Restoring Land, Restoring Value in Sultan Hamud

How do we restore value to people and places deemed worthless? At fromtheroots, we're answering that question through action.

For three years, we've created un/learning and ritual spaces for East Afrikan movement workers confronting oppression in its myriad forms to slow down, heal, reskill, and ground their changemaking in indigenous Afrikan principles and wisdom. Now we're taking the next step: Serian Sanctuary, our 10-acre land home, where we're learning and experimenting with land based skills, communal living, earth-centred governance, economies, and practices.

The challenge is urgent. Decades of erosion have carved two deep gullies into our hillside, washing away fertile soil and threatening people and animals through sudden wall collapses. Our 9-month rehabilitation project will transform this degraded landscape through rainwater catchment swales, terraces and gabions, invasive plant removal, and planting deep-rooted grasses to stabilise soil and slow water loss - critical in our semiarid ecosystem. We will plant 1,000 indigenous, fruit and medicinal trees across two acres to rediversify the land currently dominated by a single thorn shrub species. Within the gullies, we'll establish ponds for water security and food sovereignty. More water retained in the soil will support native grasses and trees to sprout. As the forest grows it will anchor ceremony space and sanctuary on the land for human and more-than-human beings.

This is more than land restoration. We're training neighbours and local schoolchildren, building community capacity for restoring gullies which deepen each rainy season in this area, and creating a sanctuary for East Afrikan frontline activists who rarely access physical and spiritual connection with the Earth as part of their healing and reimagining of just worlds for all beings.

As we restore outer landscapes, we restore inner ones too, living out our belief that regeneration requires whole community: human, Earth relatives and spirit beings.