“This will finish us”. Conservation, trophy hunting, and tourism is destroying Maasai livelihoods and culture in northern Tanzania

A superb article in The Atlantic reveals the impact of government policies on the Maasai.

PHOTO Credit: Maasai, Loliondo.

A recent article in The Atlantic by Stephanie McCrummen investigates how Indigenous Maasai communities are being evicted to make way for conservation and the safari industry. It’s a beautifully written, but extremely upsetting and depressing, article. It is well worth reading in full.

McCrummen made two long trips to Tanzania last year to research the article. She writes that,

For all its accomplishments, the cause of saving the planet has become a trillion-dollar business, a global scramble in which wealthy nations are looking to the developing world not just for natural resources, but for nature itself. The wealthy players include not only Europeans and Americans but Arabs and Chinese and others. On the African continent, political leaders are enthusiastic about what so-called green foreign investment might mean for their own economies (and, maybe, their bank accounts).

Conservation, tourism, and trophy hunting on Maasai land

The Maasai migrated to northern Tanzania 400 years ago. In the Maa language the area is called Siringet, which means “the place where the land runs on forever”.

The Serengeti National Park was established by the British colonial authorities in 1940. It covers an area of 14,762 square kilometres. The Maasai were evicted to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. UNESCO subsequently declared Serengeti and Ngorongoro to be World Heritage Sites, which brought in new restrictions.

Western tourists started arriving, looking for the Africa portrayed in films. That Africa is “one of pristine beauty and big game, not people grazing cattle,” McCrummen writes.

The Tanzanian government has also leased land to foreign trophy hunting and safari companies - the most notorious being the Otterlo Business Corporation. The Maasai were not even consulted before their land in Loliondo was handed over to this company from the United Arab Emirates that provides trophy hunting for the Dubai royal family.

More evictions under Samia Suluhu Hassan

The threat of evictions has been increasing since 2021, when Samia Suluhu Hassan became president of Tanzania. The government announced plans to evict about 100,000 Maasai who lived in Ngorongoro. The plans included resettling them in “modern houses” in another part of the country.

But a 2022 report by the Oakland Institute revealed that, “the sites lack adequate water resources and grazing land while promises of improved social and health services by the government remain unfulfilled”.

“And more was coming,” McCrummen writes:

a $7.5 billion package with the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a part, that included new plans for tourism and conservation. A $9.5 million deal with the Chinese for a geological park that overlapped with additional Maasai villages. An offer from Tanzania to make Donald Trump Jr. - an avid trophy hunter - an official “tourism ambassador.” New maps and proposals from the government indicated that further tracts could soon be placed off-limits, including a sacred site that the Maasai call the Mountain of God.

“This is 80% of our land,” a Maasai elder told McCrummen. “This will finish us.”

In June 2022, police and military vehicles arrived in Loliondo to demarcate an area of 1,500 km² of important Maasai grazing land as a game reserve for the Otterlo Business Corporation.

The government has now declared that the 1,500 km² area is the Pololeti Game Reserve.

Livelihoods destroyed

McCrummen tells the life story of Songoyo, a Maasai man who once owned 75 cows. Before the government seized them that is. His compound was bulldozed. The Otterlo Business Corporation took his land.

He has seen the Dubai royals shooting animals from trucks with semi-automatic rifles. “Once, they pulled up in the middle of my cows and I saw them shooting so many antelope,” he told McCrummen. “They just kill, kill, kill!”

Songoyo now works as a herder for hire, working for a distant relative, walking huge distances to sell sheep at a market in Kenya. His life has become incredibly difficult since the government took his cattle. His livelihood, like that of thousands of other Maasai herders, has been destroyed for the benefit of the United Arab Emirates trophy hunting company. The Tanzanian government is complicit in this land grab.

Otterlo Business Corporation and officials from the United Arab Emirates did not reply to McCrummen’s requests for interviews.

McCrummen also requested an interview with President Hassan. Instead the government arranged an interview with Albert Msando, a district commissioner, who told her that, “Whatever I am answering is whatever the president would have answered.”

“For the public interest, we have to relocate them,” Msando told McCrummen of the Maasai.

McCrummen writes that,

He also made it clear that if persuasion fails, the government maintains the legal right to remove the Maasai from conservation areas, by force if necessary. “That’s why there are guys here with their shoulders decorated,” Msando said, pointing around the room to police and military officers.

International support for violence and evictions

President Hassan has support from a range of international organisations. The World Bank has been encouraging tourism to Tanzania for several years. In the Ruaha National Park this has led to violent evictions and human rights abuses to make way for increased tourism.

For years, UNESCO has been pushing the Tanzanian government to implement “stringent policies to control population growth” in Ngorongoro. UNESCO also recommended the removal of all people from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in order to create a Nature Reserve.

The Frankfurt Zoological Society has been a partner in managing the Serengeti National Park since the organisation was created in 1958. In a letter to the Frankfurt Zoological Society executive director Christof Schenck, Survival International states that,

FZS still advocates for the racist and colonial Fortress model of conservation, as demonstrated by FZS’s “nature without us, for us” approach to the Serengeti. FZS persists in referring to the local population as one key threat to the survival of the ecosystem, thus promoting the myth of “wilderness”, which has been the underlying philosophy behind Maasai evictions from the start. Last but not least, FZS remains a key promoter and advocate of “wildlife tourism” in the region, which is a major threat to the Maasai and their rights to live in, manage and control their lands, as enshrined in the Tanzanian Constitution and international law.

Pablo Manzano is a Spanish ecologist with the Basque Centre for Climate Change who has carried out research in the Maasai’s territory. McCrummen writes that,

Manzano and others pointed to a growing body of scholarly research demonstrating what the Maasai had long known: that their management of the land did not degrade the Serengeti ecosystem but had actually helped sustain and even create it—the grasslands the Maasai had cultivated for hundreds of years were the same grasslands that many wild animals needed to thrive. In that sense, the land had already been conserved before the Germans, the British, and various international groups decided that they needed to save it.

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