The Sacred Tree

The Sacred Tree

In the nineteenth century, Mugo Kibiru, a famous prophet of the Kikuyu tribe, foretold that a fig tree at Thika, twenty-six miles north of Nairobi, would wither and die on the day that Kenya gained independence. Kibiru also prophesied that Kenya would become a white man’s colony, but that one day the white man would return the land to the Africans. He foresaw the coming of the railway which he described as ‘an iron snake with many legs, like an earthworm.’ Kibiru’s prophecies proved to be so accurate that for many years the tree at Thika was regarded as sacred. Even the white men took the prophecy seriously, for they built the tree up with earth and put a concrete wall around it so that it would not fall. These measures were doomed to fail. Shortly before Kenya gained independence, the tree was struck by lightning and it began to wither rapidly. By the day Kenya officially became independent, it had decayed completely, fulfilling the prophecy made over seventy years before by Kibiru.