The Bamburi Cement Story: Ground that was left behind
North of Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast, there is a forest growing on the floor of an old quarry.
The ground under it was once bare limestone, cut and emptied for cement.
Today the public walks its trails. It is called Haller Park, and it belongs to Bamburi Cement.
South of Mombasa, in Kwale County, there is another piece of ground that belongs to the same company.
The company calls it Diani Estate. The villagers of Denyenye, who live beside it, call it Chikuyumtole.
The villagers say their families were forced off that land in nineteen fifty two. The company says it bought the land in nineteen fifty four, and holds full legal title.
Since two thousand and seven, a camp of paramilitary police has stood on it.
No one has ruled on whose land it is.
In December twenty twenty five, the company’s new owner signed a contract to build a thirty two billion shilling clinker plant there.
It is going up now.
One company, two pieces of ground, and seventy five years of owners who lived somewhere else. This is how it came to hold both.
The Reef
In eighteen sixty seven, Felix Mandl’s grandfather founded a cement works at Podsused, near Zagreb. Cement was the family trade two generations before Kenya.
Felix Mandl was born in Vienna in December eighteen ninety eight, into a wealthy Jewish family. He studied agriculture and philosophy at Göttingen.
He became a director of Cementia Holding, a cement group based in Zurich.
In the Second World War, Croatia’s fascist Ustaše regime threatened him and confiscated the family plant.
He was imprisoned for listening to the BBC.
Later, the Gestapo arrested him. After five days he was released, for what his biography records as economic reasons, while his fellow detainees were sent to concentration camps.
The war ended, and the danger changed sides. Tito’s Yugoslavia tried him for collaborating with the fascists, a charge his biography says was never proven, and sentenced him to ten years of forced labour at Lepoglava.
He served about two years. He was let out when the authorities found he had helped the Partisans.
Years later he wrote a memoir. Its title, in Croatian, means In spite of everything, the memories remain.
In nineteen fifty one, Felix Mandl came to the Kenyan coast.
North of Mombasa, near a village called Bamburi, the ground was covered in dense bush.
Under the bush was a fossil coral reef.
A coral reef is limestone, and limestone is the raw material of cement. Here there was, in effect, no end to it, and it lay beside a deep water port.
Mandl did not find a market on this coast. He found a reef.
Kenya at the time used about a hundred thousand tonnes of cement a year, and the first plant was sized to supply the whole of it.
The company was called British Standard Portland Cement. It was a partnership of two European firms, Cementia of Switzerland and Blue Circle of Britain. The capital came from Europe, and so did control.
From the first day, the value of this business was in the ground, and the people who controlled it were somewhere else.
Construction began in April nineteen fifty two.
That October, the colonial government declared a State of Emergency across Kenya, against the Mau Mau uprising.
The works went up over the next two years.
In February nineteen fifty four, the first kiln was lit.
In April the first cement left the works. That same year, the first shipments went south by sea to Dar es Salaam.
On the twenty fourth of March, nineteen fifty six, the works was officially opened.
By nineteen sixty eight it was turning out seven hundred thousand tonnes a year, and shipping cement as far as Mauritius, Réunion and Dubai. The reef had been exactly what Mandl thought it was.
The company’s own history of those years begins with that reef, under empty bush. Whether it was empty, whether anyone lived on or used that ground before nineteen fifty one, is a question no source we found examines.
In the sources we found, the record of the company’s first twenty years does not name a single Kenyan.
And the works was built in the first years of the Emergency. How the company dealt with the colonial administration in those years, over permits, land or labour, no source examines.
We are naming those gaps. We are not going to fill them with guesses.
The Forest
In nineteen fifty nine, Bamburi hired a Swiss agronomist, René Haller, to run its garden department and look after the land held in reserve for the quarry.
Quarrying takes the reef away. What it leaves behind is a stripped floor of limestone.
White, flat and bare.
In nineteen seventy one the company set up a separate business, Baobab Farm, and Haller began work on the worked out quarry floor.
He planted twenty six species.
Twenty three of them died.
Three survived. The casuarina, the coconut palm, and the damas.
Three kinds of tree on bare stone are not yet a forest. The casuarina, though, drops fine needles, and they gather on the stone beneath it.
What made the difference was a millipede.
The red legged millipede eats casuarina needles.
And its droppings built soil.
In about five years there was a layer of soil over the quarry floor, made by a millipede out of the fallen leaves of one of the only trees that would grow there.
