Luka Kiraton, 64, vividly remembers getting evicted from his home in 2013. He said the gory sight of police and forest guards demolishing and setting ablaze his and hundreds of other houses belonging to the Sengwer people inside Embobut Forest in Kenya still hurts as badly as it did over a decade ago.
He recalled hiding in the forest and seeing the police and forest guards rummaging through the bushes near his homestead to find household items such as cooking pots and washing basins, which they had hidden away in a bid to save them from the arson. The police and forest guards threw them all in the raging fires of what used to be his mud-walled and grass-thatched huts.
The Sengwer are a marginalized Indigenous hunter-gatherer community with a population of about 10,000 people living in western Kenya. They were evicted from the forest to make way for carbon offset schemes and conservation projects funded by multinational organizations, including the World Bank and European Union. The government said the evictions were meant to protect the Cherangany Forest Water Tower — a critical watershed made up of 13 forest blocks, including Embobut — from encroachers involved in logging, farming, and illegal land fencing.
About the author
Anthony Langat
Anthony Langat is a Kenya-based Devex Contributing Reporter whose work centers on environment, climate change, health, and security. He was part of an International Consortium of Investigative Journalism’s multi-award winning 2015 investigation which unearthed the World Bank’s complacence in the evictions of indigenous people across the world. He has five years’ experience in development and investigative reporting and has been published by Al Jazeera, Mongabay, Us News & World Report, Equal Times, News Deeply, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Devex among others.
