John Sironga sifts through the pile of papers he has piled up on the seat next to him. ‘I’ve got so much evidence, collected over the years,’ he says as he pulls out something else.
From photocopies of 1960s identity documents to a transcript of a Facebook live Q&A, the chair of the Ogiek Council of Elders has been diligently documenting his community’s generations-long struggle for recognition and land rights.
The Ogiek, who number around 52,000, are descended from some of the earliest known inhabitants of Kenya, and are among Africa’s last remaining forest dwellers. About 45,000 rely on the Mau Forest as their ancestral land.
A poster catches my eye, mounted on yellow sugar paper, which summarizes over 120 years of displacement and struggle for the Ogiek of Eastern Mau to live freely on their land. It dates back to 1895 when Britain proclaimed the East Africa protectorate.
Sironga explains that he made the poster to celebrate the community’s 2022 landmark win at the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights in Arusha, Tanzania. On 23 June, the Court spelled out a range of reparations owed to the Ogiek of Eastern Mau by the Kenyan government, including collective land title and around $1.1 million in damages to be paid into a Community Development Fund established within 12 months.
The case followed another momentous judgment, made in May 2017 by the same court, which held that the Kenyan government had denied the community’s rights to their ancestral lands, as well as violations of their rights under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
Importantly, the court also asserted that the Ogiek – which means ‘caretaker of all plants and wild animals’ – have a crucial role to play in protecting their environment.1 Indigenous peoples and local communities protect more than 50 per cent of the world’s surface, according to the Forest Peoples Programme.2
‘We hope the government is going to implement the court decision because this will boost the rights of Indigenous people, not only in Africa but across the world,’ says Robert Eno, Registrar of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
Marianne Wiben Jensen, a senior advisor with the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) agrees: ‘It’s really a huge contribution to building up solid jurisprudence that can be referred to by the UN system, for instance,’ she says. ‘It’s important that other groups on the continent can see that this can happen, that you can get justice from the judicial system at the highest level in Africa.’
The Ogiek Peoples’ Development Program (OPDP) has been a key part of steering the legal process. When I first speak with founder and executive director Daniel Kobei over
