by Dr. Mark Nicholson
40m planks?…out with the chainsaw
I know we all live in an increasingly international world but the last ten days have been unusually so for the tree-planter. On my 75th birthday, I had calls from two of my daughters in Portugal and Amsterdam. After a dinner on a Rift valley farm owned by a Scottish Australian with six Dutch flower importers, my son hopped on a plane (or two) to Los Angeles while I joined a bridge match playing variously with an Ethiopian (my wife), a Greek, a Peruvian and a Norwegian. The next day I had a long meeting with lichenologists from the University of Helsinki, followed by a meeting on Saturday with donors from Zurich. Then an Ismaili friend asked me over to help a friend of his in Nairobi the following day, four days ago. That is when it became interesting.
My friend’s friend lives in a palatial house in Muthaiga, the most expensive part of Nairobi. He turned out to be an 89-year old Muslim Q.C.* who was called to the Bar in Lincoln’s Inn in the 1950s. He is in the process of suing Kenya’s National Land Commission and I was in the unusual position of being served a ‘brief’ by a Q.C. In this part of the world, he would historically have been described as an ‘Asian’, an absurd term when that could mean anyone from Istanbul to Kamchatka. The term used to mean someone whose ethnic origins were from the Indian sub-continent. Kenya today has a very large and very prosperous community of people of ‘Indian sub-continent descent’, many of them fifth generation Kenyans who know little about India. And nor would one ever say “But where do you really come from?” So one can’t say Indian because much of the Punjab is now Pakistan. Nor can one say Punjabi because religious affiliation is more important than place of origin: Kenyan Punjabi Muslims have little to do socially with Kenyan Punjabi Sikhs, and even less to do with Kenyan Punjabi Hindus. The Q.C., like my Ismaili friend, is a non-practising Muslim, which I could tell as we were drinking in the daytime during Ramadan. But he told me that his father was a devout Muslim who had done hajj over thirty times and had bought land in Mecca.
Three fascinating meetings later and I have learned more about a part of East African history than I have gleaned in over half a century[1]. My new friend told me his story. His grandfather, a wealthy merchant, arrived from the Punjab in the first decade of the 20th century before the completion of the Lunatic Express[2]. The British Governor of the Punjab encouraged artisans, accountants and businessmen to try their luck in East Africa, promising them their fares and good salaries. This was the second wave of Indians, the first being largely Sikhs and Hindus brought in for the construction of the railway. It was a risky trip. After sailing on leaking dhows across the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, many of the newcomers had to venture on foot up to Nairobi running the gauntlet of attack by lion, elephant and rhino. Once in Nairobi, they were sent to the areas designated for Indian settlement. The grandfather soon had 300 ox wagons travelling up and down from Mombasa 500km to the south-east. They would bring goods from India up to Nairobi and then they started trading in dried papain (from papayas) for the German market, hides and skins for India and dried chillies for the Japanese market. Hard work and acumen led to the family buying plots of land including 50 acres just outside what was then Nairobi (but is now more or less in the centre of the city) and then sending their two grandsons to Harvard and London to become lawyers and barristers. The 50 acres is undeveloped to this day but is inhabited by some squatters.
Across the river from the 50 acres was Muthaiga, which was then reserved for Europeans. But even the Indian areas were segregated. Goans, having Portuguese blood were regarded as “racially superior” (the phrase used by my new friend), so they could live in ‘mixed areas’ along with Jews, and whites ‘from lower strata’. The irony of course is that most private houses in Muthaiga are largely now owned by these wealthy people (along with rich politicians) who have made far more money than any of the Europeans who built the houses originally.
So how much is this fig tree worth?
We eventually got down to the problem. A long line of indigenous trees had been cut down on his land to make a new link road. The link road has been abandoned and he has not been compensated for the trees. At the other end of the property, a super-highway has been built going north to Thika. There he lost 1.5 acres of land by compulsory purchase but an unknown number of straight, exotic trees of unknown size from Australia called Grevillea were also cut down whose value is from the timber. My job is to give a figure for compensation based on old aerial photographs of 20 years ago. In addition, the Chinese road builders have dumped “thousands” of truckloads of black cotton soil and rubble onto his land which has reduced the value of the land which was high quality, red, coffee-growing soil. I did inform him that the land is bound to end up covered in high-rise buildings and that no one is going to be interested in the potential agricultural value of the land.
So what figure does one give to a crooked indigenous tree with little value for timber. All the big and high-quality trees (African Olives, Pencil Cedars and Yellow-wood Podocarpus) on the plot were actually sold by his grandfather in 1929 and he showed me the sale receipt.
Oscar Wilde described a cynic as one who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing. When it comes to trees that might be apt. For most people a tree’s value normally comes from the sale of the timber. To put a value on a living tree is both subjective and more difficult: it may have amenity, aesthetic and/ or biodiversity value but how do you quantify it? I am told that in the U.K. a fine mature tree can add thousands of pounds onto the value of a property (but presumably not if it is a Cupressus leylandii, otherwise known as Lawyer’s Delight owing to the number of suits fought over that fast-growing and sun-blocking tree of suburban England). Omni calculator gives a crude value for a tree based on the diameter of the trunk and the height of the tree but that is the timber value alone. A tree of 20m with a diameter of 130 cm gives a figure of around $3500 but that says nothing about wood quality or other attributes as a living organism. I did point out that the total figure I would come up with would be about 0.001% of the value of the land so why not sell the land and enjoy a peaceful retirement? But no. “I am suing on principle”, he tells me. “The government has ruined my land and I want compensation”.
My personal opinion is that he has not a snowball’s chance in hell of squeezing money out of the Kenya Government. But never mind. He has asked me back for more stories and I am only too delighted to spend more time listening to this erudite and charming man telling me about his family history.
Mitragyna rubrostipulata, a rare tree I planted ten years ago. What is it worth?
*Editor’s note: Queen’s Counsel. If he was still practising as a barrister in the UK today, he would be called a King’s Counsel; problematic for Kenyans who consider K.C. to stand for the derogatory label, Kenya Cowboy.
[1] He produced from his library a beautifully written coffee table book called ‘Settling in a strange land. Stories of Punjabi Muslims Pioneers in Kenya.’ by Cynthia Salvadori.
[2] See my 2021 article - https://www.only-connect.co.uk/post/the-second-best-exotic-lunatic-line
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