The hidden world of Nyakweri Forest

By Joe Ombuor

Talk of living ropes and many minds instinctively rush to frightening snakes that resemble creepers. But plants too are living organisms and some make perfect ropes, as I was fascinated to learn while on a nature trail traipse recently in one of Kenya’s surviving indigenous forests. And behold, the wonder ropes grow, full of sap complete with roots drawing nutrients from mother earth.

The green ropes are tough and resilient enough to support several grown up men doing acrobatic stunts on them without snapping. They rise from the humus rich forest floor, entangled and intertwined to the very tops of tall trees. The Maasai call these spellbinding plants, oloilei. A sapling oloilei does not betray any signs of turning into a sturdy rope, until later in the plant’s adult life.

A visit to Nyakweri Forest, located about 400km to the west of Nairobi, Trans mara district in the Rift Valley Province reveals that there is more to the value of forests than water as common belief has it----- ––– that when we destroy, say, the Mau or Aberdare or Mount Kenya forests, we are killing an irredeemable treasure.

A gem

The Maasai in their simplistic and unsophisticated existence treat forests as a gem, just as they do their livestock that they regard as the source of life itself.

"Livestock are milk, meat, blood and money all rolled into one. Forests on the other hand yield honey, fire, the medicine that cures our diseases, fun as accrues from the living ropes and now –– money," says William Chelelo, chairman of a conservation oriented community based organisation christened Dupoto, which in Maasai language means ‘to benefit’.

To prevent wanton destruction of the forest as has happened elsewhere in Kenya with disastrous ecological consequences, Dupoto fraternity comprising about 300 households relies on the services of traditional warriors or morans armed with bows, arrows spears, clubs and other crude weapons.

The morans, among other chores, assist forest guards from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) in their war against poachers while ensuring that trees are not felled haphazardly for commercial purposes. Charcoal burning even from dead trees is not allowed and anybody found doing so is arrested and handed over to the authorities.

Gallant scouts

On the nature trail, the morans are the gallant scouts who go ahead of tourists and other visitors venturing into the forest to ensure their safety from fierce wild animals. They report back in case they see elephants, buffalos, lions, hyenas or other feared denizens of the wild on the two-kilometre trail.

Moran scouts also caution tourists to avoid any contact with the robust, perpetually green tree the Maasai call olmorijoi, dreaded for its potent poison or the stinging mettles, esapai. Curiously, esapai is cooked and eaten as medicinal vegetable. Olmorijoi known in botanical parlance as aconkanthera schimperi, stores its lethal poison in its grey bark, ranked with the fangs of poisonous snakes because of the speed with which it kills when it gains access into the blood stream via a lesion or a scratch on the skin. To render the poison more potent, the Maasai boil olmorijoi bark for as many as six hours. The resultant black potion, when steeped on arrow and spearheads, is more lethal than a bullet.

But olmorijoi is not all poison, for its egg-shaped fruits are mouth watering when ripe and harmless to both animals and human beings. Interesting, eh! God in his unrivalled ingenuity to perpetuate life has a natural mechanism to de-toxicate the fruits of this killer plant. Paradoxically, animals in the wild instinctively know that biting the unripe olmorjiroi fruit is tantamount to ‘biting the dust’.

Fire trees

The wonders of Nyakweri forest are myriad. The fire impregnated oltiakarta, a slender, thorny hardwood tree, yields smoke when rubbed constantly against the bigger, thorny olkakarua tree. The former is a deep forest species while the latter thrives in open spaces.

Olkakarua, known botanically as erythrena abyssinica is distinguishable by its red, beady fruits used by Maasai women as ornaments around their necks. The Maasai do not carry matchboxes into the bush to harvest honey. All they need is to collect dry twigs, ferns and mould to get fire from the two fire trees.

Equally amazing are giant oreteti, fig trees (ficus kenuesisi) that live for hundreds of years and have the ability to snuff life out of other trees by strangling them dead. The tree produces dangling roots that sway menacingly in the wind like provoked, cold-blooded creatures, seizing nearby plants, and, like stricter serpents, coiling themselves around their victims, squeezing life out of them. Popular belief has it that barren women can conceive through the assistance of witchdoctors doing their magic around these behemoth trees, some of them 100 feet in circumference. The witchdoctor is said to take the women several times through the cavernous loops of the trees.

A visit to Nyakweri is not complete without a footslog to the nearby Laila forest, frequented by mother elephants with new calves to give their young ones a growth fillip with the health infusing but terribly rare entorotuai, a creeping plant with a succulent tuber. It is said the tuber, soft but full of energy-laced water suitable for the physical growth of young elephants, is dug out of the soil by the mother elephant using its tusks and feet and fed to the calf from as early as three days of age when it has no teeth to chew anything. The elephants and their calves retrace their steps back to the world famous Maasai Mara National Reserve about 14km away three months later.

Rich flora

More than 100 plant species form the rich flora of this forest that serves as a wildlife dispersal area for the national reserve and boasts over 200 bird and 50 animal species. Colourful turacos, trogons, woodpeckers, hornbills and various families of eagles particularly enthral bird watchers. The birds together with uncountable insect breeds turn the leafy heaven into a wild orchestra as they chirp, chirrup and twitter their lungs out as though in an undeclared competition.

To fully tap the forest’s potential as a tourist attraction and a dependable source of income for the community who have taken to conserving nature for a living, the World Bank-funded Arid Lands Resource Management Project 2 (ALRMP2) has availed tents for hire by tourists wishing to spend the night at the forest camp.

Transmara District Drought Management Officer (DMO) Ms Anne Seenoi Oloolumbwa says to further assist the community reap from the forest, the project has supplied them with top bar bee hives to harvest honey, which they in turn sell to the tourists to boost their income.

"In addition, we have established tree nurseries to keep the women busy while their men are away herding their livestock or attending to Dupoto community matters," she says.