good as nothing.

A local non-governmental organisation, Porini Association, is currently working with the community to bring about environmental and human justice. “Like in the Karima Sacred Forest and the Giitune Forest in Meru, where community ecological governance has changed the mindset of the community and the governance system, the same will happen here in Mbututia,” asserts a determined Kariuki Thuku, who is a founder member of Porini.

He says that the lake has to exist since it has a “natural right” to be there and believes that it should be accorded legal standing equal to that of a human being, in a court of law.

“We shall have failed in our duty if we do not bring people from the world over to witness the injustices being done to birds and people in Mbututia.”