Maasai Predicament Under the Rule of Wildlife Preservation

By Navaya ole Ndaskoi

Not very long ago, Europeans could no longer stand poverty and hunger facing them. So they took into seas, without any visa. When Europeans arrived in America shortly after 1492, they found the Indians living on the land with a wide range of natural resources. Colonialists gunned down herds of wildlife. The dimension of poaching in that era has had no equal anywhere since. The Native Americans were also hunted down like dogs.

In 1884, a big conference was held in Berlin, Germany, to decide the fate of Africa. In this conference, Africa was divided up among the different European colonial powers. On the East African coast, the country, which became known as Tanganyika, became a German colony. Kenya became a British colony. The line drawn in Berlin could divide the two territories with a straight line which ran for four hundred miles across the middle of Maasailand, dividing the Maasai into two countries, Kenya and Tanganyika.

The different colonial powers introduced a new system of Government, and brought in white settlers to occupy the land. They produced cash crops, and started commercial ranching. And they took away the best lands from the indigenous peoples and allocated it to settlers without considering what would be the effect on the local communities. Land alienation has continued, and the Maasai were among the people most affected by land alienation during colonialism. When the two countries gained independence in the beginning of the 1960s, the process of land alienation for “development” continued.

Maasailand is an area where wild animals are plenty. So when Europeans came, literally, every one of them was carrying a gun. They started shooting wildlife!

The animals had always been where the traditional indigenous livestock keepers had lived for more than 3,000 years. The land has always been secure with its natural resources. With the coming of the Europeans, the beginning of an era of destruction began. Europeans killed wildlife. To create national parks, they had to eject local people.

The Maasai were pushed out more than anybody else. Even now, more than 60% of the wild animals of East Africa are found in Maasai territory. The borders of the national parks are artificial. For the wild animals, they do not exist. Inside the park you find wild animals. Outside the park, the few areas where the Maasai are left with, there are still many wild animals. Just like today, the Maasai were not allowed to go with their cattle to graze inside the parks. But the wild animals have all along grazed outside the parks.

Wildlife conservation in Tanzania dates as far back as 1891 when laws controlling hunting were first enacted by the Germans. In 1921, the British established the Game Department. In 1928, Ngorongoro Crater Closed was established. A year later, the Serengeti Game Reserve was established. In 1951 the Serengeti National Park, which incorporated the Ngorongoro Crater, was gazetted.
After “independence,” many wildlife-protected areas were established. Today Tanzania has set aside nearly 48% of its territory for wildlife conservation. This is in the form of 12 National Parks (4%), 32 Game Reserves (15%), and 38 Game Controlled Areas (8%). Ngorongoro Conservation Area (1%) plus over 8% to other de facto wildlife protected areas such as “corridors, buffer zones” etc. There are 570 Forest Reserves that cover nearly 15% of which 3% overlap with other areas devoted to wildlife conservation.

The inclusion of certain species into endangered ones is done on a global scale, that is, the endangered species may be abundant in one region, but globally endangered. This puts local communities living in and/or adjacent to wildlife-protected areas at a very tight corner. Yet, conservationists want more land for wildlife conservation, in the name of the so-called “Community Based Conservation,” emanating from the Rio Conference 1992.

The whole ploy is, virtually, to make Tanzania a tourism dependent economy. Adam Smith’s comparative advantage theory seems to be the agenda. This Order makes it possible for the North to determine and control the prices of both exports and imports in developing economies. What would happen if Tanzania is dictated to reduce say, park-entering fees? Any suspicious of insecurity in the country concerned or even in neighbouring countries is enough to divert tourists. Tourism is not reliable in Africa.

Today Tanzania is among the leading of the few countries in the world that has designated a huge portion of its land area for wildlife conservation. Sadly, the contribution of the tourism sector to the national economy has persistently been dismal.

According to Tanzania Wildlife Policy 1998, the wildlife contribution to the Gross Domestic Product is about 2%. Out of over 30 million Tanzanians, the sector employed an average of 92,556 people per year from 1991 through 1999.

Tourism is considered the jet engine empowering the Tanzanian exchequer. It must be realised that whatever is officially said, the main motive behind the protection of wild animals in East Africa, is to serve the interests of tourism. And money is being made. The Governments of Tanzania and Kenya and international capitals are making money.

Professor Seithy Chachage wrote in his book entitled Environment; Aid and Politics in Zanzibar: “…just after Christmas in 1996, two chartered planes landed in Zanzibar, straight from Italy with more than 2,000 tourists who were going to spend their time in the beaches of Zanzibar and then fly to Arusha and back home”.

At this point it may not be a bad idea to make assumptions. One, assume the said 2,000 tourists visited Ngorongoro Conservation Area. They were accommodated in a foreign owned hotel for two days. Each tourist paid a total of US $ 150 fees for hotel expenses per day. The hotel owner (X) earned a total of US $ 600,000 in two days. Let this amount be what X earned in the year 1996. X was tax exempted, an incentive “to attract FDI.”