Into that soil, other trees could take root.
Within about fifteen years, the old quarry had become a forest that sustained itself: more than a hundred indigenous species, and in time more than two million trees.
Fish were farmed in ponds among the trees, and from nineteen eighty a tilapia farm produced thirty to thirty five tonnes of fish a year.
In nineteen eighty four, the nature trail on the old quarry floor opened to the public.
Haller was named to the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Five Hundred Roll of Honour, and the park was named after him. Haller Park.
It is among the best known quarry restorations in the world. It is what this company did with land it had finished using, once it decided to.
Where there was white stone, there is a forest, and people walk in it.
And down among the needles, doing the work it always did, is the millipede.
Chikuyumtole, or Diani Estate
Denyenye is a village in Matuga, in Kwale County, on the coast south of Mombasa. Its chairman is Ali Bakari Shambi. He was born in nineteen thirty nine.
By the villagers’ account, in nineteen fifty two the colonial government forced their families off their farmland.
Ali Bakari Shambi told reporters: “My father and mother refused to relocate, and they were jailed for a week.”
The company says it bought the land in nineteen fifty four, from a private owner.
The villagers put their ancestral land there at about fifteen hundred acres. They call it Chikuyumtole. The company calls it Diani Estate. It is one piece of ground with two names, and the two names are the dispute.
Three stone boundary beacons stand on the land. The date on them is nineteen fifty five.
In nineteen ninety seven, during unrest on the coast, the General Service Unit, Kenya’s paramilitary police, was deployed to the land.
From two thousand and five, the private security company G4S guarded it, with dogs.
In two thousand and seven, the GSU set up a permanent camp on the site, of about thirty officers. Holcim, which controlled Bamburi until twenty twenty four, says the camp is there at the request of the National Government.
An elder of the village, who says she is about a hundred years old, told reporters: “We are guarded like pigs here for farming on our own land.”
In November twenty twenty four, a consortium of news organisations, supported by the Pulitzer Center, published an investigation into the land.
The investigation reported two deaths, one in two thousand and four and one in twenty twenty three, which the families of the two men attribute to beatings by GSU officers.
It reported allegations of rape by GSU officers in twenty eleven and twenty fifteen, six dog bite incidents attributed to G4S, and beatings.
Twelve police reports were filed through a local group, the Kwale Mining Alliance, which says the police did not follow up.
None of these allegations has been adjudicated. Holcim and G4S deny wrongdoing.
The reporters also asked about ownership. The company could not produce the original nineteen fifty four deed.
A Ministry of Lands letter gives the first block of the land as a hundred and sixty two hectares. The lease the company showed, at a meeting in October twenty twenty four, gives the same block as three hundred and ninety two.
For the second block, the Ministry dates the lease from two thousand and one. The company’s certificate dates it from twenty sixteen.
The documents were shown to the reporters on a screen, at a private club in Nairobi. They were not allowed to photograph them, for what they were told were security reasons.
A former Bamburi manager, who was not named, told them: “Bamburi acquired Blocks one, three and four illegally, because there are no documents.”
Holcim and Bamburi responded on the day the investigation was published. Their statement said: “Bamburi Cement owns and has full legal title to all four blocks of the land at the Matuga site, Diani Estate, where it has a permit to build a clinker production facility in full compliance with government regulations.”
Holcim said the GSU is a state security detail, stationed at the site since two thousand and seven at the National Government’s request, and that it does not provide services to Bamburi. It said two recorded incidents were investigated, and that it found no evidence of wrongdoing.
G4S said its one dog is deployed only at night, on a double leash, and that in one case its handler acted in self defence.
The claims have gone down several roads. A class action for eleven community members, reported in the Kwale High Court. Twenty nine petitions in Kwale before the National Land Commission. An inquiry by the Kenya Human Rights Commission. A complaint to the OECD, reported as being prepared. And the twelve police reports.
None of them has a reported outcome.
The company says it holds full title. The villagers say the land was taken from them in nineteen fifty two. No court has ruled.
The Thinning
In nineteen seventy, Bamburi’s shares were listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange. Kenyans could buy into the company. Control stayed in Europe.
In nineteen eighty nine, the French group Lafarge bought Cementia. In two thousand and one, it bought Blue Circle and became the majority owner.
