the Ogiek

According to the New York Times, “Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya’s traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as “dorobo,” a word meaning roughly people with no cattle. Somehow, they have always managed to survive.”

As with so many of today’s new stories, this one comes packaged with a nasty little twist – “The Kenyan government is gearing up to evict tens of thousands of settlers, illegal or not, from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek’s ancestral home and a critical water source for this entire country.”

No one knows whether the Ogiek will be pitched into the black hole of modernity, but one thing’s for certain – they need to be dusting off those atavistic bows and arrows in case the bulldozers arrive.

posted by Mudd