10 Displacement of the Maasai Early 1900s

Box 8.10 Displacement of the Maasai Early 1900s

European hunters eliminated some wildlife species and decimated others which had survived over 2,000 years of contact with Africans and their livestock.

Second Hundreds of thousands of wild animals killed to feed British troops. World War 1959

Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania divided into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) and smaller Serengeti National Park. The Maasai who lived in the latter (and had done so for over 200 years) were moved into the NCA so that the Serengeti would become

a game park with no human interference. In the NCA, ‘should there be any conflict between these interests, those of the latter [the game animals] must take precedence’ (Governor of Tanganyika, 27 August 1959).

1960 Establishment of the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya, adjoining the Serengeti in Tanzania, further restricted the movements of the Maasai.

Maasai forced to evacuate the two crater areas within the NCA on the

grounds that their presence was detrimental to the wildlife and land- scape.

1975 All cultivation within the NCA prohibited. 1976

Maasai prohibited from entering the Olduvai Gorge on the grounds that their ‘livestock were detrimental to the archaeological value of the site’ (Olerokonga, 1992: 6).

1980 Collection of resin, a source of cash for the Maasai, stopped. Burning grasses in the highland areas also restricted.

1987 Anti-cultivation operation mounted by the authorities against the Maasai, who were farming small plots: 666 people arrested; 9 jailed for six months; 549 fined (Olerokonga, 1992: 6).

1994 Allegations of torture, false imprisonment, theft and corruption by the Kenya Wildlife Service against the Maasai (corroboration by Paul Ntiati, an African Wildlife Foundation representative, cited in Monbiot, 1994: 93).

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Area (NCA), for example, there are several camp sites for tourists on the crater floor, although casual camping is no longer allowed. Tracks and roads have been created to allow tourist vehicles easy access to wildlife, thereby destroying natural vegetation. Although the Maasai have been excluded from the Olduvai Gorge, many tourists enter it every day, some even removing stones as souvenirs (Olerokonga, 1992: 7). Tourists also gain access in hot air balloons, gliding low over herds of wildlife, stampeding and disorienting them (Olindo, 1991: 37), although there is no recognition of this problem in Abercrombie and Kent’s 2002 brochure in which they advertise ‘Ballooning over the Masai Mara can be an unforgettable experience. Sail over the endless game-filled plains, drifting to a gentle landing before a lavish bush breakfast’ (47).

In 1991, Perez Olindo of the African Wildlife Foundation in Kenya and formerly director of the Kenya Wildlife Department outlined several of the plans of the Kenya 13111

Wildlife Service (KWS) which were aimed at addressing the tourism and conservation problems in the game reserves and national parks. These included road construction, a ban on the development of new tourist accommodation and on casual camping, minimum flight levels for balloons, and the promotion of ecological sensitivity in the tourists. There is no mention there of the guardians of the original environment, the Maasai, neither in terms of their land and grazing rights nor in terms of an acknowledgement that tourism and conservation have been largely responsible for their dispossession and displacement.

Although seen by some as the best disciplined conservation management force in Africa, Monbiot describes the KWS as a ‘para-military sustainable tourism- conservation organisation’ (1994: 121) and Fernandes says it ‘has implemented sustain- able market driven model growth strategies which deserve to be condemned’ (1994: 11). Moreover, it is clear that much of what is done in the name of conservation is actually done to protect the profits from tourism: ‘Several times I was told by (tourism) conser- vation officials that the Maasai had to be kept out because the tourists did not want to see them there’ (Monbiot, 1994: 119). And Olerokonga (1992) makes it clear that the tourist and the Maasai are currently alienated from each other.

Fernandes (1994) maintains that such strategies owe much to the Brundtland-inspired sustainable development approaches. It is the action plans and agendas which have emerged from this generalised approach which Adams (1990) claims are ‘firmly anchored with the existing economic paradigms of the industrialised North. This might

exercised here derives from the First World, is expressed by conservationists, acted upon

be called the approach of “green growth”’ (67). The implication is clear: the power

by a powerful local elite, benefits First World tourists, and serves to increase the inequality of development by, first, preventing the local communities from conducting their traditional ways of life and, second, excluding them from the benefits of the activity of wildlife tourism. As Olerokonga explains:

Since the mid-eighties many stand along the main road to Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater waiting for tourists and hoping that they will pay to take pictures of them . . . For both, their only interest is to profit as much as possible from each other – the tourists by taking pictures of the Maasai, the Maasai by getting money from the tourist. They don’t see each other as dignified human beings.

(1992: 7) In the first half of the 1990s, then, conservation in East Africa was still largely a matter

of separating land from its traditional human inhabitants. New approaches are currently 11111

being explored, however, with the aim of attaining some redress of dignity and power.

