Ogiek People's Development Programme CEO Daniel Kobei during an event to mark eight years since the ruling of African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, in Marioshoni, Molo sub-county, on May 26, 2025. [File, Standard]
When the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights ruled in favour of the Ogiek in 2017, it was hailed as a landmark victory for Indigenous rights across Africa.
The court recognised the Ogiek as the ancestral owners of Kenya’s Mau Forest, East Africa’s largest montane forest ecosystem and one of the country’s most important water towers.
It found that decades of forced evictions had violated multiple provisions of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and affirmed that conservation could not be used as a justification to dispossess indigenous communities from their ancestral lands.
Nine years later, many Ogiek families say little has changed.
Instead of returning to secure land rights, they continue to face evictions, uncertainty and exclusion from the very forest the court recognised as their ancestral home.
“Following the African Court rulings there have been no meaningful or positive shifts in land rights or access for the Ogiek community,” said John Samorai, an Ogiek leader. “The community remains vulnerable, with their land rights still unprotected in practice.”
The Ogiek, a forest-dwelling people estimated at between 20,000 and 30,000 members, have lived in the Mau Forest for generations.
Traditionally hunter-gatherers and renowned beekeepers, they maintain that their survival, culture and spirituality are inseparable from the forest.
For decades, successive governments portrayed the community as squatters and blamed forest degradation on human settlement.
Conservation campaigns and forest restoration drives often translated into evictions, despite evidence showing that large-scale logging, commercial exploitation and politically sanctioned land allocations were major drivers of degradation.
The 2017 ruling was historic because it rejected the argument that environmental protection required removing the Ogiek.
The court concluded that there was no evidence that the community had destroyed the forest and recognised indigenous stewardship as compatible with conservation.
A second judgment in 2022 ordered the government to provide reparations, recognise the Ogiek’s collective land rights, demarcate and title their ancestral territory and ensure they were consulted on any development or conservation projects affecting their lands.
Yet implementation has stalled.
In June 2025, Ogiek representatives appeared before the African Court again during compliance proceedings, arguing that Kenya had failed to implement key orders from both judgments.
Community leaders cited continued evictions, lack of collective land titles and exclusion from decisions affecting the Mau Forest.
“Even the simplest orders remain unimplemented,” Samorai said, pointing to requirements that the government publish the court’s judgments and formally recognise the community’s rights.
The consequences are tangible.
In recent years, Ogiek families in areas such as Sasimwani have reported forced evictions that left hundreds displaced. Human rights organisations including Kenya National Commission on Human Rights have repeatedly raised concerns about evictions conducted without adequate consultation, due process or safeguards for affected families.
The dispute has become increasingly significant as forests gain value in climate and carbon markets.
Across Africa, governments and private actors are pursuing carbon offset projects, conservation programmes and restoration initiatives aimed at meeting climate commitments.
Indigenous communities have warned that such projects sometimes replicate historical patterns of exclusion, restricting access to ancestral lands in the name of environmental protection.
For the Ogiek, the contradiction is striking.
While their legal battle has centered on securing land rights, the community has simultaneously emerged as one of the Mau Forest’s most active restoration partners.
According to the Ogiek Peoples’ Development Programme, community members have planted more than 250,000 indigenous tree seedlings across the Mau Forest Complex over the past decade, achieving survival rates exceeding 80 percent. The restoration effort focuses on culturally significant species, medicinal plants and trees that support traditional beekeeping livelihoods.
“We undertake landscape restoration through indigenous planting with a focus on indigenous plants that have cultural values to the community,” said Kennedy Sigei, who coordinates restoration activities.
The community also operates tree nurseries, supports forest monitoring through community scouts and promotes restoration on farms adjacent to rivers and wetlands.
Some residents say the ecological benefits are already visible.
“Wild animals such as buffaloes which had disappeared have returned in some restoration sites,” Sigei said. Herbalists report improved access to medicinal plants that are now being cultivated in community nurseries and restoration areas.
The Ogiek argue that these efforts demonstrate a principle increasingly recognized in global conservation debates: Indigenous communities are often among the most effective custodians of biodiversity.
Research from multiple regions has shown that lands managed by Indigenous peoples frequently experience lower rates of deforestation and biodiversity loss than areas managed exclusively through state-led conservation approaches.
That argument was central to the African Court’s reasoning in 2017 and remains central to the Ogiek’s demands today.
The case has become a test of whether landmark Indigenous rights rulings can translate into meaningful change on the ground.
The court’s decisions established legal precedents for Indigenous land rights across Africa. But nearly a decade after the first judgment, the Ogiek remain caught between international recognition and local reality.
The government has cited the high cost of reparations and the complexity of land adjudication. But for the Ogiek, the government’s refusal to perform even the simplest task ordered by the Court publishing the judgment in newspapers or on its official website is a sign of bad faith.
“We are hopeful that the government will implement the Court’s decisions, although we know that there is still little political will to do so,” Sigei said .
Until that political will materializes, the Ogiek remain a paradox: a people who won a historic legal battle, even as the smoke rises from their burning ancestral villages. They have the law on their side. But the forest and the rights that come with it, remains out of reach.
