15th April 2010
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I am writing from the small town of Loliondo in northern Tanzania. The British chose these cool, wet, windy hills for their headquarters in Maasailand. Avenues of trees lining the roads, and purple-flowering jacarandas around the government offices of what is now Ngorongoro District, are a testimony to their time here.
It is the Wednesday after Easter. Watchmen pull their blankets – the red Maasai shuka - around their shoulders. The morning is chilly. But politically Loliondo could not be hotter. In the past, the Maasai were renowned for their warrior force, the morans.
The age-sets still open and close to new spear-carriers. But today the formidable army of the Maasai is their women. After centuries of subjugation by their menfolk and by government, they have discovered themselves, building strong village groups numbering thousands of members. They are planning to march on Loliondo tomorrow, April 8, to show their displeasure with governments which have gradually stolen their land to increase state revenues from hunting and tourism.
The women have come together from village to village to make plans to travel into Loliondo to hand back their CCM cards – renouncing their membership of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the party which has ruled the country continuously since 1977. They are protesting the July 2009 evictions and burning of homesteads in Loliondo Game Controlled Area - the north-western division of the district - and government plans to redraw the boundaries of village land and so exclude Maasai livestock from their traditional pastures.
In many countries, this symbolic surrender of party cards would seem a modest protest. But in Tanzania in an election year, it is seismic. The ruling party is not accustomed to being challenged. Word of the women's plans leaked out on Easter Monday ( April 5) after large meetings were held in the villages.
By evening mobile phone networks in Loliondo town were jammed with calls, as the District Commissioner (DC) Elias Wawa Lali came under pressure from Arusha and Dar es Salaam to act, and local civil society organisations (CSO) came under pressure to confess to supporting the women. The Member of Parliament Saning’o Kaika Telele has travelled back from Arusha, fearing his support will collapse ahead of party and national elections. The regional CCM chair and attendant security officers have also arrived.
The authorities' knee-jerk reaction is to hide, rather than discuss, the problem. This is embedded in CCM's genes, whether at national or local level. It seems akin to treason to question the party's authority, and Tanzanian democracy sometimes seems a facade maintained only for the international community.
In town the witch-hunt for perpetrators began yesterday. Civil society organisations are accused of fomenting the protest, and threatened with closure of their programmes. The authorities are so little in touch with life in the villages that it is beyond their imaginings that women could spontaneously undertake such resistance.
In a way they are right. The women have been empowered by more than a decade of support and training by organisations such as Oxfam, ACORD, Pastoralist Women's Council (PWC) and – through its Ereto programme - DANIDA. But in fact the women are working alone. They have each contributed 300/- towards transport costs. They say it is men who have drawn up all past land agreements, and that now it is time women came to the forefront. Their leaders are fearless, articulate and determined.
There has been a frenzy of political and police activity to forestall the women. At 9pm last night, two police vehicles were sent to one of the nearer villages, Ololosokwan, where they found more than 400 women assembled. The police declared the gathering illegal and warned the women that they would be fired on if they moved towards town.
The MP held a midnight meeting with security officers and police in Loliondo. Unintimidated, women have today moved by truck and by foot along village pathways to try to come together near Wasso, 10 km from Loliondo.
A group of about sixty were spotted by police and arrested in mid-afternoon at Wasso airstrip, and brought to the police station in Loliondo. They were questioned for several hours – through an interpreter, since none of the police speaks Maasai.
They were repeatedly asked: 'Who helped organise you?' The police also intercepted 370 women from Ololosokwan in Olipiri village, where they have been held all afternoon to listen to the strictures of the DC. This evening the DC called ACORD, LADO, OXFAM GB and other CSOs in a vain request for vehicles to take the women back to Ololosokwan. Having eventually commandeered transport, he told the women that if they did not get into the vehicles, the police would beat them. The women are – of course - being denied rights of association guaranteed under the Tanzanian constitution.
Today is Karume Day, a holiday, and the women have decided to wait until tomorrow morning to bring their cards to the CCM office. Whether any will now make it seems uncertain. About 500 women are spending the night in the bush near Wasso, some with young children. This is a measure of the women's determination. The authorities may succeed tomorrow in blocking them from the CCM office in Loliondo, but they have done nothing to win back hearts and minds.
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Maasai women have already been active in defence of their land. In October 2009 a delegation made the two-day journey to State House in Dar es Salaam, where they camped for a day outside the gates demanding in vain to 'meet the President we elected', Jakaya Kikwete. Several of their leaders, including Kooya Timan from Ololosokwan, travelled to Gambia in 2009 to attend the 46th African and Human and People's Rights Session. (Others were prevented from boarding their flight from Dar es Salaam.)
The roots of this anger stretch back into colonial times. Maasai communities were moved from the Kenyan Rift Valley by the British early last century, then from the Serengeti in the 1950s to make way for the national park, and in 1974 from Ngorongoro Crater despite the promise that it was theirs 'in perpetuity'.
The current crisis has erupted from a confusion in rights and ownership stemming from the contradictions of village land acts and the Wildlife Conservation Act of 1974. Under the Act, the lands of all 19 villages in Loliondo Division were also designated a Game Controlled Area (GCA).
