by Mark Betancourt
Tanzania’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism announced in March that it plans to forbid 30,000 Maasai tribespeople from entering a 1,500-km stretch of their traditional homeland bordering Serengeti National Park. The Maasai, who depend on this land to support their cattle herds, will face abject poverty if the measure goes through.
This is not the first time the government has denied the Maasai the right to live in Loliondo Game Controlled Area (LGCA), which they legally own under Tanzania’s Village Land Act. In 2009, the government evicted more than 3,000 Maasai from eight villages bordering the national park. More than 200 Maasai huts were burned down and some 50,000 cattle were driven into an area plagued by extreme drought, plunging the community into an immediate crisis. Members of the community also reported rapes and beatings at the hands of government riot police.
Maasai have also been evicted from a total of 13,000 square kilometers of parkland in Tanzania and neighboring Kenya. In addition to the imminent Loliondo evictions, the Tanzanian government has also proposed the removal of 40,000 more people from Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which borders Loliondo to the south.
Maasai women’s organizations have organized sit-ins to protest the Loliondo measure after broader protests failed. At least 1,000 women have participated in the sit-ins, despite a government ban on public gatherings and intimidation from police forces.
The highlands encompassed by the proposed “wildlife corridor” in Loliondo are crucial to Maasai herdsmen during the dry season, and comprise 40% of their total cattle grazing area. Cattle are already stressed by increasingly later rainy seasons as a result of global climate change.
According to Tanzanian officials, the Maasai are overgrazing the land and must be removed in order to protect the area’s wildlife. To drive the point home, the country’s president, Jakaya Kikwete, recently told a group of Maasai pastoralists that “living a nomadic life is not productive.”
Contrary to the government’s stated reasoning, studies show the Maasai are especially good at managing livestock sustainably without taxing the land, and that their methods actually improve conditions for wildlife. Several Maasai organizations, in a recent press statement, claimed that wild animals take refuge in their villages when fleeing recreational hunters. The Maasai also lived in stable balance with the now “protected” ecosystem for more than two centuries before the national park was established. In fact, the LGCA was created with the intention of allowing the pastoralist Maasai to continue their traditional way of life within its borders, but the area’s tourism industry, along with its conservationist façade, has muddled that purpose and whittled away the Maasai’s territory.
Enter the Ortello Business Corporation (OBC), a hunting tourism company from the United Arab Emirates. In 1992, the Tanzanian government gave OBC free reign of the LGCA, where it constructed high-end hunting lodges and a private airstrip for use by UAE dignitaries arriving on hunting excursions. OBC security forces have clashed with Maasai tribespeople ever since, and they are reported to have been involved in carrying out the evictions in 2009. Another tourism company, the US-based Thomson Safaris, has also been accused of violently pushing Maasai herdsman off of its land.
The Maasai are not the only African indigenous group fighting for their land rights. In East Africa alone, the Samburu, Ogiek, Sengwer, Endorois, Turkana and dozens of other tribes are all facing eviction or land rights disputes. In most cases, these groups are fighting to remain on land their people have occupied for hundreds or even thousands of years.
While tourism factors into many of these conflicts, government conservation initiatives and agricultural “land grabs” are the driving forces behind most evictions. The Ogiek of the Mau Forest and the Sengwer of Embobut Forest in Kenya have faced violent removal from their homes, a measure the government claims is necessary to protect some of the region’s vital water catchment areas—despite the fact that settlers from outside the forests, and not the hunter-gatherer native peoples, are responsible for existing environmental damage. Some estimates put the number of Africans displaced in the name of conservation at more than 14 million.
The government also leases huge parcels of land to foreign agriculture companies that replace thousands of small, family-owned vegetable plots with vast corporate farms, crippling local subsistence economies.
Land grabbing destroys the livelihood and culture of pastoralist and hunter-gathering societies by cutting them off from the natural resources on which they depend. Women are particularly vulnerable, as their land rights are less often recognized, their voices are rarely included in negotiations, and they often bear the main responsibility for providing food to their families.
