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‘This Is Our Last Resort’: The Maasai’s Struggle for Land Rights in Northern Tanzania
“We are not blocking this highway out of choice. We are doing it for necessity. For too long our voices have been ignored, and out rights have been trampled. This is our last resort.”—Statement of the Maasai Community, NCA, August 18, 2024
Losing Land and Life: A History of Displacement in the Name of Conservation
A Maasai woman holds a sign reading, “This is our ancestral land.” (Photo: The Maasai elders, NCA)
Since Tanzania’s colonizers established the Serengeti National Park in 1951—displacing Indigenous residents to Loliondo and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA)—the pastoralist Maasai in Northern Tanzania have faced relentless struggles against evictions and human rights abuses. For the past four years, their resilience has endured brutal attacks designed to expel them from their ancestral lands, transforming the region into a people-free zone to enhance safari tourism and hunting, as glorified in Western media like Planet Earth. These atrocities are masked as environmental conservation and protection.
In April 2021, the Tanzanian government announced the Multiple Land Use Management Plan (MLUM), posing a grave threat to the Maasai’s survival in the NCA. This followed the March 2019 joint monitoring mission by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre (WHC), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which urged the government to control population growth in the NCA. The government responded by prioritizing tourism revenue, enacting the MLUM and a resettlement plan that expanded the NCA from 8,100 square kilometers to 12,083 square kilometers and created new restricted areas. In essence, this condemned nearly 80,000 Maasai to lives of destitution or death through forced evictions and the destruction of their livelihoods.
“The evictions and restrictions constraining tens of thousands of livelihoods are not about ensuring conservation but about expanding tourism revenues within the World Heritage Site. Tourism within the NCA has exploded in recent years with the number of annual tourists increasing from 20,000 in 1979 to 644,155 in 2018, making it one of the most intensively visited conservation areas in Africa. The number soared to 752,215 in 2023.”—The Oakland Institute
Maasai “Volunteering” to Move from the NCA to Flawed Resettlement Sites?
Maasai mobilize for their political rights. (Photo: The Maasai elders, NCA)
In response to international condemnation, the government falsely claimed that Maasai were volunteering en masse for resettlement at two relocation sites—Msomera village in Handeni district and Kitwai A and B villages in Simanjiro district. The flawed resettlement plans forced 11,000 Maasai community members from the NCA to send a letter to the government and its main donors stating their demand to remain in the NCA.
“This is not the first time that we are fighting to secure our rights and protect the lives of our people—we need a permanent solution and we need it now. We will not leave; Not Now, Not Ever!”—A Letter from Maasai Community to Tanzanian Government & International Donors, 2022
Despite the government’s claims that the Maasai’s relocation is voluntary, they have been forcibly uprooted by a systematic denial of essential social services, including education and healthcare. In May 2024, the government slashed nearly half of the budget for Endulen community hospital, the main healthcare provider for nearly 100,000 Maasai pastoralists in the NCA. These cuts ended vital support for facility repairs and community health initiatives. The grounding of the Flying Medical Service in 2022, after 39 years of critical emergency care, left over 24,000 children unvaccinated, deprived more than 5,700 pregnant women of necessary medical attention, and halted the delivery of life-saving HIV medications. While no official count of fatalities exists, it is undeniable that lives have been lost as a result.
Disfranchisement and Punishment: The Latest Attack
Maasai hold protest signs on the Serengeti-Ngorongoro highway. (Photo: The Maasai elders, NCA)
In August, after failing to forcibly remove the Maasai from the NCA, the government struck a severe blow to their political rights. Ngorongoro Division was removed from the voters’ register, disenfranchising tens of thousands of Maasai pastoralists ahead of the upcoming local and general elections in 2025. Those registered to vote saw their polling station moved hundreds of miles away to Msomera village—the site of their forced relocation—effectively stripping even more Maasai villagers of their right to vote.
