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Heartbreak on the Serengeti
FEBRUARY 2006
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| Heartbreak on the Serengeti (continued) |
By Robert M. Poole
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Photographs by Randy Olson
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To the Maasai it's the place where the land runs on forever, but beyond the protected core of this iconic landscape, the land is running out.
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Almost 50 years into that experiment, it would appear that wildlife and tourists are thriving in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, but that the Maasai are struggling. Theirs is the old problem—too many people and too few resources, the same hard calculus that has caused so much conflict on the Serengeti's western borders. Numbers tell the story: The Maasai population has grown fivefold in the conservation area, from around 10,000 in 1954 to more than 50,000 today. At the same time they have less territory, having lost the most fruitful part of their new homeland in 1974, when they were evicted from the crater floor. Constrained by these and other developments, the Maasai face an uncertain future, hemmed in by Serengeti National Park to the west, by Ngorongoro Crater to the east, and by growing communities all around. Because their grazing range is limited, they have been unable to enlarge their herds to match their growing population. The result is that their wealth—still measured in livestock—has evaporated with the years, from an average of more than 26 cattle, goats, and sheep per person in 1960, to five for each Maasai today. They are forbidden to supplement their pastoral existence by farming on any scale larger than a subsistence basis out of fear that more intensive cultivation will degrade the area's natural habitat.
Bruno O. P. Kawasange, natural resources chief for the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority, worries that the growing Maasai population blocks migratory corridors connecting the Ngorongoro Crater with the Serengeti, an important conduit for lions, wildebeests, zebras, and other animals traveling between the two areas. "We want to make sure that these corridors remain open—especially for the lions," said Kawasange. To make room for the big cats and other wildlife, some 250 Maasai households will be moved.
"We can't support large-scale agriculture in the conservation area," explained B. M. Murunya, the authority's tourism chief. "Conservation does not go along with agriculture." Given how farming and development have encroached on parks and reserves in northern Tanzania, this seems a reasonable concern, but it does little to reassure the hard-pressed Maasai.
"The wildlife gets better treatment than the people here," said Francis Ole Syapa, a Maasai living in the windswept foothills of the Crater Highlands, where we sat in a zebra-striped hut and watched the clouds boil up from ruined volcanoes. Syapa was expressing a sentiment I heard from many Maasai. "The area is supposed to be not just for the wildlife," he said. "That's why it was established as a multiple-use area. Understand? We Maasai should be allowed to have our own plan to protect the wildlife, to develop tourism, and to decide how the people's lives can be improved here. As it stands now, we have no real say." Syapa pointed out that Maasai hold no key positions within the conservation authority, and that only one serves on the group's advisory board—this, despite his people's overwhelming numbers in the region. "We live here on the land, but we cannot plan for ourselves how to use it. We don't have the same rights as other Tanzanians," he said.
Surely, I suggested, the community must benefit from the millions of dollars flowing to the region—Tanzania's top tourist attraction.
Syapa gave me a long, searching look, followed by a longer silence. He took a swig of Kilimanjaro beer, placed the bottle on the table between us, and spoke with great deliberation: "I really don't have the information," he said, "but I can tell you we don't see very much of that money here."
This was painfully obvious down the red-dirt road in Endulen, a Maasai village of cockeyed plank shacks that looked as if they might blow away on the next wind. So did some of the people in this town of 8,000, which suffers from tuberculosis, malnutrition, and malaria, according to doctors at the region's only hospital. "We also get brucellosis, which comes from drinking unboiled milk, fractures from fighting, and quite a few injuries from buffalo attacks," said Jeanine Heeren, a doctor in Endulen's 80-bed missionary hospital. She also reported that HIV had made its appearance in Endulen, a sign that residents of this community were venturing into the world and bringing new problems to the village.
Endulen was busy, though. Women with shaved heads and jangling silver necklaces picked through oranges and onions in the market, where a butcher in a red robe and baseball cap hung glistening slabs of goat meat in his stalls, watched closely by a pair of hopeful dogs. Warriors with spears led cattle down a path to Olndogom River, which flowed through town.
Half the village seemed to be in and out of the stream—women washing clothes and spreading them to dry on thorn trees, children fetching buckets of water for the school, herders waiting in line with donkeys and cattle for their turn at the stream. Some of the herders, I learned, had walked three or four hours to get here, a rare source of fresh water.
"Nobody could survive without it," said a Maasai who had lived his whole life in Endulen.
The village draws its water from the river because the government has built no infrastructure in this region, which grows bigger and more established with each passing year—with or without government help.
"We have been waiting for water for 50 years," said Raphael Ologolie, an elder I met on the outskirts of Endulen. We sat on the ground outside his neatly fenced compound and talked, Ologolie, sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin, cocooned in a red blanket so that only his head was visible. "Since the Maasai were first moved out of the park, the government has been making these promises—to bring water, to bring schools, to bring health care. Our people are going hungry. They come to my house every day asking for food—a little cornmeal, a little salt, a little sugar, but it's never enough. Nobody has kept a single promise to the Maasai."
For its part, the government says that it will do nothing to encourage permanent settlements in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which is supposed to be occupied by Maasai nomads living lightly on the land.
"The idea that pastoral people, people who are moving from place to place, will have a fixed source of water and other amenities that the settled communities have, well, we can't provide those things," said Samson S. Mkumbo, chief manager of community development for the authority. "For those Maasai who want to make the shift from the nomadic life to farming, we are seeking an area outside the Ngorongoro Conservation Area."
Having been uprooted twice before, the Maasai do not want to move again. And whether the government acknowledges it, the Maasai have already settled in to the Ngorongoro region for the long haul, having begun the slow, agonizing transition from the world of nomadism.
They still keep livestock—any Maasai worthy of the name must do so—but they have more goats and sheep than cattle these days, and they spend less time on the land, going out for a day or two rather than weeks or months. They return to live in permanent dwellings, fret about educating their children, take a keen interest in politics, and scratch away at the earth, working in vegetable plots outlawed by the conservation authority. The old ways are fading: Maasai intermarry with neighboring tribes, fewer girls are circumcised, and fewer youths have the stretched and decorated earlobes of old. In Maasai country today, hiking boots, sneakers, and T-shirts ("Washington State Volleyball Band") have begun to replace traditional robes and sandals; and everywhere the twittering of cell phones sings from deep in the folds of Maasai togas. A new generation is leaving the villages to make their way in the world.
"I know where I am from," said one of these educated Maasai, Jombi Ole Kivuyo, who recently traded his warrior's spear for an apartment and a paycheck in Arusha. "But I don't know where I am going. I am like a blind man feeling his way."
This young Maasai may stumble on his journey, but it is more likely that he will survive it, just as his ancestors survived the earlier disruptions of plague, war, eviction, and hunger because they were, to borrow a Maasai phrase, "tough as a hyena's sinew." They remain that way, striding along under the immense African sky, looking for the next hill.
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