The Tree Menelik Planted: Eucalyptus in East Africa, Medicine and Colonial Wound

Ancestral Wisdom · Environmental Justice · Sacred Plants & Spiritual Wellness

The First Knowledge-Holders

Every honest story about eucalyptus begins in Australia. The genus counts more than 900 species, and most of them occur naturally there, with a few native to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Timor, and the Philippines, according to the Kenya Forestry Research Institute (KEFRI). Long before a single seed was shipped abroad, these were the home trees of the peoples indigenous to that continent.

We name that at the start because a plant’s first teachers deserve to be remembered, not footnoted. The Western record tends to date eucalyptus from the moment Europeans began to plant, distill, and sell it, but the relationship between people and these trees is far older than any bottle or plantation. Today eucalypts rank among the most widely cultivated forest trees in the world, and their road into East Africa ran through two very different doors: an emperor’s capital and a colonial railway.

An Emperor, a Fuel Crisis, and a Strange Tree from Across the Sea

Ethiopia was never colonized, and that matters for how we tell this part. In 1952, after six months in the country, the FAO forestry adviser E. H. F. Swain set down the story in an article for the FAO journal Unasylva. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, he wrote, Emperor Menelik II brought his court to the Entoto hills, then thick with juniper and podocarpus forest. Ethiopian rulers had long moved the imperial seat from place to place as nearby stands of firewood and building timber ran out. Menelik tried to protect the new site by re-declaring, as oral law, the old tradition that full-grown trees belonged to the crown. It was not enough. Younger trees kept being cleared for cultivation and burned as fuel, and the Entoto hills were stripped bare.

At that moment, Swain continues, a Frenchman named Mondon-Vidaillet, whom he describes as a forester, arrived with seed of Australian eucalypts. One of them, Eucalyptus globulus, the blue gum, grew prodigiously. Swain credits its planting on the Entoto hills with making a permanent capital possible by 1906, ending the old cycle in which the court moved whenever the wood ran out. Addis Ababa, in other words, was able to stay put in part because of this tree.

Ethiopians made the tree their own. Swain records a local name for it that he translated as the “strange tree from across the sea,” and notes that anyone who wanted to secure their future planted a plot. Thinnings became fence staves, slim sticks for wattle-and-daub homes, and tall poles for scaffolding, while bundles of foliage went to household fires for baking injera. By the early 1950s, he reported, forestry had become the chief industry around the capital, and growers carrying their poles and firewood made up 90 percent of market-day traffic.

So the Ethiopian chapter is not a simple tale of a colonizer imposing a tree. It is an African sovereign’s capital answering an urgent fuel crisis with a foreign adviser and Australian seed, in an era when European empires were carving up the rest of the continent. It also carries a warning that Swain himself drew: protecting only the grown trees while clearing the young is how the juniper forests of Entoto were lost. The honest answer is that eucalyptus in East Africa arrived as a replacement for lost forest, and whether it now helps or hinders that forest’s return is a question communities are still answering.

1902: A Railway That Needed Fire

In Kenya, the story runs straight through the colonial state. According to the Kenya Forestry Research Institute (KEFRI), eucalypts were introduced in 1902 to identify fast-growing trees that could supply fuelwood for the Kenya-Uganda Railway, the British line that carried imperial trade from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. It is the same railway our Gikuyu ancestors had been warned about, as we remember in the prophecy of Mugo wa Kibiru. About 100 species have since been introduced. Over time the uses widened to timber, plywood, electricity poles, pulp, fencing, and windbreaks.

KEFRI estimated that Kenya had about 100,000 hectares under eucalyptus: 15,000 in gazetted forests, 35,000 on land owned by large companies, and 50,000 on land held by individual farmers and local authorities. That last number is the heart of this story. A tree that arrived to serve a colonial railway now grows mostly on smallholder farms, planted by Kenyan families for their own reasons.

The Water Question

If you have spent time in rural Kenya, you have heard it said that the blue gum “drinks” springs dry. The fact-checkers at Africa Check took that claim seriously. A KEFRI chief scientist told them the claims “have not been conclusively supported by scientific evidence,” and that eucalyptus is actually efficient, needing less water to produce a kilogram of wood than most crops. Yet the researcher Brandy Garrett-Kluthe, whose doctoral work studied eucalyptus in Kenya, told the same reporters that soil moisture was significantly lower in eucalyptus woodlots than in indigenous forest, and that woodlots should sit at least 50 meters from water sources.

