“We have lost everything.” New Amnesty International report documents the violent evictions of Maasai Indigenous communities from Loliondo, Tanzania

In 1959, the Maasai were evicted from the Serengeti National Park and moved to Loliondo, a division in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro district. Since then, the Maasai have several times been forcibly evicted from their traditional lands.

In 1992, Tanzania’s then-President, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, did a deal with the deputy minister of defence of the United Arab Emirates, Brigadier Mohamed Abdul Rahim Al Ali. In exchange for millions of dollars to Tanzania’s armed forces, the Tanzanian government gave the brigadier’s hunting company, Otterlo Business Corporation, exclusive hunting rights on an area of 400,000 hectares to the east of the Serengeti National Park.

The Maasai were not consulted about this.

Violent forced evictions took place in 2009, 2013, 2017, and 2022 - all in the name of conservation.

Otterlo Business Corporation has long lobbied for an area of 1,500 square kilometres to the east of the Serengeti to be converted into a protected area. But this land is important grazing land for the Maasai and is Maasai village land.

In June 2022, security forces violently crushed protests by the Maasai against a demarcation exercise on this 1,500 km² area of land.

A new report by Amnesty International documents how the Tanzanian authorities have resorted to violence, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and forced evictions against members of the Maasai Indigenous community living in Loliondo, Tanzania.

The report is based on research that Amnesty International carried out between June 2022 and May 2023 into the evictions of the Maasai from Loliondo.

A 69-year-old woman now living in Kenya told Amnesty International that,

“Land is everything to us. Our culture, our identity, our livelihood. We have lost everything.”

June 2022 state violence

Eyewitnesses to the violence in June 2022 told Amnesty International that security forces attacked them in their homes. They destroyed food, crashed into motorbikes with their vehicles, and beat anyone they came across.

Security forces destroyed homes, huts and enclosures for livestock by driving heavy trucks through them. Security personnel came into people’s homes and stole money and other valuables. The Maasai can no longer graze their cattle close to where beacons marking the 1,500 km² area of land have been erected.

They cannot even walk near the demarcated area, let alone go inside it, because security forces would beat them or confiscate their animals. The report states that,

People who were arrested for various offences have had to sell livestock to pay for legal fees. Many others, when found inside the 1,500km² area, have had their livestock impounded by wildlife authorities and have had to pay exorbitant fines to have them released. Those who were unable to pay the fines had their animals auctioned off by the authorities. This has impoverished many of those who still live in Loliondo.

In a statement, Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East and Southern Africa, says,

“This crucial report reveals how Tanzania’s security forces resorted to the use of brutal force when evicting the Maasai from 1,500 square kilometres of their ancestral lands in Loliondo. It also highlights total disregard for due process and free prior and informed consent of the affected Maasai people in the decision-making process that was used to justify the forced evictions.”

Conservation and human rights

Amnesty International’s report challenges the Tanzanian authorities’ claim that evicting the Maasai is necessary to conserve the land and biodiversity. Amnesty International is calling on the authorities “to ensure Indigenous peoples are offered leadership roles in conservation, allowing them to protect the land by using their traditional knowledge, as they have done for generations.”

The report notes that the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework sets out a target that,

[B]y 2030 at least 30 per cent of terrestrial, inland water, and of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, are effectively conserved and managed through ecologically representative, well-connected and equitably governed systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, recognizing indigenous and traditional territories, where applicable, and integrated into wider landscapes, seascapes and the ocean, while ensuring that any sustainable use, where appropriate in such areas, is fully consistent with conservation outcomes, recognizing and respecting the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities including over their traditional territories.

“Human rights and biodiversity conservation therefore are not two separate issues,” Amnesty International writes. “They are two sides of the same coin.”

This is in dramatic contrast to the way the Tanzanian government licensed the whole of Loliondo division and part of Sale division to the Otterlo Business Corporation for elite safari tourism and trophy hunting. The government has now declared the 1,500 km² area part of the Pololeti Game Controlled Area, despite the fact that the land is registered as village land.

The Pan African Lawyers Union has issued a call for the Tanzanian government to reverse the Government Notice declaring the 1,500 km² area of village land as the Pololeti Game Controlled Area.

Amnesty International’s report ends with a series of recommendations. The first three of Amnesty International’s recommendations are to the President of Tanzania, Samia Suluhu Hassan:

• Ensure that Tanzanian authorities respect, protect, promote, and fulfil the human rights of everyone and halt the ongoing forced eviction of the affected Maasai community from their ancestral lands in the Loliondo division.

• Ensure that Tanzanian authorities recognize the Maasai as an Indigenous people and further recognize their right to their ancestral lands in Loliondo.

• Suspend any land acquisition plans in Loliondo and ensure that none proceed unless the Maasai community has given their free, prior, and informed consent in genuine consultations.

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