Some indigenous groups have succeeded in bringing legal action against their governments and other responsible actors. The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights recently ruled in favor of the Ogiek community in an ongoing trial regarding the tribe’s customary land tenure in the Mau Forest, placing an injunction on any further evictions until the case is decided. In 2010 the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, a body associated with the African Court, ruled that the Kenyan government’s 1970 eviction of the Endorois people to make way for a wildlife reserve violated international law. The San people living in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in Botswana, long the victims of government abuses, have won two cases in Botswana’s high court establishing their land and water rights.
But even when indigenous groups succeed in winning favorable court rulings, governments often drag their feet in implementing changes. The San have just initiated a third case demanding that the government of Botswana honor its court’s previous rulings by issuing the permits necessary to live and hunt within the CKGR, which it still refuses to do. Despite Kenya’s acknowledgement of the African Commission’s ruling, which is not legally binding, the Endorois are still waiting for any tangible government effort to compensate them for their eviction. And even when governments do take steps to make reparations, it isn’t easy. Once a group has been displaced, it can be complicated, and usually impossible, to return them to the status quo prior to eviction.
Laura Young, a lawyer with ProRights Consulting, a firm that supports communities facing eviction in Kenya, acknowledges how difficult it is to defend the land rights of a group once it no longer occupies the land in question. “If you can stop land loss from taking place in the first place, and stop land status from changing, that is definitely a top priority,” she says. “That stops the chain of incredibly messy legal nightmare that you have to deal with once a community is evicted.”
Often current landowners have bona fide title to their land, and had nothing to do with the eviction of residents before they purchased it. According to Thomson Safaris, it legally acquired its 12,600-acre “Enashiva Nature Refuge” in 2006. Regardless of how companies like Thomson comport themselves now, legally challenging their ownership of the land can be difficult.
Young also points out that any legal action must also be accompanied by capacity building and rights-based education within communities. Without these tools, community members cannot properly assess the threat of land grabs or negotiate with the government once they are initiated. She suggests that governments also need capacity and education, including cultural sensitivity in negotiating with Indigenous groups. For example, despite claims that it would be open to comments from the Maasai community, a general management plan proposed by the Tanzanian government for the Ngorongoro Conservation Area was drawn up and implemented without Maasai participation, let alone approval.
Whether in the name of conservation, tourism, or even human rights, the process of developing Indigenous territories must begin with the Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of the communities affected. No progress can be made when the rights of a community to determine its own future are ignored, and the FPIC process itself depends on well-informed leadership on both sides of the negotiation.
“I firmly believe there are ways to deal with these very complex situations,” says Young. “We can all work together on this and come up with a solution that may not be 100 percent perfect, but it’s going to be better than a whole community of people ending up as squatters.”
Young also stresses how important it is for communities facing land conflicts to support each other. She points out that the Endorois have become ambassadors for land rights in the region, advocating not only for themselves but for indigenous communities throughout the continent. And the network reaches beyond Africa—a petition by the global civic organization Avaaz.org successfully stopped Maasai evictions in Tanzania in 2012, with nearly a million signatures. The petition, which is still active, has now been signed by nearly 2 million people.
First Peoples Worldwide has partnered with Ogiek, Sengwer and Sumburu organizations to fund the kind of education and training projects that strengthen the capacity of these communities to defend their FPIC rights. Two grants to organizations representing the Sengwer helped the community map and document its land claim and receive rights-based training in order to fight government evictions. Several grants to the Ogiek Peoples Development Programme funded a series of workshops for the community members about their rights under Kenya’s new constitution. An emergency grant to the Samburu in early 2012 helped the community attend a similar constitutional rights forum, where they met directly with government officials and, through coordinated media efforts, brought their case to into the public eye.
(Photo from Wikipedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Young_Masai_herder.jpg)