In 1992 President Mwinyi's government conceded the whole of this Game Controlled Area – almost 5000 sq km - to a member of the Emirati ruling family, Brigadier Mohamed Abdulrahim Al-Ali of Otterlo Business Corporation (OBC). OBC's purpose is game-hunting.
It has gradually asserted its control over a vast tract of land within the GCA belonging to eight villages, until in July 2009, police of the Tanzanian Field Force Unit burnt down 305 homes making about 3000 people homeless. People were beaten, one woman raped and one child was lost and is presumed dead. One man was shot in the face and has lost an eye.
The original agreement between the authorities and OBC states that 'The Brigadia will allow villagers to continue grazing livestock in the area under contract providing they do not harm the wildlife....' ('Brigadia atawaruhusu wanavijiji kunendelea kulisha mifugo yao katika eneo la Mkataba mradi tu wasifanye uhalifu wa aina yoyote.') This was paid no heed during the recent drought, when herders were prevented from taking their starving livestock onto what had been the community's dry season grazing reserve.
It cannot be disputed that some villages have drawn benefits from OBC, in the form of annual payments. Historically those purporting to be Maasai leaders have too readily signed away the rights of their communities. Even with OBC, communities failed to perceive the threat to their livelihoods, and to join together to face it. Until 2007, the villages whose land OBC occupied were each to be paid 3mn Shillings - though this was processed by the District Council and sometimes remained there.
Recently payments rose to 25m/- per annum - and in the case of one village, Soit Sambu, 50m/-. As a PR initiative, cheques were released to 9 villages on August 15, 2009 at the DC's office with media in attendance. Ololosokwan and Maaloni were included, even though they had not signed any agreement with OBC. The OBC contract came to an end in December 2009. Though it has not been renewed, jets from Dubai continue to fly into OBC's airstrip.
Recognising its mistake in rousing the media with forcible evictions, the authorities have more recently resorted to arresting and charging 'encroachers' under the 2004 Environmental Management Act – to protect wealthy Arab hunters shooting wildlife. The irony is not lost on the Maasai who are in their present plight because they eschewed hunting and lived alongside the plains wildlife.
They are the conservators. Two worlds are in collision in Ngorongoro, an ancient herding community now pressing for the education of their children and the development of their communities, and the obscenely rich who look for new playthings. A Tanzanian governnment susceptible to financial incentives holds the ring.
Not far from the OBC 'park', a further 12,760 acres known as 'Sukenya' has been earmarked for a luxury hotel to be built by Massachusetts-based Thomson Safaris. During the last drought in 2009, villages around Sukenya and OBC were unable to access the grasslands of Sukenya and OBC, and lost 70 per cent of their cattle. 'That land is the greenest land, where there is grass and water,' Olmwalmui from Ololosokwan village told me. 'But the animals could not go there. They just died, died.'
The Wildlife Act of 2009 is close to implementation and sets a framework for demarcation of village lands and the game controlled area. But a game controlled area can only be formally established on land removed from the villages. And this land, like Serengeti, and like the land now defended by OBC and Thomson Safaris, would not be open to Maasai livestock. So the Maasai are threatened with a final expulsion that could leave them in village centres which would become little more than displaced camps.
Political efforts to address these wrongs are being thwarted by the lack of accountability and of genuinely democratic institutions in Tanzania. At least ten delegations have come to Loliondo to find the facts and report. The most significant of these was the parliamentary committee led by the Speaker, Samuel Sitta. Their report was to be tabled in Parliament on February 6, and civil society organisations supported eighteen leaders from the villages to attend. But the CCM caucus met the day before and blocked the tabling of the report.
Civil society players now feel that the political process has failed. Their legal efforts also received a setback on 30 March. A case against the DC's enforcement of evictions was dismissed in the district court in Loliondo, on instruction from the Director of Criminal Investigations who said the court did not have a mandate to hear the case. This will now be appealed to the High Court. Another constitutional case challenging the evictions has already been lodged in the High Court.
The government's support for OBC has created an unusual alliance of opposing interests. The myriad tour operators working out of Arusha stand to lose business. Permanent camps operating in the villages, such as Klein's Camp in Ololosokwan, are threatened: recently a tourist group from Klein's were watching a lion, only to see it shot by guests of OBC.
The arch-conservators of the Frankfurt Zoologocal Society, which has in the past supported evictions from the Ngorongoro highlands, is also firmly in the opposition camp. It seems possible that the Tanzanian authorities could kill the goose that lays the golden egg if they continue to grasp at every opportunity to increase their revenues from the northern plains. Maasailand without the Maasai would be a diminished attraction. The hunting of game does not sit happily alongside the ideals of ecotourism. Plans by Kempinski to establish a new luxury hotel within the Crater rim at Ngorongoro have attracted criticism from UNESCO.
Perhaps the best hope of the communities in Ngorongoro is a continued political campaign backed by continued pressure from the international community. EU and US delegations in Dar es Salaam, led by the Danes and Swedes, have visited Loliondo several times since the evictions have condemned government policy. But will they be prepared to sacrifice their relationship with the Tanzanian government, however intransigent and unwholesome, for the sake of one small beleaguered community?
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN
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