KITENGELA, Kenya. — A short distance from the slums and
skyscrapers of Nairobi, Naanyu Ntirrisa pulls thorn bushes around her Maasai
village to keep out marauding lions that have killed a cow and two sheep.
"We are doing our best to be vigilant," she says.
Across a river from the village, tourists in Land Rovers
photograph giraffes munching on acacia thorns, with the city’s towers visible in
the distance.
They are enjoying the charms of Nairobi National Park, the
closest of its kind to a capital city in the world, where visitors can grab a
quick safari during a business trip and airlines even take stopover passengers
out for a game drive.
Airliners making their final approach fly over vultures
wheeling in the sky and zebras browsing with antelopes.
The scene on the Athi plains south of the Kenyan capital is
typical of the Maasai lands stretching hundreds of miles to the Tanzanian
border.
The park hosts one of the largest concentrations of the rare
black rhino in Kenya and lions and even cheetahs can still be seen – with a bit
of luck.
Yet, where plains were once black with thousands of
wildebeest on the scale of the famous Maasai Mara migration further south,
scarcely a hundred now roam.
The pressure of human expansion is posing a deadly threat to
the park, Kenya’s oldest, and has led to bad-tempered rows between wildlife
organizations, Maasai groups and a microfinance institution trying to help slum
dwellers.
The most passionate dispute focuses on a clutch of red roofs
sprouting on the windswept plains south of the park, where wild animals and
Maasai herdsmen roam.
They mark the first stage of a township where 10,000
residents from Nairobi’s huge, squalid slums will live. The town is the
brainchild of Ingrid Munro, a Swedish woman who has devoted her life to helping
Kenya’s poor.
Munro runs Jamii Bora, Kenya’s largest microfinance
institution. After winning five years of legal battles, Jamii Bora began
construction of Kaputiei town last May.
An alliance of the government Kenya Wildlife Service,
conservation NGOs and one Maasai group vows to continue the battle, saying the
town will destroy the traditional way of life in the area, increase crime,
pollute water supplies with sewage and block the corridor by which animals enter
the park.
Most of the animals roam on the much bigger plains and come
into the park through the open southern boundary for water in its 12 dams during
the dry season, but their route is increasingly restricted by fences and
settlement.
Munro fiercely rejects the arguments of her opponents, saying
the corridor was blocked years ago by palatial houses and fences put up by rich
Kenyans and flower, poultry farms and eucalyptus plantations that soak up the
scarce water.
"We have owned the land for six years and have never seen a
wildebeest," Munro scoffs, denying that the town is even in the corridor. "The
truth of the matter is that the migration in and out is not there any more."
She adds: "Some of those who are against us live on the
border of the park in huge mansions with private air strips and swimming pools."
But Inge Burchard, of the Friends of Nairobi National Park
society says the town "will strangle the park." The group pays compensation for
livestock killed by wild animals under a successful scheme to protect predators.
"Maasai will be outnumbered. wildlife and livestock will be
poached, crime will increase," Burchard said.
James Turere, chairman of a Maasai group based around the
sprawling nearby town of Kitengela, said: "The people who decided on this
project, they have killed our future."
"This will make the local community into a minority, it will disenfranchise
the community economically, politically and environmentally," said Maasai
landowner Ogeli Makui, who administers a scheme paying herders to keep the
ranges open.
