The Difference between ‘Hearth’ and ‘Hiraeth’: An Indigenous Perspective

By Haritha Sara Kuriakose

Masters Student, Environmental Biology, Swansea University

On 22 May 2024, Ambreena Manji, Professor of Land Law and Development, Cardiff University, gave a talk on ‘The Emancipatory Politics of Indigenous People in Kenya’ at Swansea University, a talk based on her new book. Although her earlier works examined Kenya’s questionable property laws, land problems, and constitutional failures, she aims to go further in-depth on the matter this time – focusing primarily on the Kenyan Indigenous communities’ struggle for land and justice, deriving on the experiences of the Endorois, Ogiek, and Maasai people among many others.

In the talk, Prof. Manji dissected African literature’s take on colonial oppression and its effect on Kenyan Indigenous communities, as opposed to the American and Australian Indigenous communities. Since colonial times, Kenyan legal mechanisms had promoted European settlement, leading to racialised land policies and treaties, which the dominant ethnic groups exploited to their advantage while the Indigenous people suffered. She discussed the challenges of understanding and accommodating multiple epistemic regimes, highlighting the lack of international literacy in native African culture and its acknowledgment in the Kenyan political and legal forums.

Another key point that Prof. Manji touched on is the relevance of opening up to the nuances of the native languages in comprehending Indigenous land claims. Here, people instinctively think in ethnic terms; their claims follow the narrative of ethnic roots, as the traditional connection to their lands defines their identity. However, their eco-relational model of land access is usually misread as they are dominated by the Kenyan state and the English language, leading to unfair judgments in court cases. Their claims are considered false ‘marketing techniques’ crafted to make moral and political headway on the international stage. Academic scholars also discount them as mere land ownership claims due to ontological suspicion of their attachment to their homelands.

Prof. Manji clarified how they are only:

1) saying their ‘indigenous’ existence is threatened without legal backing,

2) requesting social reproduction rights, and

3) expressing the long-term consequences of poverty, marginalisation, and colonial eviction, that jeopardises intergenerational maintenance and exchange of resources and rights.

She emphasised the significance of ‘kin labour’ in framing these Indigenous communities’ transgenerational rights in their Indigenous model of ‘place-making’ – which contextually differs from any Anglo-Australian model of people-place relationships. She invited everyone to ponder “What do freedom and belonging mean to a Kenyan Indigenous individual and what role does their ancestral land play in driving their survival spirit as a community?” She befittingly asked, “What do the Kenyan Indigenous women have to say about this?”

Moreover, these lands provide critical environmental significance as carbon sinks, ecosystem services, heterogenic landscapes, and habitats for endemic and non-endemic biodiversity. For instance, Mount Kenya is an afro-alpine biodiversity reservoir home to over 800 plant species, 88 bird species, and the largest remaining African elephant population. The Kikuyu, Maasai, Embu, and Ameru people regard it as a holy mountain. Another example is Lake Bogoria, a Ramsar site of importance and a designated national reserve owing to its rich wildlife and avian fauna of more than 300 aquatic bird species and populations of about 1.5 million migratory birds such as the Lesser Flamingo.

However, Mount Kenya’s forests are facing grave degrees of deforestation due to illegal logging, causing biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, forest fires, flooding, water quality degradation, temperature fluctuations, and melting of glaciers. Meanwhile, Lake Bogoria suffers from skyrocketing human population pressure, commercial developments, soil erosion, agro-chemical pollution, and land degradation. Opencast ruby mining also occurred at the site which poisoned the soil and waters, causing the dependent Endorois people severe health issues.

In this era of climate crises, it is imperative to rekindle Indigenous ties to their homelands and consult Indigenous knowledge on sustainable living. Every individual exists in two places: one where their body touches the ground and one where their soul touches the sky. For the Kenyan Indigenous people, these two places are traditionally the same.

Their lives are intertwined with their lands like the two sides of the same coin. Removing them from their ancestral lands (and vice versa) is nothing short of cutting their communal, cultural, and spiritual umbilical cords and jumbling up their life purposes like transfiguring ‘hearth’ (floor of a fireplace; English) into ‘hiraeth’ (homesickness; Welsh). On the other hand, supporting them will naturally boost environmental growth and build ecosystem resilience to climate change. Finally, Prof. Manji reinstated the need for contextualized translations of the Kenyan Indigenous experience to recalibrate old decision-making systems and to ensure the collective’s sustainable future.

Haritha Sara Kuriakose was at Swansea pursuing an MSc in Environmental Biology: Conservation and Resource Management at the department of Biosciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering.