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Winnie Kiiru

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Winnie Kiiru is a Kenyan biologist, elephant conservationist, and the chairperson of the Wildlife Research Institute in Naivasha. She is currently the chairperson of Friends of Karura Forest, a Community-Based Organization (CBO) that helps manage Karura forests. She is also the founder and Executive Director of CHD Conservation Kenya, a CBO based in Amboseli that believes in people-centered conservation.

Quotes

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  • Kenyan conservation will not work unless we spend time with the people, understanding their aspirations, pain, and disappointments.
  • As a child, I was always asked to speak on behalf of others. Maybe this was a result of being the firstborn.My mother had me before she got married; my siblings were born when I was around six years old. I never had the luxury of being childish. I learnt that unless I spoke up, and very quickly, I would bear the brunt of my younger siblings’ mistakes. I later realised that I had the gift of communicating, not just my thoughts, but those of other people as well.It was high school that crushed me.I realised there was a way I “needed” to look to be accepted. My skin needed to be lighter, my hair longer. My schoolmates told me I had knocked knees, something I hadn’t previously considered. I got a lot of mean comments. But then again, I gave as good as I got. That being said, at the end of high school, I didn’t get the grades to do anything I wanted. I had lost my voice.
  • I thought maybe I’d have made a great lawyer.I went to university kicking and screaming because, first of all, I had to go to the National Youth Service, which was brutal. Secondly, I was going to train to be a teacher. I never wanted to be a teacher.As soon as I completed my university degree, I got married. I didn’t have the confidence of my earlier years, so I didn’t choose, I was chosen. It makes me a little sad because I saw what was happening around me, but I didn’t have a voice. What I did have was resilience, the ability to stick it out. It was when I started working in conservation that I started finding my voice again. Staying in the bush for extended periods gave me a new sense of freedom. I found the thrill that I’d been missing through high school, through university, and into marriage. And that continued as I went to study for my master’s degree.
  • I was just doing life, and when I found myself in a space that energised me, I immersed myself in it. My journey in conservation has been my greatest gift because it opened up a whole world that I would wish for any woman. I’ve had a privileged life in that way. When I completed my master’s degree, I got a job at Kenya Wildlife Service. With time, I got a bit disillusioned with this job and decided to shift gears into the world of multilevel marketing. I was using a different energy in this space, and while I excelled at what I did, I started to feel a little insecure again.I finally found my way back into conservation through a job with the Born Free Foundation. It gave me a lot of opportunities to travel and speak. I would give talks at fundraising events with serious heavy hitters, and in that process, it occurred to me that I was good at this. It built up my confidence.My job didn’t pay a lot, but it gave me a lot of exposure. At some point, I decided to leave my job and go to write my PhD. I applied to Kenyan universities but didn’t get accepted. Then I spoke at an event at the Royal Geographic Society in London. Afterwards, a couple in the audience followed me and asked how much money I needed to put more research into the address I had given. I told them, and they wrote a cheque to fund my research. They asked for nothing in return. I ended up doing my PhD at the University of Kent with additional support from Born Free Foundation. Going for my PhD was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. I see this as a time when I gained a doctorate but lost everything.
  • When I came back, I had to go back to the drawing board. Once again, my confidence was shattered.I have two boys who I lost in a sense because of my long absence from home. I had to ask my long-term house-help to leave at some point, and my younger son was not happy about this. His reaction made me feel like I had been replaced. That hurt like hell. My eldest son had done his A levels in South Africa and was going to university in the US. My absence had resulted in his lacking confidence. It took a lot of work to rebuild, in my children, the assurance that I was still their mother, who loved them unconditionally and cared that they succeeded.
  • What has made me who I am is that I dared to take this academic journey. The only thing that I would do differently would be to get insights from people who had done the same thing. That way, I may have been a lot less surprised at the end of my experience.I had illusions that once I finished my PhD, I would automatically get a job. This wasn’t the case. I taught at the university for three years without pay. During this period, I underwent some severe PhD poverty, as some called it. My financial situation was so dire that I had to borrow money to buy a ticket to get to my graduation. I had no idea how my home situation would change and how my children would be affected. Writing a PhD takes a lot, and you have to put other commitments on the back burner for a while. In the meantime, life goes on. Some people in your life will become resentful, some will be understanding, and some will be helpless.

People assumed that because I was in England, I was okay. But I was suffering from the loneliness that comes from being away from home and from the racism. I was not okay, and it was not easy. What would I do differently? I would communicate more.

  • Yes, they now live in New York, and we have a great relationship. Whenever I visit my children, I always get back thinking if I died today, I would go to heaven. I say this for two reasons. One, they are best friends, and they look out for each other. And, two, they spoil me and love me to bits.

