For more than four decades, they have lived in squalor. They have been abandoned by successive governments and short-changed by leaders, with empty promises of finding them alternative land.
The more than 2,000 squatters in Kibwezi West in Makueni County have for years lived in shanties, adults having to share makeshift beds with their children.
Their troubles began in 1976 when the Government gazetted Ngai Ndethya as a game reserve and rendered those settled there landless.
According to Wandia Mutungi, 88, they were among 5,000 people who were evicted from Kyulu ranges in 1987 to create space for wildlife conservation.
Ms Mutungi said in 1992, some of those evicted were given land at Masongaleni, Kibwezi, Kiboko ‘A’ and ‘B’ settlement schemes that were created for the squatters. However, not all the displaced persons were allocated land.
Weak sticks
From a distance, one can confuse the structures with manyattas, if not for seemingly weak sticks they stand on. They are grass-thatched, while others are covered with black polythene papers.
We peep into one of the smoke-stained structures. Inside an old man sits on a stone closely watching as something cooks in a pot on a three-stone fire. He refuses to let us in. His neighbours tell us he would not open for fear that children might stream in to beg for his little meal.
The delay in creating settlement schemes has subverted the locals and crippled agriculture. Most of the squatters have no land to till, while others have pieces measuring 10 steps by 25, which cannot yield much.
“I had planted hundreds of mango trees in Kyulu before eviction. Now I’m forced to make use of a piece measuring only 10 by 25 steps here,” said Mutungi.
Lutha Kakui, one of the few men in the camp, has pleaded with the Government for land, wondering who, between wild animals and the people, are more important?
“We border a wildlife conservation reserve and a research centre (Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation) that keeps animals,” said Mr Kakui.
He is considered rich, for he owns an old bicycle that doubles up as the locals’ ambulance and also transports them to Makindu market.
There are 79 people in the compound. Many of them are old men and women abandoned in the shacks by their children. Many youthful sons and daughters of the squatters are said to move to neighbouring Kajiado County to do irrigation work. Many never return.
We meet two girls who have dropped out of primary school after giving birth. The younger one yearns for education. She hopes to save her parents from poverty.
At this place, they have also formed a welfare group “Umiisyo wa wildlife” to voice their grievances.
“We formed this group to assist one another and lobby,” says Magaret Katunge, the group’s chair.
Some five kilometres southwards is ‘Boma 5’ alias Kalembe Raha. It was created by former Kibwezi MP Kalembe Ndile.
Here the situation is dire. Irresponsible sexual behaviours are rampant. Even school girls are said to flee their homes for fear of sharing beds with their fathers.
Some have become beggars and other street children in Makindu town. Mutua Musilu, a local, says several others prostitute on the Nairobi-Mombasa highway.
To the north of ‘Boma 4’ is Katia village, where squatters live in fear of attacks from elephants and Kenya Wildlife rangers.
“We are suffering as squatters, but in addition to that, rangers come in the middle of the night and arrest you. They accuse you of hunting game. We can’t grow anything, all the crops are destroyed by wild animals. We never get compensation,” said Onesmus Manthi, a father of five.
Milcah Mueni, a mother of 10, shares a shanty with her two daughters-in-law and when their husbands come they are forced to sleep in lodgings in Makindu before returning to work.
It is not a house - the structure has no beds, they sleep on the dusty floor, and they close their structure with an old-tattered cloth. There are no pit-latrines.
Mueni says floods washed away her six goats and chickens, her only source of livelihood.
The suffering locals say they have no place to bury the dead, no means of transporting the bodies as they ferry them in carts to the only cemetery located 10kms in Makindu town, which has no space.
Baobab trees
The squatters have criticised the Government for promising to find them land. Their hopes have been fading 55 years on. They say they are tired of politicians maximising on their plight every electioneering period.
Most of the poor homeless Ngulia people blame influential Ukambani politicians who grabbed large tracts of land leaving majority of the people squatters scattered in various regions in the former larger Kibwezi.
Some of the squatters say they originated from Ngai Ndethya, past Mtito Andei.
The Ngulias’ sufferings started in 1836. According to Lindblom and Hobley’s book, The Akamba of British East Africa, they were the indigenous Kamba of Kikumbulyu.
As Lindblom and Hobleys explain, the Ngulias migrated to the southwest before settling between Taveta and Lake Jipe near the Pare mountains and later moved to Tanzania stretching from Musi Valley, Usambara and the Maramba region.
Reportedly, a large number of these people remained in Kikumbulyu, the area between River Kiboko in the north and Kyulu Hills in the west.
Between 2002 and 2006, there was a policy research project by the Masongaleni Community Organisation for Sustainable Development (Macosud) highlighting the plight of the landless Nguliapeople, who lived under baobab trees.
Parts of the Jacobus Kiilu-led Macosud research read that when the East African Scottish missionaries, led by Dr James Steward, arrived in Kibwezi in 1891, the Ngulia Akamba were there.
Further, there were documented agreements between the missionaries and the Ngulia under the rule of Kilundo in 1891. The report says the Ngulia, who form part of the biggest population of Kibwezisquatters, had their settlements centered near water points, water courses, hills and raised rocks.
The two-year research found that the Ngulias’ troubles started in the late 1890s and 1900s after missionaries settled in Kibwezi.
“In a blink, the whites initiated a tactical eviction of the Ngulia people. According to existing records, when Tsavo West National Park was established. The Ngulia people were moved from River Tsavo, passed Mzima water catchment area and settled at River Mtito Andei,” said Mr Kiilu.
Chronologically, in 1902, there was the Crown Lands Ordinance, which restricted Ngulia people to the Kikumbulyu Native Reserve, which included Kyale, a region near river Kiboko, Mbui Nzau adjacent to Kibwezi town and Kyulu block along the Kyulu ranges.
Kyulu block reportedly had more than 5,000 people.
The research document points out that in 1932 the colonial district commissioner paid a visit to Kikumbulyu reserve, something that intensified the Ngulia people’s problems.
Records indicate that he proposed that Kamba people from Kyulu block were suffering from drought and they were to be moved to Kyale, near Kiboko River.
The contents of the Carter Land Commission, 1932, states that they agreed to go-by the DC recommendations for the Kyulu residents to be moved north of the railway line.