Both can be true at once. Eucalyptus regulates its thirst: when water is scarce it conserves, and when water is plentiful, beside a river, a spring, or a wetland, it transpires freely. KEFRI’s own review notes that few studies on eucalyptus water use have been done in Kenya, but it cites South African catchments where eucalyptus and pine plantations dried a stream after some years, and where flow returned to normal within about five years of felling.

This is why eucalyptus in East Africa is an environmental-justice question and not only a botanical one. The families who lose a spring are rarely the ones who profit most from the timber. Water is shared; wood is owned. When a tree planted for private income drains a common source, the cost lands on neighbors, on women and girls who walk farther for water, and on the wetland plants and animals that have no vote.

Law, Courts, and Who Gets Heard

Kenya has been writing this debate into law for years. The farm forestry rules under the Agriculture Act state that no landowner “shall grow or maintain any Eucalyptus species in wetlands and riparian areas,” the Water Act forbids planting exotic species that may harm a water resource, and Kenya Forest Service guidelines bar the genus from wetlands, marshy areas, and irrigated farmland, as Africa Check documented. In February 2020, Kenya’s environment minister, Keriako Tobiko, called for eucalyptus in wetlands to be uprooted. The pendulum has swung before: KEFRI recalls that in the 1980s a presidential commission on soil conservation discouraged eucalyptus planting, which reduced it in state forests, and that the current enthusiasm for planting on private farms came later.

Then the courts moved. In November 2025, the Environment and Land Court at Ol Kalou ruled on a public-interest petition brought by Nyamira lawyer Wilfred Moseti Omariba, Citizen Digital reported. The court barred planting eucalyptus within 30 meters of wetlands nationwide, ordered such trees uprooted within 45 days, restricted planting on irrigated farmland and on parcels smaller than a quarter acre, and gave Parliament 12 months to pass a law regulating the tree. Notice who brought that case: not a foreign NGO, but a Kenyan citizen from a farming county, using Kenyan law to protect Kenyan water.

A Savings Account That Grows in the Ground

It would be easy, and wrong, to write eucalyptus off as a colonial weed. For many rural families it is a savings account that grows in the ground. KEFRI’s booklet reports that farmers grow eucalypts as a reliable investment with good financial returns over relatively short rotations, and that the trees cushion families when markets for their other crops fail or prices fall. It cites a study finding that growing eucalyptus for fuelwood and poles was more profitable than growing maize in high-potential farming areas such as Kitale and Uasin Gishu, while at Kericho, tea still edged out eucalyptus grown for fuelwood.

The same booklet expects the area under eucalyptus to keep growing because of high demand for transmission poles as rural electrification expands, and it records that tea estates, tobacco companies, and paper and plywood mills all rely on the tree for fuel or raw material. That, too, is a justice question: whether the value of a tree grown on Kenyan farms stays in Kenyan communities, or flows mostly to the large buyers who set the price.

The Steam Under the Blanket

Now the medicine. The introduced tree did not stay only a crop. The clearest documented example of how communities folded it into healing practice comes from western Kenya, near the shores of Lake Victoria.

In Kenya, researchers interviewed 30 herbalists in Kisumu East among the Luo community, and their 2020 paper in Chinese Medicine describes how river red gum leaves were boiled in an earthen pot while the patient sat covered by a blanket so the steam “completely engulfed them.” Most of those herbalists were women, and the largest group was between 61 and 70 years old. The authors call the preservation of their knowledge a pressing concern. We agree. These are the protagonists of this medicine: elder women carrying practice forward, adapting an Australian tree into a Luo remedy for the common cold.

What the Science Actually Shows

The compound behind that familiar scent is 1,8-cineole, also called eucalyptol, the main constituent of eucalyptus oil. The best-known clinical trial, by Juergen Fischer and Uwe Dethlefsen, published in Cough in 2013, gave 242 adults with acute bronchitis 200 milligrams of cineole capsules three times a day or a placebo. After four days the cineole group had significantly greater improvement in a combined symptom score and in coughing fits, though by day ten the difference was no longer statistically significant. The trial was funded by a grant from Cassella-med, a company in Cologne, Germany, which does not make it wrong, but it is worth knowing. And note what was tested: capsules of isolated cineole swallowed in measured doses, not leaves in a pot.

