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Where It All Began . . .

As had been their custom for centuries, the local people were felling their trees without replacing them. "Trees are Shauri ya Munga, God's Business. They just grow," they said.

But the Sahara was advancing almost 50 kilometres each year. And now the settlements and medicines of Europeans immigrants were increasing the pressure on the land that remained.

Richard St Barbe Baker, a forester recently arrived from England, observed that: ". . . whole tribes were dying out, trapped in a triangle of forest with a desert in front of them for 1,000 miles, desert behind for 1,000 miles. The chiefs had forbidden marriage, the women refused to bear children. It was racial suicide on the biggest scale the world had ever seen, directly as a result of forest destruction."

St Barbe Baker determined to help the 'Great High God' (as the local people put it) to re-green the land by restoring the tree cover.

With Chief Josiah Njonjo, he called all the people together and organised a celebration: The Dance of the Trees.

On 22 July 1922, 3,000 warriors arrived from many parts of the country to lead the dance; another 12,000 came to watch.

St Barbe Baker told them that, from that day on, it would be a commendable thing to plant trees by the thousand to make their land fertile again.

Fifty Kikuyu began work. They earned themselves the name, Watu-Wa-Miti (Men of the Trees), because they always seemed to be working with their trees. They would greet each other with a special handshake, using three fingers, to symbolise their threefold promise: to protect trees everywhere, plant at least ten trees or seeds a year and do a good a day. Their secret password - Twahamwe (Let's Work Together) - is the motto of The Men of the Trees today.

Soon tribes who were hostile to each other came together, vying with each other to see how many trees they could plant. "Evening by evening when they couldn't think of a better good deed to do they raised tens of thousands of young indigenous trees of the country."

Both Josiah Njonjo and Richard St Barbe Baker spent their entire lives in the cause of restoring tree cover throughout the world. The trees they planted are still growing in Kenya today.