In an interview with Jacksonwild.org, you said, “So many biologists spent all of their time studying animals and natural systems and forgetting human beings impacted those systems”. Can you break this statement down? I’ve always known that Kenyan conservation will not work unless we spend time with the people, understanding their aspirations, pain, and disappointments. The ethic has to be people-centred. There are no two ways about it. Currently, conservation practice in Kenya is rife with brutality, especially towards rural people. There is a sense that they are a nuisance; they encroach on spaces for wildlife, and they fail to understand that securing our wildlife resources is essential. And so, they are treated with suspicion. They get very little compensation for the times when wildlife destroys their lives or property, whether directly or indirectly. Because if you live with wildlife, you deal with many impacts. Some of them are obvious — like when a lion kills somebody, or a hyena kills your goats — that’s direct, and it hurts. But indirectly, if the animals are grazing in the same grazing areas as your cattle, you are just expected to let them graze. Meanwhile, you don’t have the opportunity to graze in the parks, which the government protects jealously, as it should. But then what happens when the same wildlife spends 80 per cent of its time on your land, eating the grass that your cows should be eating? What happens when this wildlife kills your children? Does the government know that you are carrying that level of liability? And if so, shouldn’t you then share in the spoils? The money they get from tourism? Sadly, this is not the case because you will find that the poorest people in Kenya live next to the most visited wildlife resources. I don’t know what can make you understand poverty more than seeing a child carry a little tin full of soil for their lunch.

  • Yes. The children go to termite mounds and take soil off them because there’s no food at home. They eat the soil to keep the hunger pangs away. These things have made me realise that we should think of compassionate conservation, not just towards the animals but also the people. Because if we have no compassion towards the people, they will finish the wildlife.

Nobody watches their child carry a tin of soil and withstands that for long, they will put up a fight. It’s a question of time. The older people remember being brutalised by both the colonial and post-colonial authorities; they are scared. But younger generations don’t have the same history. They couldn’t be bothered. If we want to conserve our wildlife, we need to sit with people and agree on what we will do collectively. I know a woman whose son was killed in the prime of his life by an elephant. A week later, her other son’s leg was amputated because he had cancer. I want that woman to be able to speak and say what she feels. If she’s angry towards elephants, I want her to talk about that, and I want her voice to be honoured

  • It’s an uphill task and will be for a long time, but you know what? We need to start somewhere. My lightbulb moment has come, and I know for a fact we have to stop paying lip service to the people and begin understanding them. I’ll give you an example. I spend a lot of time in Amboseli and have many wazees (elders) come by my place. This one mzee comes by, and I ask him to stay and have a cup of tea as it’s raining. He tells me he can’t because the youngsters in the field forgot his goat, and he has to find it before dark.

“Mama, you know there might be a hyena in the bush that has been praying for a meal for three days. If God answers the prayer of the hyena before he answers my prayer, my goat will be gone”, he tells me before heading out. Three days later, I ask him, “Whose prayer was answered?” He laughs and says, “The hyena’s.” Now imagine if that story was written by someone who had not had a conversation with this man. The expectation is the man is angry and looking for a hyena to kill or a government officer to blame. But this is far from the truth. The man has already given himself an explanation, and he is okay with it. He won’t come at conflict in the legalistic way that we do. We would arrive at compensation differently if we understood that. Instead, we neglect those conversations, so the relationship between the authorities and the people continues to be adversarial. To understand human-wildlife conflict, you need to know that there is a relationship that has been going on for generations between those who live with wildlife and the wildlife itself.

  • 100 per cent. The other day on my Twitter feed, there was a story of how one elephant, Ella, got killed. This is very sad. I commented that we need to create a harmonious existence between wildlife and people, and somebody asked, “When will we start culling the people?” This really shocked me. What kind of person would suggest killing Africans as a solution to the human-wildlife conflict? Sadly, this is not a unique sentiment. Our colonial histories determine the conservation ethic in Kenya and Africa. The existing success stories have colonial roots so there seems to be no reason to change the narrative.

Drawing lines and bringing in fences, boundaries, and guns are strategies that haven’t worked; we are losing our wildlife because everyday decisions are made without compassion

  • Be kind to yourself. Life is full of ups and downs, and a lot of times, no one teaches us to be kind to ourselves. We focus on what we didn’t do, and there is a long list of these things tucked away in our minds. I have learnt to replace that list with a list of things that make me feel better. Because of all the things that you didn’t do, there are a whole lot of other things that you did do.

Find space where you can be with people that can 1: Teach you. 2: Love you just the way you are, and 3. Embrace you as a gift. Because whatever nasty things you tell yourself, you are a gift. There is something you are that nobody else can be. There’s something you need to do that nobody else is ever going to do. There is a place you need to be present where nobody else will ever be.