Adding to this assault on their political rights, Government Notice (GN) 673, issued on August 2, 2024, delisted 11 wards, 25 villages, and 96 subvillages in Ngorongoro Division, affecting over 110,000 people, all without obtaining their Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. This blatant violation of their rights sparked the August 18 protest, where Maasai residents demanded the reversal of GN 673 and the restoration of their electoral rights by the National Electoral Commission.
“We urge the Minister of Local Government to revoke and cancel Government Notice No. 673 of 2024, as it violates the constitution, laws, and international and regional treaties that Tanzania has signed and ratified.”—Onesmo Olengurumwa, National Coordinator, Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition
As images of the Maasai, armed with grass and placards, demanding justice, went viral on August 22, 2024, the Arusha High Court temporarily suspended GN 673, pending further instructions. However, community lawyers have condemned the ruling as a sham. The court’s decision followed an injunction supposedly filed by Ngorongoro resident Isaya Ole Posi, who denies any involvement. Allegations have surfaced that the government paid the lawyer who filed the injunction against itself, in a calculated move to divert international attention sparked by the protests.
Holding Those Responsible Accountable
Stranded tourists stand watching the Maasai protests. (Photo: The Maasai elders, NCA)
While the Tanzanian government must undoubtedly be held accountable for violating the rights of its citizens, we must also scrutinize the role of two other key actors. The first are international conservation bodies like UNESCO, IUCN, and ICOMOS, under whose influence the government’s Multiple Land Use Model (MLUM) and resettlement plan were developed. It took an extensive global campaign to shift their stance. UNESCO’s website carries the government’s February 2024 report on the conservation status in the NCA, providing the false narrative that the relocation of local communities is voluntary, adheres to international best practices, and includes compensation measures. Yet, it also notes ongoing concerns from local communities, acknowledging the need for a human rights-based approach.
If designating areas like the NCA as World Heritage Sites endangers the survival of Indigenous peoples in African countries, UNESCO and IUCN’s outdated, colonial, and top-down approach to conservation—while boosting tourism—must be dismantled immediately. These institutions have reluctantly admitted that the NCA’s multiple land use model is appropriate, rather than altering its protected area category with disastrous consequences for residents. However, they have ignored calls for the NCA to be delisted from World Heritage sites and failed to pressure the government to stop its human rights violations.
As for the international tourists who continue to flock to Tanzania, lured by the chance to witness the “Big Five” or hunt trophies, the August 18 protests should serve as a wake-up call. The Maasai protesters and their global supporters have made their message clear: This is no longer a scene from “Out of Africa.” If there is no respect for Indigenous lives, then it must be “Tourism out of Tanzania!”
5 Things to Know About the Global Land Rush and How to Stop It
The land rushes that are reproduced to sustain capitalism are held up by intersecting levers of oppression, among them class fragmentation and socially constructed identity politics like race and gender.
These efforts come at a critical time, when the media's spotlight on land grabbing has dimmed—signaling that the practice has become a routine part of international politics. The following are five key takeaways from the meeting in Colombia about the state of the land rush and the resistance that seeks to stop it in its tracks.
1. The Old Guard Marches On
Grabbing land, natural resources, and territory has always been an integral part of capitalism. The system thrives on crises—the more, the more profitable—which in turn provoke waves of uneven development. Contemporary land grabs are a layering of these factors, all of which are extractive in nature. When the 2008 food price crisis became ensnarled with global disruptions in finance and energy, it reconfigured large-scale land grabs as the world has come to know them.
Although agribusiness has been a defining feature of decades of neoliberal reforms, it has proliferated even more across the global South in recent years—turning peasant farms and Indigenous forests into monocrop business ventures. A striking case is that of Tanzania, one of the most heavily targeted countries for land grabs 15 years ago. Now it is bracing for a new surge of land deals for mass export crops, made worse by the oppressive seed policies that have been imposed throughout the African continent. These older land deals are on the map to stay, and the situation is further complicated by their newer counterparts.
