Twigs litter the moist footpath. They have fallen from the many, many trees that are everywhere. A few metres ahead, a river bursts into view, its gentle whistle suddenly becoming a loud rustle. Apart from the sound of her feet crushing the dry leaves beneath and the river’s roar, Vivi can’t hear any other sound.
The chirp of the birds is lost to her ears although birds are nesting in the trees that are staring down at her. Among them is the Dzanga robin, the little colourful bird that can only be found here and nowhere else in the world. As she stares at the rare robin’s bright yellow belly, Vivi has no idea that this bird can only be found here in her forest.
Her hair is short, her eyes brown. Her complexion shares the same colour with the ebony tree she is leaning against. The celebrated tree is so huge that its trunk can easily fit five versions of Vivi. Such trees are a major reason why forestry is the second leading employer in Central Africa Republic, behind only the government.
"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge." Bertrand Russell
A few metres away are several African tulip trees. Their bright orange flowers are one of Vivi’s favourite forest sights. A stone throw away from the tulip trees is yet another favourite sight that always captivates her.
About one hundred elephants are stumping at Dzanga Bai, a marshy clearing in Dzanga Sanga rainforest. They seem to be having a jolly good time as they swing their trunks in the moist air and stump around. Patches of mud are plastered all over many elephants, a result of the mud bathing that they love to indulge in. A mother chases her muddy calf. Catch me if you can! The baby dares mama before stumbling in the slippery mud.
There are several big guys whose sheer size gives them an air of invincibility as they stroll along majestically. Their massive ears are flapping back and forth, as if swaying to some invisible rhythm that only the giant elephants can hear. But much grander is the Dzanga Sanga rainforest that surrounds the marshy clearing where the gang of elephants is having a morning party.
On May 6th and 7th 2013, the joie de vivre of the forest elephants was shattered by the sound of bullets as Sudanese poachers stormed Dzanga bai and slaughtered at least 26 elephants.
Photo by Rudy and Peter Skitterians
When Vivi’s father told his daughter about the unprecedented slaughter, she broke down. Although she is from the nearby Bayanga village, she has never really been to the Dzanga bai clearing that elephants, bongo antelopes, forest buffaloes and other wildlife love to hang out at. But her father has told her so much about the forest and its creatures that she feels like she knows it intimately.
Dzanga Sanga is such a biodiversity hotspot that it should be attracting millions of eco-tourists and not dozens of deranged poachers. It’s a magical place that should put lots of bread on the table of Vivi’s dad and all other people who live adjacent to it.
As little Vivi cried for the slain elephants, she could have been crying for the unexploited potential of this vast Dzamba sanga rainforest. Potential that lies in ensuring that it remains a secure refuge for the wildlife and a providence basket for the local people.
This potential remains largely untapped. Partly due to unequal historical global dynamics that greatly disadvantaged many African countries. Thomas Sankara, the transformative president of Burkina Faso touched on such dynamics when he said in October 1983 that, ‘to state it more clearly, we buy more from abroad than we sell. An economy that functions on such a basis is headed for increasing ruin and catastrophe.’
But also, Vivi’s past and future remain mired in poverty because many African leaders have had the bizarre habit of shooting their continent in the foot.
The United Nation Development Programme’s 2014 Human Development Index ranks Central Africa Republic in the 185th slot. Pourquoi? Why?
République centrafricaine as Central Africa is known in French, is almost three times the size of Netherlands. But its Gross National Income is 116,000 times smaller than Netherlands. Tragic as this fact is, the bigger tragedy is a widespread acceptance by many African leaders of this as normal. But the even bigger tragedy would be for Vivi to grow up accepting her poverty plight as normal.
Vivi lives next to one of the world’s most incredible biodiversity hotspots. This proximity to natural wealth should translate to a measure of wealth for her family.
Vivi adores the bright flowers of the African tulip tree. The bright future that these flowers symbolize should not remain in the distant future.
Their ages range from 18 to 80. They are drawn from several villages in the expansive Kajiado County, which is predominantly populated by the Maasai Community. They are known simply as Njoroi Women Group, named after the locality that they come from.
These women are seeking to infuse more sustainability and prosperity into their livelihoods. Only a handful of them - less than five- have high school education. None of them studied beyond high school. The majority are either primary school dropouts or illiterate. This educational status alone has undermined their employment prospects. They cannot fully resort to smallholder farming like women in other parts of Kenya because the Maasai culture has for long been pastoralist in nature, emphasizing more on rearing livestock than planting crops.
Against this bleak economic backdrop, the women are now seeking sustainable livelihoods.
"We just want to be able to earn money on a regular basis so that we can ensure that our children get the education that we were not able to get," says Miriam their Chairlady.
On 23rd July 2021, Environmental Africa's Leader DJ Bwakali visited Njoroi to discuss with the women group about an upcoming August field research trip. He met with Miriam, the Group's Leaders together with three other women and a local village elder. Also present was George, Environmental Africa's Kajiado County community coordinator.
Environmental Africa is working closely with Njoroi Women Group to ensure that it unlocks Green Economy in the area.
As Blaise Compaore, the immediate former president of Burkina Fasso fled his country in a convoy of heavy military escort, he left behind streets full of demonstrators and farms full of uncertainty.