That is one company-funded trial of a purified compound, not a verdict on whole eucalyptus oil, and certainly not on a pot of boiled leaves. It is a reasonable starting point for research, and a poor foundation for marketing claims about “boosting immunity.”

And the steam itself? A Cochrane review of six small trials found that the evidence does not show clear benefit or harm from inhaling heated, humidified air for colds, and rated the evidence low quality. Many people feel real relief from steam, and that felt relief matters. But science has not proven that leaf steam shortens a cold, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Leaf Steam Is Not Oil, and Oil Is Not Food

Here is where respect for the plant means caution. Concentrated eucalyptus oil is a poison when swallowed. The U.S. National Capital Poison Center warns that eucalyptus oil should never be swallowed, that a teaspoon or less of undiluted oil can be fatal, and that symptoms, which can include vomiting, drowsiness, seizures, and coma, usually start within 30 minutes but may be delayed up to four hours. It advises against giving eucalyptus oil to children under two and against use in pregnancy. It also recommends storing products that contain eucalyptus up, away, and out of sight of children, and keeping children away from the liquid in vaporizer units.

Steam carries its own danger, especially for children, because a pot of boiling water can tip and scald. If a family chooses steam, keep boiling water stable and out of children’s reach, never use bottled essential oil in place of fresh leaves without guidance, and get medical help for any fever that is high, lasting, or accompanied by trouble breathing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Holding Both Truths

The blue gum asks us to hold two truths without letting either one erase the other. It arrived through an emperor’s fuel crisis and a colonial railway, it stands where native forest once stood, and near springs and wetlands it can take water that belongs to everyone. It also earns farm income, builds homes, feeds cooking fires, and steams in clay pots where grandmothers have made it part of their own medicine. A plant can be both a remedy and a wound.

What we refuse is the old pattern in which outsiders decide, from far away, whether a tree should stay or go. The future of eucalyptus in East Africa belongs to the farmers weighing income against water, the elders who know which leaves to boil, the courts and citizen petitioners using their own laws, and the Aboriginal peoples who lived with this tree first. Our work in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria is to stand beside communities making those choices, not to make them on anyone’s behalf.

Know someone who reaches for eucalyptus steam every cold season? Share this story of where the tree came from and who carries its medicine.

Sources

• Citizen Digital (2025). Court bans planting of eucalyptus trees near wetlands. Royal Media Services.
• Fischer, J., & Dethlefsen, U. (2013). Efficacy of cineole in patients suffering from acute bronchitis: a placebo-controlled double-blind trial. Cough.
• Mailu, J. K., Nguta, J. M., Mbaria, J. M., & Okumu, M. O. (2020). Medicinal plants used in managing diseases of the respiratory system among the Luo community: an appraisal of Kisumu East Sub-County, Kenya. Chinese Medicine.
• National Capital Poison Center (n.d.). Eucalyptus oil: Is it safe?. Poison Control.
• Oballa, P. O., Konuche, P. K. A., Muchiri, M. N., & Kigomo, B. N. (2010). Facts on Growing and Use of Eucalyptus in Kenya. Kenya Forestry Research Institute.
• Shiundu, A. (2020). Thirsty species? The science behind the eucalyptus tree ban in Kenya’s wetlands. Africa Check.
• Singh, M., Singh, M., Jaiswal, N., & Chauhan, A. (2017). Heated, humidified air for the common cold. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
• Swain, E. H. F. (1952). Forestry possibilities in Ethiopia. Unasylva 6(1). Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Related Reading

• Mwarubaini: The African Neem Tree That Has Always Been a Pharmacy
• Kenya Just Made History: What the New Traditional Medicine Policy Means for Ancestral Plant Wisdom
• What Baobab Knows: Ancient Trees as Witnesses, Teachers, and Medicine
• Our Grandmothers’ Pharmacy: Herbal Medicine as Ancestral Knowledge

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