A veritable treasure trove of natural splendour is discovered minutes from the madness of the concrete jungle

By Wayua Muli

Cover of the Saturday Magazine

This does not look much like Kiambu. The trees are hundreds of years old, and the river's reeds have stories to tell, of centuries past and people long dead. There are nature trails and campsites everywhere. There's a shimmering, silver-curtain waterfall, about 10 feet long, that feeds a dammed river flowing past a picnic site set into the land. Behind the waterfall is a cave that dates back to prehistoric times. This most definitely does not look like Kiambu.

Joseph Mbai calls it 'Paradise Lost'. Ornithologists would call it the 'Treasure Trove'. Archaeologists say it is 'An Excellent Example of Prehistoric Shelters'. However, since Mbai owns the caves, his tag wins the day.

Misarara, where the caves are located, is a middling coffee farm, set in the midst of so many other red-soil, berry-bearing Kiambu coffee farms. When Mbai's father bought the farm in the seventies, the acquisitions he was sure he had were a lovely colonial-style country house, a portion of the Gichi river and prime coffee acres. Little did he know that some ancient caves had been thrown into the bargain. 'They have always been part of the land, except that they were a shallow sort of indent in the rock wall behind the waterfall which none of us ever bothered to investigate," Mbai says. The urge to 'go caving' came in 1996 when Mbai, then 30, came back from America, where he had been studying for a degree in marketing.

Joseph Mbai with his 'baby', a clay sculpture he has installed in an alcove in the caves

"I was at a loose end," he says, "wondering what to do with myself and trying to get used to the country that I had last lived in ten years before." Among the ideas he was toying around with was setting up a picnic site at the farm on a piece of land next to the dam. "It is a particularly peaceful area, and I wanted it to be a place where I could go and relax, not necessarily open it to the public. One day, I was walking around the caves where I remembered playing as a child, and I decided to investigate them."

When the digging first started in September 1996, Mbai did not know what he was looking for, or what he would find. "It was a gut feeling that was guiding me, nothing more, nothing less," he remembers. So he formed a team of 'excavators' composed of the farm hands and, with simple torches and 'jembes', started the foray into the unknown.

"We were running around like headless chicken in there, not knowing what we would find at the end of our dig. After a while, we started to get channels into the interior of the cave that were filled with soil instead of rock, which told us that there were hollows in there," he says.

Kamau the caretaker and resident guide, shows how they crawled when they were excavating the caves

The first real clue came when they found little pieces of black rock. "They looked man-made to me," Mbai remarks. It was this peculiar discovery that prompted him to suspend digging for a while and take the pieces to the National Museums of Kenya's archaeology department for vetting.

"The first person I talked to looked at me in shock when he saw what I had in my hand," he says. "'Where did you get this from?' he asked me, and when I told him that I had found it on my land, he was even more surprised. He made me narrate the story of how I found them as his eyes grew wider with surprise. Then he called the rest of the department and made me narrate the story all over again," Mbai says. "After they had heard everything, they all looked at each other, then looked at me and said 'Let's go.'"

The reason the archaeologists were so excited was because the black pieces of stone were actually obsidian rock artefacts from the Late Stone Age period, about 8000 years ago, meaning that the caves may be of some archaeological significance. These caves are part of a bigger network that can be found in the Kiambu/Karura Forest area. Most of them were found by archaeologists of note, including the late Louis Leakey. The Mbai caves were never discovered, partly because they were always part of a residential property.

The Museum team assessed the site and got together a team of three to excavate a small cross-section of the area. They came up with a huge pile of obsidian rock shavings and sharp-edged tools. Meanwhile, a little more excavating from Mbai and his helpers yielded 'The Cathedral', a large, dome-shaped opening in the extreme interior of the cave. Here, they found pieces of pottery suspected to be of Dorobo origin, from the same time period. Sometimes there would be false leads - like finding a bone and rushing to the museum hoping that it was part of the missing link to man's origins, then finding out that it was just a bone from a common domestic cow!

Some of the areas still to be explored

The archeological team stayed on site for three weeks, digging here and excavating there, until they came up with a formidable collection of pottery, stone implements and flakes, beads and animal remains. Everything was analysed later and when all this information was collated, it was found that the cave may have been occupied as far back as 12,000 years ago. However, all these figures are just estimates, and the Museum will have to carbon-date all the material that they found there before they can conclusively state how old the caves are.

"The Late Stone Age spans about 45,000 years, and so when we say that the artefacts are part of that era, it takes a lot more research to determine exactly how old they are," Dr Karega-Munene of the National Museums of Kenya Archaeology Department says. Some of the samples are with the University of Helsinki, who funded and participated in part of the dig, and will undertake to date the samples. However, the bulk of the work remains to be done in Kenya. "Unfortunately, we do not have the facilities to carbon date the finds ourselves, otherwise we would have done it much earlier," Dr Karega says.

8,000 years ago prehistoric man was skinning small animals with obsidian tools in the darkness of the caves. A few years later, the Dorobo shaped pots and cooked vegetables in them in the darkness of the caves. 40 years ago the Mau Mau used the caves and their environs as a hideout and a transit point for members coming from up-country and on their way to the city. The Mau Mau never sheltered in the caves, because they were afraid of bombs being lobbed at them inside the shelter, from which they may have not been able to escape.

In more recent times, the caves have become an important site for traditional Kikuyu rituals and prayers. Currently they, and the picnic area next to them, are becoming an important site for religious retreats. Mbai hopes to turn the caves into a museum of sorts as soon as all the data have been analysed and dated, and until he knows for sure what their significance is. He has already installed a generator to light the dark interior of the caves so that visitors can witness this rarity so near the city. And four, maybe five thousand years from now, the story of the caves will be repeated again when someone else excavates the cave to find the remains of Homo Sapiens, circa 1999.

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