Karura was part of the southern fringe of a vast swathe of dry upland forest that extended northwards around the Aberdare Mountains and Mount Kenya. However up until 500 years ago much of it was open or lightly wooded grasslands grazed by animals and wetlands.
Aboriginal hunter-gatherers lived in Karura for 30,000 years until a few hundred years ago according to an analysis of stone tools found in caves in Karura show while 3,000 year old pieces of pottery and animal bones suggest pastoralists also used the caves.
In the 18th century Kikuyu cultivators settlers cleared tracts of forest to grow crops and by the 1880s large areas of forest north of Kiambu had been replaced by farmlands The Kikuyu community kept a protective buffer of forest around the southern edges between themselves and the Maasai pastoralists on the plains and Karura is one of the few surviving fragments of this belt.
In the early 1900s British Colonial Administration annexed. Karura and other tracts of forest for fuelwood and timber for the Uganda Railway. The Colonial Administration also started cutting the forest for residential areas in 1902 creating what is Parklands today and from 1903–1905, the forest in in what is now Muthaiga was felled for farms to supply settlers. By 1907, most Kikuyu farmlands north of Karura had been annexed for white settlements with quarries in the forest providing grey-stone bricks for houses.
The colonial Forest Department. established in 1902, used remaining areas for timber – replacing indigenous forest with plantations of fast-growing timber trees such as Eucalyptus, Araucaria (monkey-puzzle trees), cypresses, and pines. By 1932 indigenous trees and shrubs made up just a quarter of the reserve’s vegetation. During the struggle for independence Mau Mau fighters used three caves in the forest by the Karura Riber.
After independence in 1963, the under resourced Kenya Forest Department remained focused on timber production and plantation forestry in Karura.
By the mid-1980s, forest reserves all over Kenya had become havens for criminals and illegal loggers while property developers and corrupt officials were looking to take land. In 1998 almost a third of the forest was allocated secretly to developers and the Forest department received a quit notice.
However this raised a huge outcry and in January 1999 demonstrators stormed the bulldozing sites of property developers and violence broke out. Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, known for her bravery in opposing previous attempted land grabs, led her group of women to plant trees but they were savagely beaten. This galvanised more demonstrations and international condemnation and the government finally gave up the fight to allow property developers to destroy the forest although did not revoke the title deeds until 2017.
Under the new Government elected in 2002 Waangari Maathai was appointed Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources. A new Kenya Forests Act (2005) included safeguards against irregular de-gazettements of forest land and an emphasis on conservation with a new authority, the Kenya Forest Service (KFS) overseeing implementation.
The Act recognised the importance of forest-adjacent local communities and the Friends of Karura Community Forest Association was registered in 2009. FKF raised private funding ensure the security and infrastructure of the forest including an electric fence, forest scouts, and facilities, including gates and gate-houses, rest-rooms, and parking areas and rehabilitated forest tracks and trails. The old Kenya Shell (now Vivo Energy) sports club became the Karura Forest Environment Education Trust (KFEET) with 4.1 hectares of sports fields and recreational facilities and by 2011 the forest was financially self sufficient. A new office building by the main Limuru Road entrance was constructed as a centre for managing the forest from the revenues.
. By 2011 the huge number of paying visitors made the forest financially self sufficient.
FKF also prioritised the restoration of Karura’s natural forest ecosystem to replace old plantations of cypresses, monkey-puzzles, and eucalypts which covered nearly 75% of the forest indigenous species as well as getting rid of the infestation of alien plants such as Lantana camara and Caesalpinia decapetala (‘Mauritius thorn’)
A phased KFS-managed logging programme began in 2011 following standard tendering procedures and regulations and the sites prepared for re-planting with native trees. By October 2019, Karura’s indigenous vegetation cover had increased to more than 40 % and is now at 60%. For example Wangari Maathai’s Grove, a neglected Eucalyptus plantation was cleared in 2018, re-planted with indigenous species, and is now a tranquil forested haven.
Inventories of the forest’s flora and fauna (over 560 species of plants and 230 of birds including the Crowned Eagle). Remote cameras caught images of over 20 mammals including Giant Pouched Rats to African Civets, side-striped jackals and Bush Pigs. After an absence of many decades, over 120 Colobus monkeys were re-introduced between 2014 and 2016 and their number has more than doubled.
The current plan is to continue restoring old degraded plantations of exotic trees from South America, Australia and Asia to indigenous forest cover at the rate of 15 hectares per year. The FKF Nursery, nurtures nearly 100,000 indigenous seedlings from 70 different species of trees and shrubs indigenous to Kenya’s dry upland forests which are ready to be planted.
Currently, Karura is the most popular place in Kenya for people to visit and relax with 75,000 visits each month – the majority by Kenyan citizens.
