Grandmother Mugumo

Another tree-person has fallen

It’s Earth Day and a wise, sacred tree-person has fallen around the corner from our house. Per usual, I’m having lots of feelings. Heartbreak and heaviness and connection and beauty. I didn’t know this tree intimately during her life, as she resided behind the concrete fence surrounding my neighbor’s garden – a neighbor I had never met. I knew her branches and shade though. Those I experienced from the other side of the wall. And I was grateful for her wisdom watching over us. When she fell, Grandmother-tree broke open walls and forged new connections – graceful in death as she was in life.

Most of the time,

Learning, by Nature

is overtly about mainstreaming nature-based learning in schools. Today’s dispatch is connected, but maybe not as obvious as sometimes. I’ll tl;dr it here to draw the straight-line connection for those in a hurry. The whole post is pretty short by my standards, though.

Tl;dr

We must develop emotional ties with more-than-human nature – and with other humans as well. The research tells us humans — especially kids — need time in nature and role models who care for nature. And so does experience. Nature-based learning in schools can foster these connections. 

A different fate

Another tree-person has fallen in my Nairobi neighborhood. I am grateful she has met a different fate than my tree-sister Mninga (Bloodwood). 

Some of you will remember. I wrote of Mninga’s demise which came not from falling naturally like this new tree, but from being cut down because of a grave offense to modernity: her branches were ‘too close to a transformer’. She was cast aside with capitalistic expediency to declutter the streets from the eyesore of her body cast about in pieces on the side of our manicured cabro streets. The transport was expedited because – they said – her wood was “unusable for furniture.” Someone even told me she was an invasive species. 

Unlikely. 

Her size alone – and the age it implied – meant she lived long before the colonial era in Kenya. What hundreds-year-old tree could be invasive? My post-mortem googling uncovered my Mninga-sister’s indigeneity and a host of values from the sacred to the cosmetic.

Grandmother Mugumo

Now it’s Fig. Sacred Fig. Mugumo. She is considered sacred by Kikuyu people. 

Photo by Michael on Unsplash

I don’t know how to describe her size. Was she as big as two semi trucks? Or three train cars? Or 4 shipping containers? How many elephants could have been placed on a scale opposite her severed limbs and trunk? The comparisons are lacking in accuracy. And they can’t even come close to capturing the mass of our loss.

When Grandmother Mugumo fell, our neighbors closest to her no doubt gasped and felt their own bodies, touching their arms and those of their loved ones. All there. 

They held each other. They looked at the gaping maw of rainy night sky where she stood the night before and for hundreds of years besides. 

I imagine they said prayers of gratitude to their God or Gods or Goddesses. Or just drew deep breaths and sighed with relief. No humans had been hurt when giant Grandmother fell. A miracle. 

A WhatsApp message to our neighborhood chat came from the family onto whose garden she fell:

‘We are looking for a Kikuyu male to bless this tree. We understand that Mugumo trees are sacred to Kikuyu people and we are looking for someone to offer a prayer.’

Omens

Just days earlier, another Mugumo grandmother fell in Kiambu county blocking a busy road. Again, as if by miracle, no humans were hurt. Elder Kikuyu traditionalist wise men (wazee) performed rituals over the tree. They assessed why it fell, not in a “the roots rotted from incessant rains” or “the soil loosened and subsided” sort of way, but in the what-massive-change-is-being-foretold-by-this-passing way. What omen can we understand from the falling of this wise being? A sheep of a single color was burned to ashes using Mugumo’s branches, warding off calamities to the community in which she fell.

Fallen Mugumo trees have preceded – and maybe foretold – major political transitions in Kenya. They mark the end of an era. Transition. 

In life, Mugumo’s body contains ancestors’ spirits. She and her sisters weather drought and flood over centuries providing stability through change. Ceremonies are performed in her shade. It is said that if an individual walks around the tree seven times, their sex will change (though no documentation of such transitions exists). 

She is not planted, but grows wild or maybe, as some say, she is “planted by God.”  

Faith

Our neighborhood Grandmother Mugumo lived in the yard of an Ismaili Muslim family. Her fallen body stretched across a road at the entrance to our community — one filled with Kenyan families and expat families from all over the world spanning a cornucopia of faiths, agnostics, atheists. She crashed – as gently as a several ton being can fall – into the garden of a Hindu family on the other side of the street. Though we have Kikuyu neighbors who practice a blend of traditional Kikuyu faith and various forms of Christianity, none of them was qualified to perform the rites for this tree. No mzee.

We searched far and wide but could not find any Kikuyu wazee to bless the tree who were willing to do so without the traditional animal sacrifice. I’m grateful our neighbors didn’t want this. Even as I respect tradition, my own stomach is weak when it comes to killing living beings to appease Gods. 

‘We just don’t want any more lives lost,’ my neighbor explained. 

“Amen.” I thought. 

The Ismaili family offered prayers with bells. The Hindu family performed a puja. Other neighbors prayed in their own way, communing with and thanking Grandmother Mugumo. 

Instant connections

When Clara and I arrived to pay our respects, our neighbor from whose garden Mugumo fell – who had nurtured her own children under Mugumo’s branches for 30 years – was there, her hand touching one of Mugumo’s giant bones. She asked if she could join us. I laughed and asked the same.

Yes, of course.

We introduced ourselves. We met Habiba.

Thrust into instant intimacy, we thanked Grandmother Mugumo for her strength, her shade, the homes she provided for birds and other animals and insects. For clean air and her wisdom. 

We left flowers on her bones.

Clara hugged one of the stumps and pressed her cheek against its bark. She kissed Grandmother Mugumo.

As we were leaving, Clara ran back, picked up a branch, and planted it into the ground.

I know it won’t grow, mom, but I wanted to do it anyway, she said. 

❤️B