by AMBREENA MANJI
Ambreena Manji writes about the Tanzanian government’s threatened eviction of more than 80,000 Maasai from the Ngorongoro world heritage site in the country. The government claim that the Maasai must be cleared from their land in the interests of conservation and ecology wildlife corridors. Manji writes about what is really going on.
In the past few weeks, the Tanzanian government has renewed its attempt to demarcate land in the Loliondo ward, Ngorongoro district in the north of the country as a wildlife sanctuary, effectively banning the Maasai from their indigenous land. As semi-nomadic pastoralists, Maasai livelihoods depend on cattle herding and some crop cultivation. Access to pastures and to water for their cattle is vital. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979. But the Maasai have long lived with the threat of displacement to make way for tourism and for conservancies. The government has accused the Maasai of getting in the way of animal migration routes and of breeding grounds and claim that in the interests of conservation and ecology wildlife corridors must be created over Maasai land. The Maasai have organised to resist these moves, accusing the government of using wildlife conservation as a pretext for their eviction.
However, in keeping with Tanzania’s land liberalisation and promotion of foreign investment since the late 1990s, it is widely reported that the cause of this renewed interest in Ngorongoro is the government’s plans to grant exclusive hunting rights in an area of 579 square miles to foreign investors. For the Maasai, this is an intensification of a long-term trend that dates from independence. Since then, the Maasai have already lost over seventy per cent of their land to ‘conservation’. In 1992 an investor from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was granted a license to trophy hunt in the area. In 2018, a report detailed the devastating impact of private companies in the area: a company called the Ortello Business Corporation had evicted Maasai in order to run a hunting block for the private use of the UAE royal family and their guests and continued to operate in the area after their licence had been cancelled by the Tanzanian Ministry of Natural Resources.
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