According to World Bank estimates, a staggering 80% of Burkina Faso’s 17.3 million people rely heavily on agriculture for their livelihoods. The country itself depends on cotton, which is its main source of income.
In the short term, the current unrest will definitely not boost revenue for Burkina Faso’s agricultural sector. This sector is replete with smallholders whose tiny farms produce barely enough food for them, leaving little or no surplus to sell and earn livelihoods from. Many other farmers can’t even cultivate their farms because they have abandoned them, thanks to soil erosion, decreasing fertility and slanting topography that complicates farming.
"Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture." Juan Ramón Jiménez
When Blaise Compaore’s entourage crossed the border into Côte d’Ivoire, the former president was ironically doing what thousands of his countrymen and women do or a regular basis. Burkinabe often migrate to Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana regularly for seasonal agricultural jobs. For these seasonal migrants, migration is the golden bridge that promises greener pastures on the other side. One of these migrants was Traoré, a father of three from the southeastern town of Diabaga.
When Traoré fled from Diapaga town in August this year, he wasn’t running away from blazing guns or ethnic conflict. Diapaga was very much peaceful. He was running away from poverty into what he hoped would be a much better life in Côte d’Ivoire. He could have travelled for 350 kilometres to Ouagadougou to try his luck at the capital, but a former school mate who is a seasonal migrant to Côte d’Ivoire kept telling him about the good money in the farms of Burkina Faso’s larger and richer neighbor.
Ironically, Traoré left behind the gold that western companies had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to come and mine. Although huge amounts of gold hadn’t really been discovered yet, mining was ongoing. But Traoré had three children and a wife to feed, not to mention the extended family of his ageing mother and three younger brothers who were also jobless. Traoré and his family couldn’t eat the dreams of gold. So he took the plunge to Côte d’Ivoire.
Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world despite the fact that it is the fourth-largest gold producer in Africa, behind South Africa, Mali and Ghana.
‘Where is the gold?’ the Burkinabe like to ask whenever their country’s golden status comes up in conversation.
They never ask where the farms are because they interact with these farms almost daily and reap from them millet, maize, rice, sweet potatoes, mangoes, cassava, beans and a host of many other crops that feed them. Among them is fonio, a tiny indigenous cereal that has been planted in West Africa for millennia.
It is within this dynamic agricultural context that the World Bank is funding the Africa Union’s great green walls initiative. In Burkina Faso, this project seeks to ‘support restoration and protection of natural resources, forest and biodiversity in the larger ecosystem landscape related to agricultural expansion.’
One major challenge facing not just agricultural expansion but existing agricultural land is the fact that half of Burkina Fasso is semi-arid savannah land. It’s hardly the kind of land that would attract the average farmer.
But Burkinabe farmers are not average. They are innovative and resilient. They have accumulated decades of indigenous knowledge that has equipped them with innovative coping strategies. One such strategy is known as zaï. It is a small hole that the farmers dig on barren land then fill it with organic matter. The small holes then become scattered islands of fertility within which crops can be planted. How cool is that!
These farmers may not be in the streets Ouagadougou, on the front lines of the Burkinabe revolution, but they are on the front lines of feeding their country against great odds. As for Traoré, he too is on the front lines of feeding his family, even if it means doing so from farms of another country.
In May 2017, I went to Karura Forest for a forest trek. Despite having lived in Nairobi for all my life, this was my first time in the forest that was thrust into prominence when Wangari Maathai fiercely defended it from the Moi Government’s attempt to annex part of it for development.
I was just a little kid when that happened and it is only much later that I saw videos of a battered but impregnable Wangari Maathai facing off with the police and a bunch of hooligans right in the heart of the forest. I later met her during the launch of her film, an even that I was moderating. I remember turning to her on the stage and thanking her for her courage. I call it green courage.
The courage to stand up and defend our God given nature from those who would seek to annihilate it in the name of development. Thanks to Wangari Maathai’s green courage, Karura stands tall and green today. But other battles demand green courage to arise. Donald Trump should be a major recipient of this courage because his disdain and sabotage of the Paris Accord is simply unacceptable. But that is a story for another day. Today, I want to talk a bit about illegal logging.
"We are born to live, not to prepare for life." Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
In 2016, UNEP and Interpol released a joint rapid assessment report entitled, ‘The Rise of Environmental Crime.’ This report contained the shocking news that Kenya loses, 70,000 hectares of forest each year to illegal logging. To put that into perspective, Kenya loses an area that is one and a half times bigger than Seychelles every year to illegal logging. How is this even happening and why aren’t Kenyans taking to the streets to protest this utter injustice and demand action?! Could it be because green courage is in short supply? Although Kenya is overflowing with environmentalists and environmental organizations, one wonders whether the vast majority of this either bereft of requisite tools or the passion to keep green green. I go with the latter, because as I once said in my poem, ‘butterfly on her shoulder’, “passion pushes you to your limits and pulls you from your comfort zone. Passion stirs an overflow of courage.”
We cannot keep losing 70,000 hectares of forest each year to illegal logging. Or even one hectare for that matter because the loss of one tree today is similar to the loss of a forest tomorrow.
Environmental Africa Trust is an organization that articulates and amplifies the voices of Africa's ecosystems and grassroots communities. We do this through green stories that empower communities and replenish ecosystems.
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