Ogiek's fight for community land rights has seen historic, decades-long battles finally pay off

Johnson Takur addresses members of the Ogiek during a consultative meeting on the ongoing registration process of the community land after the court reverted the land to the community. [Courtesy]

For Johnson Takur, 77, the struggle to find a place to call home has been tormenting and bitter. This reality still faces many in Kenya, exposing the painful unresolved cases of historical injustice, discrimination and the challenge of landlessness.

Since his childhood, Takur, from the Ogiek minority community in Mt Elgon, Bungoma County, has endured cumulative suffering both before and after independence.

The retired teacher is rich with memories of a brutal life while championing the rights of the Ogiek community. This community has suffered not only marginalisation but also discrimination by successive governments since Kenya gained its independence.

His family has suffered forceful evictions since colonial times and after independence from what he has known to be their ancestral land.

After being pushed from the rich agricultural soils of Trans-Nzoia by the colonialists to make way for white farmers, the Takur family ended up in the Chepkitale forest in the 1920s.

According to Takur, the Ogiek families were evicted and pushed higher up the mountain to make way for the white Highlands, a settlement of the Europeans attracted by the good soils and the cool climate.

Takur says his father, Cheprot Takur, was born in 1912 and brought up in the Matumbei area, East of Kitale town, before the family was kicked out of their home by colonial masters.

The Cheprot family and several Ogiek families ended up at Lolwot caves in Chepkitale after the displacement.

In Chepkitale, the families relied on honey, wild fruits and wild animals for food.

"I was born and brought up in Chepkitale, but life has not been fanfare but warfare. It was gruesome," says Takur.

Like other communities in East Africa who faced exclusionary measures guided by modern conservationist thought, the colonial administration gazetted Mt Elgon as a Crown Forest reserve and denied the community the legal right to occupy and manage their lands.

And after independence, management of the forest reserve was transferred to the Kenya Forest Service, which controls it at Mt Elgon to date.

Takur recalls how the British administration forcibly evicted the Ogiek from living in the forest below the moorland and away from the treeline, and that some families took refuge in caves, surviving through thick and thin.

"The British saw the moorland as useless land and categorised it as an untitled tribal reserve in 1938 before it became a trust land in 1942," he says.

Again, the Ogiek suffered yet another eviction from a swathe of forest in 1968, when Mt Elgon National Park was created.

"After the creation of Mt Elgon National Park, the Ogiek were evicted and their movement around the mountain as well as lower forest restricted," Takur explained.

At his age, Takur says he has experienced disruptions in his life that could have earned him a spot in the Guinness World Record.

"I have seen many disruptions in my life that can properly grant me a space in the Guinness World Record,” he alleged.

These disruptions derailed Takur's education and forced him to repeat some classes.

"Because of these disruptions, I was unable to go to school for two years and was forced to repeat classes," said Takur, a former student of Kapsokwony Boys.

Cosmas Murunga,70, says the Ogiek have been subjected to untold suffering in the fight for their land rights.

He says that settling in Chepkitale has frustrated the Ogiek since 1979, when the government violently evicted them and offered them land in the Chepyuk settlement scheme.

According to Murunga, the political elite in Mt. Elgon had convinced the KANU regime in 1971 to establish the Chepyuk settlement scheme to settle the Ogiek community.

This went against the wishes of the Ogiek community, who had not given up their rights to their lands but had begun negotiations with the colonial government to secure land where they could plant their own food, given the bouts of hunger that affected East Africa in the 1950s.

During this time, the community relied on butter, trading their baskets for food with neighbouring communities.

A series of violent evictions by the government, compounded by community-wide cattle raids by armed raiders from Uganda, made life unforgiving for the Ogiek.

The Ogiek later on learned that the raiders were combatants from the Ugandan political unrest which deposed the late former President of Uganda, Idi Amin Dada

The community allege that instead of the Kenyan security forces coming to assist the community, they came to displace the community to settle at Chepyuk settlement forcibly.

When calm returned to Chepkitale, the majority of the Ogiek community returned to the area in 1982 while tilling their farms in Chepyuk for food.

In 1989, while the community peacefully settled, security forces struck again and forcefully evicted them on the instigation of some Mt. Elgon political elites.

Again, the Ogiek families at Chepyuk returned to Chepkitale in 1992, which they showed as uninhabitable compared to the settlement scheme.

Takur recalls how the Uganda raiders launched a daylight attack in 1996, killed some people,e and drove away several livestock, an attack that prompted the families to flee Chepkitale.

"It was a deadly attack; we lost many people and livestock. The attack forced families to return to Chepyuk until 2002, when they returned to Chepkitale,' Takur said of the raid.

 Between 1979 and 2002, the Ogiek faced brutal evictions and lost property.

While some families agreed to move to Chepkitale, others crossed and settled in Kimboroa forest in Trans-Nzoia; the group, however, returned to Chepkitale in 1992.

The Ogiek forest-dwelling people estimate that between 6,000 and 9,000 have lived in the Chepkitale area for generations, but their presence has faced oppression and evictions.

Traditionally hunter-gatherers and renowned beekeepers, they maintained that their lifestyle and culture are inseparable from the forest.

Despite evictions by successive governments, the Ogiek, through communal by-laws, conserved the forest.

The establishment of the Chepyuk settlement scheme in 1971 did not provide answers to the Ogiek agony but instead inflicted more scars.

Half of the Chepyuk settlement scheme was allocated to better connect neighbouring communities and resulted in deforestation, degradation and inter-ethnic conflicts.

It is believed that over 2000 lives were lost during the 2008 insurgency of Sabaot Land Defence Forces SLPF.

In 2000, Mt Elgon County Council gazetted the land as Chepkitale National Reserve, leaving a trail of violent evictions of the community.

Despite the evictions, the community bravely returned to Chepkitale and insisted on ancestral ownership.

Disturbed by the continued land rights abuse, the community moved to court to contest the conversion of the ancestral land to a national reserve, sparking a legal battle.

And as fate would have it, the Ogiek struggle bore fruit on June 26 2022, when a Bungoma High Court found the conversion unconstitutional and unlawful.

Peter Kitelo and others had moved to court and challenged the conversion.

Judge Boaz Olao of Bungoma Environment and Lands Court struck down Gazette Notice No 88 of 2000.

In his ruling, Judge Boaz Olao cited a lack of legal process for appropriating indigenous trust land during the conversion of Chepkitale land.

This victory legally restored the ancestral rights of the Ogiek community over the historical land on Mt Elgon, recognising Chepkitale as community trust land.

The County government of Bungoma has not appealed against the court verdict.

The Ogiek community celebrated the ruling and is in the advanced stages of registering over 80,000 acres of ancestral land as community land.

Last week, the Ogiek community formed a 15-member community land management committee, including five women, to oversee boundary surveys.

The committee will be responsible for preparing the community register and conducting survey work to define the community land within the larger Mt Elgon forest under the Kenya Forest Service.

Despite the victory on land rights, the Ogiek community still faces many economic challenges.

Chepkitale lacks electricity, communication networks and security.

With a population of 9,000, Chepkitale has no police officer deployed to protect its people.

Chepkitale-Kapsokwony road, the only road linking the community to the rest of the world, is impassable, and residents are unable to transport their produce.

The honey and milk business, the only source of livelihood for the Ogiek, has been grounded by the poor road.