A woman activist is supporting the work of Kenya’s rangers, including a network of women rangers at the frontline – protecting the country’s wildlife and forests.
Bernard Muhia
“During one of our patrols inside Kijabe Forest, we came across someone burning charcoal. When they saw us they hid in a bush. As one of the rangers was running towards the bush, the guy emerged and threw a panga (machete) at the ranger. Luckily, as if by divine intervention, the ranger tripped over and fell to the ground and it flew over his head. He would have gotten cut deeply and knocked out by the sheer speed,” recalled Mary Gathoni Thiong’o, a ranger with Kenya’s Kijabe Forest Trust, speaking at an event arranged by the trust.
Gathoni said she’d never across someone with such a violent reaction. Her team arrested the man and he was prosecuted and jailed for two years.
Esther Ndung’u remembers growing up in Old Kijabe surrounded by forest. She said she was afraid of venturing into the forest because as a child she had been told about the animals in there and that you can get assaulted inside the forest.
Today, she’s a ranger, patrolling in the forest and is so fit she often walks well out in front of her male colleagues.
“In Kijabe we walk 18-20 kilometres every day for our daily patrols,” Ndung’u said.
Lynn Muhia grew up a bit farther from Kijabe at the escarpment, in a village that goes by the same name and remembers hunting rabbits in the forest. She later joined the National Youth Service (NYS) and after graduating, was hired by KFT. Today she jokes that her paramilitary training at NYS and love of uniforms made her an ideal commander; nevertheless, the dangers of the job remain very real.
Lucy Wanjiku grew up in Kijabe, often walking in the forest and swimming in the rivers. She developed a side hustle, taking people on hikes in the forest as a tour guide. Today she’s an official ranger, though many community members in Kijabe still don’t believe she’s a ranger due to the fact that she is a woman.
“This is a male-dominated job, I wasn’t sure that the Kijabe Forest Trust would pick us as ladies, but I was told it’s an open opportunity,” Wanjiku said.
Their stories would all be familiar to Raabia Hawa, a media personality turned activist.
In 2006, Hawa started volunteering at an animal orphanage run by the Kenya Wildlife Service. While learning the ropes, she got to know the rangers who were looking after the animals. She also started hearing of how rangers were getting injured and killed in skirmishes with poachers. And while poaching was in the headlines, ranger deaths and injuries were not.
“The fact that nobody was talking about rangers was mind-boggling to me. I thought, I really would like the world to appreciate rangers more,” she explained.
“Rangers are the frontline defenders… they weren’t being given the support that I felt they deserved,” Hawa said.
She decided to change that, developing support activities that culminated in a well-publicised event.
“That’s when I did the Walk with Rangers in 2014, which took more than a year of planning.” Hawa said.
The awareness campaign led to her setting up Ulinzi Africa Foundation, East Africa’s first NGO focused on ranger welfare, empowerment and facilitation. It aims to raise awareness of the challenges faced by rangers in their fight against poaching.
According to Hawa’s Walk with Rangers/Ulinzi Africa Foundation, over 1,000 rangers have lost their lives in the line of duty in the last decade. She has lost six ranger friends to fatal injuries or gunshots from poachers.
“You really feel the loss differently when it’s someone you know, someone you’ve spent a lot of time with, sometimes in life-threatening situations and also knowing that it could have been you. It’s not just the losses, but also the violence that comes with it and the kinds of things that poachers do to rangers, they are things you can’t even speak about,” Hawa said.
Hawa has also faced some backlash from her activism. As a result of speaking out to raise awareness and protection for a forest in the Tana Delta, a wetland in the coastal region of Kenya, she has suffered an incessant onslaught of various levels of threats, harassment and intimidation against herself, her team and the organisation as a whole. She however also remains unbowed in her stance.
“Rangers deserve to have their voices heard and deserve better treatment. I don’t see how you can protect an elephant without a ranger. It’s not going to protect itself.” she continues. If the rangers are not looked after well and treated properly, then you’re not really going to be able to protect wildlife effectively. They are human beings too and the premise of what we need to do is to protect life in all its forms,” she said.
According to Kenya’s Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Heritage, rangers play a critical role in providing security for both wildlife and tourists at the reserves. Nevertheless, rangers in Kenya face many challenges, including poor remuneration, limited professional capacities, harsh working conditions, and inadequate recognition and appreciation by their employers and the government, according to activists.
The Wildlife Conservancy Rangers Association in Kenya lists ranger roles as including security, policing, intelligence gathering, biodiversity data gathering, community relationship building, and conflict management.
Rangers are not only the first line of defence for wildlife but also the first line of help for the community. This is because sometimes there is no hospital in the area and so rangers get called to transport pregnant women to a hospital or respond to snake bites and other attacks from wildlife.
“I remember a time when we had to transport school children for their exams in Garsen, in Tana River County,” Hawa said.
“The community also informs you on situations that need responding to, like poachers coming in or animals getting caught in snares. Protecting animals also protects the community because if zebras and gazelles are poached, then lions and cheetahs will turn to goats and cattle which the community depends on.”
Ndung’u said that she and her female colleagues were sometimes mocked when they came across poachers who asked how they could have been employed as rangers and claimed they could not be arrested by women.
“According to our culture, men believe that a woman can’t control them. In any case, it’s my choice, I’m a grown up and I have children to look after ” Ndung’u stated firmly.
However, Ndung’u has had to arrest three women who are her friends whom she found in the forest cutting trees for firewood.
She has had to live with people in the community talking behind her back as a result but said her job was more important.
She is proud to be the first ranger in her family and said her mother and aunts were really excited at the news of her joining KFT.
Wanjiku says that since she became a ranger, her family and friends have stopped going into the forest for firewood since they respect the fact that it’s one of their own protecting the forest. Some even want to be contracted to plant trees or employed as rangers so they won’t be the same ones destroying trees.
According to a report on Forest Resources Management and Logging Activities in Kenya, the Forest Sector is key to Kenya’s social and economic well-being as most of the country’s economic sectors rely on environmental-based resources for their sustenance. The sector contributes about Ksh7 billion (US$ 47 million) to the economy and employs over 50,000 people directly and another 300,000 indirectly.
A global survey of the Working Conditions of Rangers by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 2019 showed that only 7.5% of rangers worldwide are female. The survey involved 7,000 rangers from 28 countries.
Hawa asserts that the risks to women are far greater than to men in this line of work. Despite leading a team of male rangers, she says she would never risk putting a woman in the field as a ranger, especially given the security risks associated with the Al-Shabab terrorist group in the Tana Delta, where her organization primarily works in.
“Even for the male members of my team, I’m nervous about their safety every day, now imagine someone’s mother or sister,” she disclosed.
The importance of community support is one reason that when the team at KFT find someone carrying out illegal activities in the forest, they first try and educate the person about conservation. Depending on the response from the culprit, they may let them off with a warning.
Gathoni said that when they find someone cutting trees or burning charcoal, they educate them that preserving the trees will ensure continued rainfall and thus food crops will flourish in their farms and there will be water in the rivers. It is when someone is caught again that they involve officers from the Kenya Forest Service in arresting the offenders, and prosecution
“The cost of activism is high, and the path is dark and lonely, but I would choose a life of purpose over mediocre comfort any day,” Hawa said, making it clear that she was determined to continue celebrating and supporting rangers.
“If you are a steward of natural resources, you should be somebody that should be celebrated,” Hawa concluded.
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