240 • ‘Hosts’ and destinations

In 1996, for example, a small group of the Maasai opened the Kimana Community Wildlife Sanctuary covering over 6,500 acres in Kenya, having negotiated a deal with

a British tour operator to construct a luxury lodge, from which a proportion of the tourist payments (approximately US$12 out of each US$80–100 paid per tourist per night) are made to them. Having calculated their takings before the deal was signed, they devel- oped plans for a school and clinic for their community. In November 1996, the British Guild of Travel Writers recognised the significance of this deal by the Kimana commu- nity with one of their annual awards. By the year 2002, the school and clinic had not materialised and the benefits had not been as widely distributed as originally intended, which detracted from the significance of the scheme. Nevertheless, this was still an important step for one group of the Maasai – in the past such deals directed benefits into the hands of a single individual or a single family rather than a whole group. Other examples, perhaps more successful than the Kimana Community scheme, exist. The Eselenkei Community Wildlife Sanctuary in Kenya, for example, is owned by a Maasai community in which the financial benefits of the wildlife tours in the sanctuary are

reported 3 to be widely distributed and appreciated throughout the community. For the Maasai, these cases may not make good their displacement, nor retrieve their former lifestyles, nor compensate them for all the losses and betrayals they have suffered in the past. But now for some groups of the Maasai at least such schemes offer a hope of improvement, even if they can hardly be said to threaten the dominant model of devel- opment which has been at least in part responsible for the displacement. Such mild ‘success’ as this highlights a deep division among the Maasai over the wisdom of involvement in these kinds of tourism projects. The views of the Kimana community proponents of the sanctuary and lodge contrast sharply with the views expressed in the following statement from one of the Maasai:

We know there is money to be made from tourism. We already have tourists staying on our lands in tented camps. And, yes, they bring us an income. We don’t need the Kenya Wildlife Service to tell us that. But you can tell Dr Leakey

[director of KWS until 1994] 4 this. We don’t want to be dependent on these tourists. We are Maasai and we want to herd cattle. If we stopped keeping cattle and depended on tourists, we would be ruined when the tourists stopped coming.

(Cited in Monbiot, 1994: 98)

Mountain gorilla conservation in Uganda, Rwanda and Zaire

The case of the international conservation agencies’ attempts to save the remaining mountain gorillas from extinction in Uganda, Rwanda and Zaire illustrates an example of wildlife conservation that has had some success, although the onset of genocidal inter- ethnic strife in the region in the early 1990s has led to uncertainty about the long-term prospects for mountain gorillas. The case is included here because publicity about the success of the wildlife conservation and tourism revenue attraction measures has over- shadowed the human displacement which these measures caused.

Between 1960 and 1973 evidence showed that the mountain gorilla population in the area of the Virunga volcanoes had declined from 450 to 260, mainly through poaching (Weber, 1993). The gorillas were under pressure not just from poachers but also from local farmers who required more land to provide food for a growing popula- tion. As a result of this pressure, the Mountain Gorilla Project (MGP) was established in Rwanda in the late 1970s. The project had the linked goals of promoting ecologically sensitive tourism, improving park security and spreading conservation awareness. The

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ecologically sensitive tourism essentially took the form of gorilla watching similar to that described in Uganda’s Mgahinga National Park by Melinda Ham:

Holding their breath, the four tourists crouch in the grass, their long-lens cameras at the ready. Less than five metres away, their prey gently breaks off

a piece of bamboo as thick as a human arm, tears off strips with his teeth and chews the soft green core. The silver-backed gorilla stands proud. Beside him a female grooms her neighbour while a baby gorilla somersaults play- fully beside her. They take little notice of the human presence . . . The tourists have spent nearly two hours climbing up through the dense, muddy bamboo forest, accompanied by two trackers and a Uganda National Parks (UNP) ranger. The trackers carry machetes to cut a narrow path through the forest.

13111 The ranger carries an AK47 assault rifle in case of a chance encounter with armed poachers. Under the strict rules governing gorilla-tracking tourism in Uganda the tourists can spend only one hour with the gorillas once the trackers find them.

(Ham, 1995: 1–3) For Rwanda’s Parc National des Volcans, Lindberg and Huber (1993) show that the

revenue from tourist fees to see the gorillas rose from US$7,000 in 1976 to US$1 million in 1989, a sum which far outweighed the cost of running the park (approximately US$200,000 in 1989). Demand was high and only 24 visitors per day were permitted entry. This allowed the fixing of a high individual fee – almost US$200 per person for

a one hour visit which, as Sherman and Dixon (1991) suggest, was around the highest charged anywhere in the world and may have been near the upper limit that visitors were willing to pay. Moreover, it has been estimated that an extra US$3–5 million annu- ally was paid into the national economy by foreign tourists (Weber, 1993).

The high fees have drawn charges of economic elitism, but the scheme was widely deemed to be successful. From the late 1970s to 1989, the gorilla population in this area rose from 260 to 320, which was due, according to William Weber, a specialist in primate conservation at the New York Zoological Society, to tourism revenues paying for more forest guards and in turn reducing gorilla poaching. Since 1994, when geno- cide in Rwanda took up to a million lives, the popularity of gorilla watching declined from almost 7,000 people per annum in 1993 to just over 2,000 in 2001 (Vick, 2002).