In twenty fifteen, Lafarge merged with Holcim of Switzerland, and the merged group held about fifty eight point six percent of Bamburi. Listed in Nairobi, run from Paris, and then from Zurich.
In twenty twelve, Bamburi made a profit of four point nine billion shillings. In twenty twenty two, it made a hundred and eighty one million.
Newer rivals had taken customers, among them Mombasa Cement, Savannah Cement and National Cement. Bamburi’s market share, about thirty six percent in twenty fifteen, was thirty two point six percent a year later, the last standalone figure we found.
Imported clinker and power costs were eating into margins as early as twenty thirteen.
In twenty eighteen the company spent a hundred and fifty three million shillings on redundancy packages, and did not disclose how many people left.
By the end of twenty twenty four, Bamburi Cement had three hundred and sixty six permanent employees. A hundred and fifty six of them worked at the Mombasa plant.
About a decade earlier, the reported figure was around eight hundred and fifty. Part of that fall is the group getting smaller: by the end of twenty twenty four, its Ugandan business, Hima Cement, had been sold.
The rest, no source breaks down. Where those jobs went, and who runs the quarry, the kilns and the trucks today, on contract or as casual labour, no public record says.
None of this was a collapse. The company blamed twenty twenty two on inflation, freight costs and the war in Ukraine. At no point does the record show it close to dying. It thinned.
Its owner was leaving. Holcim was pulling out of markets it called fragmented, from Zambia to Brazil, and in twenty twenty three it sold its stake in Mbeya Cement, in Tanzania, to Amsons Group of Dar es Salaam.
For twenty twenty three, Bamburi reported a net loss of three hundred and ninety nine million shillings, and paid a record dividend of one point nine nine billion.
In March twenty twenty four, the sale of Hima Cement in Uganda completed, for a hundred and twenty million dollars, eighty four million of it for Bamburi’s seventy percent.
Those proceeds were paid out to shareholders as a special dividend: eighteen shillings and twenty five cents a share, six point six three billion shillings in all.
By our own arithmetic, not a reported figure, Holcim’s share of those two dividends comes to roughly five billion shillings.
Within the year, Holcim had sold Bamburi itself. Each step is documented: a record dividend paid on a loss, the Uganda cash paid out, then the sale. The reading is ours. The cash left before the owner did.
Sixty-Five Shillings
On the tenth of July, twenty twenty four, Amsons Group of Tanzania offered sixty five shillings a share for Bamburi Cement. That valued the company at about twenty three point six billion shillings, a premium of forty four percent.
Amsons was founded in Dar es Salaam in two thousand. Its managing director since two thousand and six is Edha Nahdi, a name that also appears in the Kenyan press as Edhah Abdallah Munif.
The group already ran a grinding plant in Dar es Salaam. Nahdi’s stated aim was to be one of the largest cement makers in Kenya and Tanzania by twenty thirty.
Holcim’s two holding companies, which together held about fifty eight point six percent of Bamburi, signed an irrevocable undertaking to accept.
In August, a Kenyan company made a higher offer. Savannah Clinker bid seventy shillings a share, and promised to keep Bamburi listed in Nairobi, a Kenyan public company. It had its own plans for a clinker plant in Kitui.
Its chairman and main shareholder was Benson Ndeta. He had founded Savannah Cement, left it in twenty twenty two, and at thirty one had chaired East African Portland Cement.
On the second of October, Amsons and Holcim’s holding companies mutually terminated the undertaking, so that shareholders could weigh the competing offers.
On the twenty second of October, Savannah Clinker raised its offer to seventy six shillings and fifty five cents a share, about twenty seven point seven billion shillings.
Three days later, Amsons’ offer opened for acceptance. It would close on the fifth of December.
On the fourteenth of November, while that offer was open, the consortium’s investigation into the Kwale land was published.
In late November, Benson Ndeta was arrested. He was charged over an alleged fraud of four point five billion shillings against Absa Bank, linked to Savannah Cement.
No conviction has been reported in any source we found. A former Vice President, Kalonzo Musyoka, called the arrest politically motivated, which is an allegation.
Savannah Clinker said that after the arrest, its financier wanted further due diligence. It asked for sixty more days. The Capital Markets Authority refused.
On the fourth of December, Savannah Clinker withdrew its offer.
On the fifth of December, Amsons’ offer closed with ninety six point five four percent of Bamburi Cement.
