The Mukogodo Forest in central Laikipia County is Kenya’s largest national forest reserve, covering a landmass of over 30,000 hectares. Out of a total 372 gazetted forests, the Mukogodo is one of the nation’s few remaining dry forests and the only one under exclusive management of an Indigenous community, the Yaaku.

For centuries, the Mukogodo provided the Yaaku — traditionally a hunter-gatherer community — with buffalo, hyrax, giraffe, and other animals, along with forest berries and honey. But they were evicted from their cave dwellings in the forest when the Kenyan government seized the Mukogodo and converted it into a forest reserve in 1932. In the decades that followed, the Yaaku acculturated with the pastoralist Maasai and Samburu and began livestock herding and small-scale farming. In 1977, the Kenyan government banned all forms of hunting as part of an overarching conservation agenda, thus eradicating an essential component of the Yaaku’s traditional livelihood.

Eviction from their land and assimilation with the Maa tribes diluted certain facets of Yaaku identity (e.g. converting to agricultural and pastoral livelihoods), and even today are not nationally recognized as a distinct ethnic group. But there have been hopeful steps toward recognition.

The Forest Act of 2005 granted the Yaaku rights to forest resources in the Mukogodo. In 2007, the government granted the Yaaku a greater role in forest stewardship under the Forest Management and Conservation Act as part of Kenya’s first participatory forest management effort (the Act is in accordance with Article 56 of Kenya’s Constitution, requiring the state to promote programs that ensure minorities and marginalized groups can “develop their cultural values, languages, and practices.”) The following year, the Yaaku mobilized their own Community Forest Association (CFA) –– ILMAMUSI –– to officially partner with Kenya Forest Service. Together, they work to protect the forest and foster ecological and socio-cultural values within the Mukogodo. Other collaborators include Forest Laikipia Wildlife Forum, Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, Borana Conservancy, and Northern Rangelands Trust.

The Yaaku have maintained a strong connection to the land, as well as ties to traditional foods. For instance, honey is not only key to Yaaku diet and cherished for its different medicinal properties (specific honeys are harvested from different blossoming trees to treat various ailments) but it also offered as dowry and used in sacrificial rites (for example, asking for rains in times of drought). Older generations follow the sounds of different birds like cuckoos and honeyguides in their search for wild honey hidden away deep in the forest. And today, each household maintains its own beehives. “Yaaku without honey is like Maasai without cattle,” said Juiliana Lorisho, a young community member. Her sister, Rachael Malka Mpeletian, has started a female-owned business called SICA (meaning ‘honey’ in Yaakunte) in nearby Nanyuki, selling the special white honey sourced from their home village.

These generational connections to the forest guide Yaaku life today. The community’s council of elders, for example, is a unique governance system that incorporates ancestral ecological knowledge into forest management strategies. This decision-making body is one example of how the Yaaku have manifested their traditional and hierarchical conceptions of ownership. Input from the council of elders is relayed to ILMAMUSI, which employs Yaaku rangers to patrol the area and mediate disputes among those living in the forest reserve — cattle rustling among a top concern.

ILMAMUSI also encourages surrounding communities across four different group ranches — Ilngwesi, Makurian, Mukogodo, and Sieku — to engage in conservation work as well as sustainable use of the forest, from building small-scale ecotourism businesses to scaling up bee-keeping activities. (Group ranches represent a post-colonial strategy for delineating land-use to protect the rights of Maasai people and other pastoral groups, introduced in 1968, five years after Kenya’s independence.) In doing so, ILMAMUSI has successfully brought together people across a number of regional subcultures to work together to conserve the Mukogodo while advocating for Yaaku cultural continuity.

While many other forests in Kenya are suffering losses to agriculture and habitat encroachment, the Mukogodo’s official status as a conservation area has been a tremendous ecological success thus far. The region is under the care of those still bearing traditional knowledge; encouraging such practices benefits both cultural preservation and deters unwanted development. Illegal poaching has declined, and illegal logging has predominantly halted under Yaaku stewardship.