Investigating the Forced Removals of Maasai People in Tanzania
In the middle of January this year, several Maasai people in the Tanzanian village of Komotorok (near Tarangire National Park) were shot by Tanzanian National Park paramilitary units, while another 8 were arrested, and a large number of cattle taken. This incident is not an isolated one - it was a consequence of an effort by the Tanzanian government to evict and relocate Maasai people away from prominent and growing conservation areas in the East African country. GorStra reports - on the context, details, and complications of this pattern of human rights violations.
To begin to understand these evictions, one must first touch on those who are set to be evicted - the Maasai. While ‘Maasai’ may refer to speakers of the Maa language, the term is reserved usually for the nomadic people of the same name living throughout Kenya and northern Tanzania, who subsist mostly on the products of their livestock. The tribe, who have managed by-and-large to retain their pastoral traditions, however, have come under increasing pressure from the Tanzanian government to modernise and settle away from the people’s traditional territory.
Tourism is the second significant element in the background of this issue. The sector is an important one for the Tanzanian government - in 2018, personal travel exports (that is, goods and services purchased by international travellers visiting Tanzania) were valued at $2.45 billion, at that time about half the value of the country’s total goods exports (at $5.62 billion). UN Tourism estimates, more boldly, that the sector is responsible for 17% of the country’s GDP, and that it is Tanzania’s third-largest employment source. Powering this tourism industry is Tanzania’s natural environment: the nation is famed for its vast savannah plains and the wildlife inhabiting it, and attractions such as the Kilimanjaro mountain or Serengeti National Park attract thousands upon thousands of tourists each year (the latter of which was visited by over 450 000 people in 2019). 39.66% of the country’s land is protected in some form, which provides great opportunity for travel companies such as &Beyond or Otterlo Business Corporation (OBC) to provide safari tours, or - for the latter - hunting concessions, all of which generate large revenue flows for the country.
It is this reliance on tourism (and Tanzania’s tourism base originating in the attraction of a large, ‘untainted’ natural landscape) that is pushing the Tanzanian government to evict - sometimes forcefully, sometimes subtly - the Maasai people from their territory (and, as mentioned, encouraging them to adopt more modern lifestyles in the process). The traditional grounds of the Maasai people already uncomfortably intersect and overlap with national parks and conservation areas, but the Tanzanian government is expanding these, with devastating effects for the Maasai. For example, it was recently decreed (on the 17th of January this year, but a few days after the incident near Tarangire) that human habitation within Ngorongoro National Park would be prohibited - it is estimated that over 100 000 will need to be forcibly removed for this order to be fully completed.
Evictions from conservation areas are not new, and can be traced as far back as 1956 (although, admittedly, these orders preceded independent Tanzania). However, their frequency does anecdotally seem to be increasing, with further notices in 2009, 2013, and 2017. Efforts are only becoming greater in 2024, and eviction notices have been served to those living close to the Tarangire National Park as well as the planned expanded Kilimanjaro Airport. Maasais face, as reported by Amnesty International, excessive use of force during involuntary evictions, as well as arbitrary arrest, torture, and detention. Further pressure is placed by the government upon the Maasai by severe restrictions on or decreasing access to healthcare, water, and land, which constitutes a less immediately apparent attempt to force the community away.
These evictions are more significant than the material cost of relocation: Ngorongoro National Park, for example, contains within it over 55 sites of significance (either ritual, ethnobotanical, or spiritual) which will become far more difficult to access should the Maasai be unable to reside in the area - meaning that, essentially, the Tanzanian government is extinguishing a way of life in order to pave the way for greater economic gains.
It should be noted, however, that it is not only the Tanzanian government pushing for these evictions - private companies, who would benefit greatly from expanded tourism opportunities, are complicit. The aforementioned OBC has been reported as accompanying and aiding Tanzanian National Parks paramilitary forces in their eviction efforts, while others (including &Beyond) now occupy land once belonging to the Maasai - indicating at the very least an apathy towards the human rights violations committed against the population whose land and livelihoods are being forced from them.
An adjacent debate this author feels is pertinent to address, if only to dispel potential doubts, is the perceived Malthusian conservation problem which posits that, if unregulated, communities will naturally and infinitely grow, to a point which requires a level of resources beyond what the land can provide without degradation. Applied to this context, it would be believed by Malthusians that should the Maasai be eternally granted the right to work their land (either by allowing livestock to graze or by cultivating crops - the latter is rarer considering the population’s nomadic trends, but it still occurs), they will eventually destroy their natural environment. And, despite potential problems with this theory, it is one some think is adequately evidenced by degradation already occurring - prominently, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Council, who themselves advocated as recently as 2019 for the voluntary removal of Maasai people from Ngorongoro. This recommendation was grounded in concerns that the area had been, after a long period in which the Maasai were granted grazing and cultivation rights in various conservation areas, threatened by an ‘increasing human population’. This bought at least partially into Malthusian concerns over the environment, and posited that the best resolution to unsustainable land practices was not to make those practices more sustainable but to remove the offending population entirely.
Under this theory, it is perhaps only the force which the Tanzanian government uses in evictions which is an offence, rather than the acts of removal from a traditional space themselves. However, this author argues that even if the Maasai’s lifestyles will eventually become (or already have become) unsustainable without regulation, this does not grant an organisation the power to proclaim that the Maasai are simply too dangerous to the land for their own good, that they are unable to sustainably manage their environment, or unable to learn to do so. It also does not grant the government the right to forcibly and cruelly evict a population from a land they are significantly bound to, nor decide their future without consultation.
Ultimately, the evictions of the Maasai reveal an expansive effort from the most powerful in society (the Tanzanian government and large corporations specifically) made to expand a prominent economic industry and push profits at the expense of an indigenous community. The removals, forceful or not, constitute a human rights violation, and even if current land management practices are unsustainable, efforts should be made to provide more with the Maasai people and reach an equitable, just, and socially optimal outcome - it is a future they, and all humans, deserve.
Edited by GorStra Team