2. Climate Politics Signify the Perfect Storm
Green and blue grabs—the idea of "selling nature to save it"—masquerade as a solution to the climate crisis and have resulted in an advanced surge of extraction, commodification, and financialization of nature. Such initiatives have brought new actors to the scene of the extractive economy, some of whom initially opposed it, in a vastly complicated alliance.
Cambodia, for instance, was the first country in Southeast Asia to endorse the Blue Skies & Net Zero 2050 campaign, which is one of the latest developments in carbon trading—earlier versions of which have devastated rural communities through massive land, water, and forest grabs. International financial and intergovernmental institutions continue to blame farmers, fishers, and forest dwellers for worsening climate change through "backwards" techniques—when the real culprit is violent foreign intervention coupled with decades of natural resource grabs led by agribusiness. Instead of attacking this problem at its root, programs like Net Zero make promises to resolve hunger, unemployment, and the climate crisis at once. The devil, however, is in the details—in this case shouldering local Cambodian peasants with the burden of mitigating big corporate pollution from abroad, unavoidably leading to more land grabs.
3. Resurging Violent Conflicts and Geopolitics
Land, water, and food have long been weaponized against marginalized populations through extreme violence. While our understanding of contemporary land grabs has often been one of transactionary land deals, usually large in scale, and often synonymous with agribusiness, we have yet to fully incorporate land seizures carried out through military invasions and wars into the equation. We must expand our conceptualization of the land rush to more comprehensively include these factors, also paying attention to the geopolitical environments in which they unfold.
An important link here is that for many peasant and Indigenous populations, land is not only a resource, but also territory. Seeing land grabbing as territory grabbing is a way of coming to terms with how land capture in violent conflict is an abduction of people, movements, culture, and history. As such, it has resounding place-specific and collective implications. Today genocide and ecocide in Gaza as a result of the Israeli invasion have refocused global attention on the question of Palestine. Analyzing these actions as territory grabs may contribute to a more just resolution of violent conflict—not only in Palestine, but also in other militarized geopolitical contexts as diverse as Haiti, Sudan, Myanmar, and Ukraine.
4. Colonization Is Alive and Well
The land rushes that are reproduced to sustain capitalism are held up by intersecting levers of oppression, among them class fragmentation and socially constructed identity politics like race and gender. These forced divisions are the driving force behind past and present colonial projects. Across the Americas, the plantation economy was made possible by the enslaved labor of Black bodies, the removal of Indigenous ones, and the cheapening of female and gender nonconforming ones. Struggles for independence and liberation from these processes have only partially been won, which is illustrated by modern land grabbing as an extension of plantation economies.
Land grabbing feeds on race, class, and gender as overlapping forms of oppression—and as such affects the Global North in addition to the Global South. In the highly racialized context of the United States, agribusiness continues to operate on lands stolen from Indigenous peoples with the labor of undocumented migrants—many of them displaced by extractive activities led by the United States in countries south of its Mexican border.
5. Peasant and Indigenous Movements Lead the Resistance
Social movement and academic delegates visit with signatories of the historic Colombian peace agreement on a land plot previously controlled by drug traffickers in the Puerto Salgar municipality; community members also sent a delegation to Bogotá to participate in the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing.
(Photo: @jovieshome)
If anyone knows the true value of land, it is the peasant and Indigenous communities that have ensured its survival across borders and generations. These groups of people are consistently hunted alongside the natural resources they seek to protect. Their demands—for ending and rolling back land grabs—are most often disregarded as idealistic at best and downright undoable at worst.