Two, assume the said planes belong to another investor (Y). A tourist paid US $ 2400 as air fair for the whole safari. Y earned a gross total of US $ 4,800,000 in 1996. And British Airway and KLM are the leading airlines ferrying tourists to and fro Tanzania.

The majority of Tanzanians live far below the “poverty line” earning less than US $ 246 per capita. Remember the average income per capita is obtained by an arithmetically equal distribution of wealth, which no Utopia is expected to achieve. Even so, it will take an average Tanzanian over 2,430 and 19,500 years to earn what X and Y respectively earned in one year. And the average life expectancy in Tanzania is estimated at 50 years.

In practical terms, land allocated to wildlife conservation is reserved for tourists and investors who are significantly foreigners. Foreign investors own about 80% of the entire tourist hotels and lodges. They own nearly 90% of the air travel and about 90% of tourist hunting business and transport. They own about 60% of all tour operator firms.

Moringe ole Parkipuny, former Member of Parliament for Ngorongoro Districts said in 1989 that tourism in East Africa, and the whole policy of preservation in Tanzania, could not be sustained, and therefore would not have brought harm to the indigenous people of East Africa, without the involvement of Western countries. Because there are many international conservation organizations based in these countries, which are active in supporting and propping up the anti-people preservation strategies in Africa.

These include organisations like the World Bank, African Wildlife Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, the New York Zoological Society, USAID, DfID, GTZ, FINNIDA, DANIDA, UNDP, UNEP, Frankfurt Zoological Society, Green Peace, International Union for Conservation of Nature and many others. All based in the temperate North.

“These organizations have not come to recognize the link, the historical link, between indigenous culture and the survival of the wildlife heritage and other biological resources in the developing countries. At least in East Africa, they still pursue the old approach, the colonial approach, which sets aside nature from people,” Parkipuny maintains.

He said, “Most of the tourists who go to East Africa come from these countries. So in many ways, the citizens of these countries are supporting the policies that are destroying the cultural and biological heritage of Africans. Most of these international organizations, apart from getting money from corporations, also depend on contributions made by ordinary citizens of these countries. These citizens contribute with the understanding that the money is going to be put to good use. But that money destroys indigenous cultures.”

Locals get almost nothing out of conservation accrued benefits. There is much talk on the need of wildlife neighbouring communities to share the benefits of wildlife conservation. This loud cry is neither supported by enforceable legislation nor by clearly spelt out Government policies. To Government functionaries, it is enough to proudly talk of the earnings from wildlife and highlight it as a percentage of the national income.

If the successes of conservation in terms of the welfare of rural people in and/or adjacent to wildlife-protected areas are gauged, obviously they are failure. Yet the villages in and around protected areas have little or almost no Government-supported infrastructures.

Take Ngorongoro District for instance. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is in the District. The District is bordering Serengeti National Park, Masai Mara Game Reserve and other wildlife protected areas. But there is no even Government District hospital in Ngorongoro. And it may take a week to travel from Arusha to Loliondo (the District headquarters), just less than 400 km, depending on weather for there is almost no road. And there is no any public advanced level secondary education school in the District.

This situation brings to question the legitimacy of wildlife conservation vis-à-vis the right of rural people to lead a decent life given nature endowment in their localities.

The Government just gazettes the land for “national interest” or give it to “investors.” Conservation lobbyists and donors are crucifying villagers in Tanzania in the name of conservation. In this way, local communities have lost their fundamental human rights.

In 1992, the Government granted the hunting permit to the Brigadier Mohammed Abdulrahim Al-Ali of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates who owns the Otterlo Business Corporation Ltd. The grabbed land is a birthright of thousands of villagers of Arash, Soitsambu, Oloipiri, Ololosokwan, Loosoito and Oloirien villages of Loliondo Division, Ngorongoro.

In 1951, the colonialists declared the land on which the Maasai and their ancestors for hundreds of years had lived, Mkomazi Game Reserve. Initially, the Maasai were allowed to stay on as before. In 1974, a new Conservation Act was passed requiring the Maasai to leave. However, this was not enforced until 1988, following the usual outlook of international conservationists to exclude human inhabitation, when a new conservation programme was launched at the reserve and the donors insisted the Maasai be evicted.

The last century has witnessed a growing awareness of the disastrous consequences of a reckless imperialistic approach to development in Maasailand. It is apparent that Tanzania is passing through the most serious crisis ever experienced since independence.

The British consultant, Professor Patrick McAuslan, whose work was funded by the British Overseas Development Administration, drafted the new Land Act 1999 and Village Land Act 1999 of Tanzania. Just like the British Colonial Land Ordinance 1923, the “new” Acts vested power in the executive arm of the state over control and management of land. Implicitly, the Act will further pauperise the Maasai.

(Navaya ole Ndaskoi is the Co-ordinator of an informal group called Indigenous Rights for Survival International).

References

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End.