  • When I was a young girl, I always wanted to be a vet, not because of loving animals, but because when the vet came to my grandmother’s, everything stopped. My grandmother would dress really beautifully, like a VIP was coming. The vet always wore in a white coat with a bag for looking after the cattle. The whole atmosphere around him was so grand and I thought, that’s who I want to be. Then I went to university and studied botany and zoology.

What I didn’t know is that I soon after University, I would get a job with the Kenya Wildlife Service and then straight away, I was research assistant to Joyce Poole. My first job was to count elephants in forests, where you literally had to walk through the forest, count piles of dung then use a formula to convert these numbers into elephant population. I counted a lot of poo in my first years

  • I did my masters at the University of Zimbabwe, which meant I had to do a whole number of units on social development, ecology, and community. They deliberately bring social thinking into the mind of a scientist. At that time, human-elephant conflict was becoming such a big issue, but none of us biologists knew how to measure the impact, deal with politics, or solve the problem. So many biologists spent all of their time studying animals and natural systems and forgetting human beings impacted those systems.

Initially, I didn’t really care what was going on with people either, but then these problems started – every day we would get serious calls, elephants with spear wounds, demonstrating on the street; I went to a number of these meetings and Joyce [Poole] thought I was a natural because I could communicate easily with these individuals. The Maasai people and I really connected. The Maasai people had always been tolerant of the elephants, so these spear wounds and demonstrations were new. No one had really spent time trying to understand how the people were changing or what they saw as their future with wildlife. No one was studying the strategies elephants adopted to survive in this changing landscape.

    • [Sounds delightful! What made you interested in conservation and human development, then?]
  • As soon as I finished my Ph.D. (in Biodiversity Management with a focus on human-elephant conflict), I knew I needed a vehicle to help me communicate my passion for human development.

Note: Dr. Kiiru’s foundation, ConservationKenya, became this vehicle. I kind of thought of calling it Conservation-and-Human-Development-Kenya but it was too long. Still, I knew that the name had to define me, the conservationist, but really, really I wanted to spend a lot of time just working on individual community issues.

  • I don’t know the answer. It’s organic. It’s just grown on me. It’s a passion project. Another thing that bothers me a lot is that many young Kenyans don’t see Conservation as something that is authentic for them. They are clouded by the tourism industry. People who are non-Kenyans—Europeans and white conservationists—they have been so involved. If you show a conservation film, people will say, ‘Why are you watching things for white people?’

I know that’s not true. Protecting the forests, parks, etc, lies in the young people appreciating the need to preserve it.

  • I have developed a study center to bring kids for a weekend where they can tromp around. Where I live, if you take a walk in the morning, you will walk into a head of giraffe, and Mt Kilamanjaro is about 70 km away. A Kenyan child could finish a degree in wildlife ecology without ever having been in a national park without being controlled by teachers. This program allows them basically to do whatever they like. Some might do a vegetation survey, anything. I don’t care what they do, and I don’t care about the results. I just want them to experience the wild.

After that, they go to the Maasai, where they live so close to the land on so little but with such a passion for their cattle and goats. These kids get a total education, learning that you can live a pretty good life next to the land without destroying it. I’ve done this for the last two years, done about 500 kids just coming through and they can come for free – I don’t charge them anything. All they have to do is come with food and cook it themselves. I would like to grow that some more because every child I have brought for that trip just is different when I meet them later on in a later course.

  • I’m convinced that the Maasai way of life is great, and I’m also convinced that certain aspects of their culture cannot respond to life as it is. For instance, keeping 50% of the population off the table in terms of discussing what goes on with their lives. Why aren’t the women participating, excluded from any formal trading, they don’t go to the market, excluded from meetings, but they are the ones who are interacting first hand with the land and the children.

Investing in the women and giving them basic skills and education is not counter to a simple way of life. My view of development is not so much stuff, but it’s how much you’re represented in the decisions that affect you. Is it fair to be voiceless just to preserve a culture? So if I give you a voice, and having that voice somehow makes you start to desire a bicycle so you can move faster, that’s a story for another day. I just want you to have a voice.

You think you have a problem, just try and come to my part of the world. What I wear, how I say things, how I choose to arrive, all of those things are judged each one and they will be used against me to make me look small. I literally have to revise the script as home and take out anything that might be reinvented as just pure raw emotion. I need to not bring on attention to myself that will have me just put down as female, hormonal, estrogen oriented.

  • [With] my son, maybe. Maybe the next generation. It’s changing slowly, but… there’s hope. [It starts with] the generation of boys brought up by strong mothers. My son dates a woman that went to Yale. He just lets her do whatever. Who asked him?

The women, it’s in our hands. You have to bring up boys who are so secure in themselves that they don’t feel they have to look so good they have to be tough on women. If you bring them up to realize it’s just fine, then they can let us be.

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