Forests Kept Sacred by Not Being Used

The religion of the nine Mijikenda peoples of coastal Kenya centers on ancestor veneration and on the kaya, sacred forests that grew back around the fortified settlements the Mijikenda built when they first moved into the area and later abandoned as places to live. Councils of elders hold authority over the kaya and over Mijikenda ceremonial life, access to particular groves and paths is restricted to those elders and to those they permit, and this article does not describe what takes place within a grove.

What is public, and formally recognized well beyond Kenya, is the fact and the mechanism of the forests' protection. In 2008 UNESCO inscribed the Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests on the World Heritage List, citing the customary prohibitions against cutting, grazing or removing wood as the very reason the forests still exist, centuries of ceremonial restriction functioning, in effect, as one of the oldest conservation systems on the Kenyan coast. That international recognition rests on the forests as places and on the fact of the restrictions, not on any account of what elders do inside them, and this article keeps that same distinction. The kaya remain in active ceremonial use today as places of prayer, burial and the deposit of talismans, a living religious landscape rather than a historical one.