Saidi Chidzinga, a field assistant at the Coastal Forests Conservation Unit (left) and an elder identify one of the gigasiphon macrosiphon trees in Kaya Muhaka. Inset: A flowering gigasiphon macrosiphon in Kaya Muhaka on Kenya’s coast. Photos/Rupi Mangat/Itambo Malombe
Dry leaves crunch underfoot as we enter Kaya Muhaka, a sacred forest of the Mijikenda a few kilometres inland off Kenya’s South Coast. It is cool and quiet inside the sacred grove.
Kaya Muhaka is home to some rare tree species. One is the gigasiphon macrosiphon, known as mnyanza in the local Digo language, which Dr Itambo Malombe of the East African Herbarium at the National Museums of Kenya discovered while conducting an evaluation of plant and insect biodiversity for the National Council for Science and Technology in the Kaya forests between 2008 and 2010. Dr Malombe’s team found fewer than 10 trees in the 350-acre Kaya.
