Keep State projects off revered cultural sites

Githunguri Kia Wairera gallows heritage site. [Courtesy, Meta/Kenya News Agency]

Culture, as often said, is the glue that holds society together. Among the Kikuyu, Mugo wa Kibiru, a seer, walked the hills of Githunguri, read the skies above them, and left behind a spiritual inheritance. That inheritance at Githunguri Kia Wairera is today under threat of destruction because of the Affordable Housing Programme. 

Bulldozers are on site even as iron-sheet walls go up. Here, as elsewhere, the government is treating community land as an inconvenience standing between ambition and a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Development, no doubt, is welcome. Kenya needs housing, roads, schools, hospitals, and economic infrastructure that lifts people from poverty. No serious person disputes this. But development that devours what communities hold sacred is not progress.

There is a reason the Kaya forests of the Coast have survived centuries of colonial aggression, commercial logging interests, and post-independence neglect. The Mijikenda people have guarded them with reverence. They are sacred groves, shrines, burial grounds, and repositories of ancestral memory. 

UNESCO recognised them as World Heritage Sites because communities, not governments, preserved them. In the hills of Tiriki in Western Kenya, the sacred forests tied to initiation and communal identity have outlasted every political administration since the colonial period. The Embu similarly maintained forest sanctuaries around Mount Kenya that doubled as ecological buffers. Destroy the shrine, you destroy the forest. Destroy the forest, you unravel the community.

In Ethiopia, the church forests — small patches surrounding Orthodox churches — have survived for centuries in a landscape otherwise stripped bare. Scientists studying them marvel that some contain tree species no longer found elsewhere in the Horn of Africa. They endured because communities considered them inviolable. Sacred designation was, in effect, the most powerful conservation policy ever devised.

A railway cannot navigate around a hillside shrine; that is understandable, but a housing project can. Githunguri Kia Wairera heritage site comprises 58 acres. Kenya covers 582,000 square kilometres. The arithmetic of alternative sites is not complicated. The Government should take its housing project elsewhere.