Sixty five shillings a share, for a company a Kenyan rival had offered seventy six shillings and fifty five cents for, weeks earlier, with financing that was never put to the test.
For seventy three years, the controlling owner of Bamburi had been European. Now it was Tanzanian. It still was not Kenyan.
On the twenty eighth of February, twenty twenty five, trading in Bamburi shares was suspended. The last minority shareholders were bought out, compulsorily, at sixty five shillings.
After fifty five years, Bamburi Cement left the Nairobi Securities Exchange.
The Ground Under the Plan
In twenty twenty five, its first full year under Amsons, Bamburi made a profit of three point zero eight billion shillings, on turnover of twenty four point nine billion.
The company credited pricing discipline, growth in its retail and key accounts business, and nine hundred and seventy nine million shillings saved by shedding unproductive assets.
It declared no dividend. Nearly all of the profit now belongs to one shareholder.
It is a real result. It is also one year.
Holcim was not quite done leaving Kenya. In November twenty twenty five, an Amsons company, Kalahari Cement, completed its purchase of Holcim’s twenty nine point two percent of East African Portland Cement, Bamburi’s historic rival and a former state corporation.
It then moved on the stake held by the National Social Security Fund.
By one press estimate, the two companies together give Amsons about thirty one percent of Kenya’s cement capacity.
In February twenty twenty six, the Competition Authority cleared the pension fund deal on one condition: no layoffs for eighteen months. We found no comparable public condition attached to the Bamburi takeover.
In December twenty twenty five, Bamburi signed a thirty two billion shilling contract to build a clinker plant at Matuga, in Kwale County. President William Ruto witnessed the signing.
Clinker is the half made material that cement is ground from, and the company had long paid for imported clinker.
The plant would take the company’s clinker capacity from one million tonnes a year to two point six million. First clinker is due in twenty twenty eight.
The plant is going onto the Matuga site, Diani Estate. That is the land Holcim said, in November twenty twenty four, the company holds full title to. It is the land the villagers of Denyenye say was taken from them in nineteen fifty two.
It is the land for which the company could not produce the original deed to reporters.
Whether the plant’s footprint covers the particular blocks the villagers contest is not established, and this episode does not say that it does.
The security allegations date from the Holcim years, and they were made against state police and a private contractor. The plant belongs to Amsons. The ground is the same.
In Kwale, forty eight residents say they were paid a fifth of their agreed compensation, with the rest promised within ninety days. Nearly three years later, they say, it had not come.
On the thirtieth of April, twenty twenty six, the Kwale Environment and Land Court declined jurisdiction over their petition, because the matter was already before the High Court.
In August twenty twenty six, Bamburi’s chief executive, Geoffrey Ndugwa, visited the Matuga site, met the Mwachome Project Affected Persons Committee, and toured areas set aside for resettlement and what the company called livelihood restoration.
The company’s account of that visit sets the resettlement against the World Bank’s Environmental and Social Framework.
That framework describes a process. It does not tell us how much the families are being paid, how many households are moving, where they are going, or what they say about it. None of that is in the public record we found. The company’s release names a committee, not a person.
And the new owners have not said publicly how they view the dispute over the land.
On the title itself, no court has ruled.
At Matuga, the ground is being cleared for a kiln.
Beside it, a resettlement is under way, with a committee, and without a ruling.
In nineteen fifty one, a cement man from Vienna, backed by money from Zurich and London, found a coral reef under the bush on the Kenyan coast.
The owners changed. Zurich and London, then Paris, then Zurich again, now Dar es Salaam. Not one controlling owner was Kenyan. The ground stayed where it was.
On one piece of it, the company grew a forest out of bare stone, and let the public in.
Another piece it has held since nineteen fifty four, guarded and disputed, passed from owner to owner with the question still attached.
The company that became famous for healing one piece of land is now building its future on another that no owner has ever had to account for. This is Asili Africa. Every empire has an origin. See you on the next one.
Key Takeaways
- The Reef. In eighteen sixty seven, Felix Mandl’s grandfather founded a cement works at Podsused, near Zagreb.
- Chikuyumtole, or Diani Estate. Denyenye is a village in Matuga, in Kwale County, on the coast south of Mombasa.
- The Thinning. In nineteen seventy, Bamburi’s shares were listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange.
- The Ground Under the Plan. In twenty twenty five, its first full year under Amsons, Bamburi made a profit of three point zero eight billion shillings, on turnover of twenty four point nine billion.
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