But against all odds, and frequently faced with great danger, social movements are winning struggles for territory. This work occurs in sophisticated alliances that straddle local, national, and international organizing efforts. Colombia was selected as the host country for the gathering against land grabbing precisely for these reasons, with hopes that bearing witness to the history being written there could inspire political gains elsewhere. From its Pacific and Caribbean coastlines, to its vast farmlands that fade into the Amazonian and Andean forests, rural communities are taking back territory—under the protection of an amenable government that is committed to an ongoing process of putting into place peasant and Indigenous autonomous zones.
Social movements are building strong convergences with politically aligned scholars and policymakers to prepare for the next phases of their still-uphill battle against the land rush—not only in Colombia, but around the world.
The World Bank Must Stop Funding Human Rights Abuses in Tanzania
The Oakland Institute’s report Unaccountable & Complicit exposed how this expansion has triggered the impending eviction of tens of thousands of people from their legally registered villages, without their Free, Prior, and Informed Consent or resettlement plans. The bank’s funding for Tanzania National Parks Authority (TANAPA) has enabled a paramilitary force of rangers who have been involved in shocking violence, including torture, rape, and murder.
In recent years, the bank has taken swift action to sever funding to several countries, including Uganda, after the passage of a draconian anti-LGBTQ law and Russia, after its invasion of Ukraine. That it continues to finance the Tanzanian government is a shameful double standard.
The uncertainty and fear from the eviction announcements has put the lives of villagers on hold. Fields sit unplanted. New power grid connections abruptly ended in 2022. Construction of schools and the number of students advancing from primary to secondary school has plummeted. Rangers continue to illegally seize thousands of cattle to decimate livelihoods and force people to move. Any resistance is met with brutal force.
Despite these hardships and the government’s notorious track record of trampling on the rights of Indigenous communities to boost safari tourism, the impacted villagers are waging a struggle to protect their lands and lives. In February, 852 smallholder farmers from Mbeya filed a case to stop the government’s plans to evict them from their land at the High Court of Tanzania at Mbeya. Weary of the government’s disregard for the rule of law, villagers turned to the World Bank’s Inspection Panel (IP), an independent complaints mechanism, to seek justice. The IP works to promote accountability and “give affected people a greater voice in activities supported by the World Bank that affect their rights and interests, and foster redress when warranted.”
Navigating the IP Process
In June 2023, two villagers submitted a complaint to the IP on behalf of the community, detailing the human rights abuses and violations of the bank’s safeguards that resulted from the REGROW project. The complaint described how the planned evictions, incidents of violence, and cattle seizures have impacted several Indigenous groups, including the Maasai, Sukuma, and Datoga pastoralists. Given serious fear of retribution for speaking out, the requestors remained anonymous and nominated the Oakland Institute as their adviser through the process. One villager explained, “We do fear because when you become identified [by the government], that will be the end of your life.”
After the request for inspection was officially registered in July, the IP traveled to Mbarali District to visit several villages and meet with impacted community members in August. Members of the Panel heard from the women who had been beaten with hot bush knives by TANAPA rangers earlier this year. Others told harrowing accounts of their loved ones disappeared or killed by rangers. The IP heard directly from a Sukuma pastoralist who was tortured by rangers during an illegal cattle seizure. They saw the scars left on villagers and included direct testimonies in their report—a rare occurrence that speaks to the severity of what they witnessed.
The visit of the IP raised the villagers’ hope. They shared in a letter to the bank: “For the first time in years, we hoped the disappearances of our sons and brothers and violence against our daughters and sisters would end and the rangers responsible be brought to justice. After these meetings [with the IP], we thought our nightmare would soon be over.”
Delays Allow Abuses to Continue
This hope, however, fades as the lengthy investigation process drags on amidst the bank’s continued financing of the project.
The IP prepared a recommendation to the bank’s Board of Executive Directors to pursue a full investigation on September 19. The report called for “an investigation into the bank’s review and due diligence of the capacity and processes of one of the project’s lead implementing agencies, i.e. TANAPA, and whether risks to communities were identified in project documents, appropriate mitigation measures put in place, and the bank’s supervision of the project’s implementing agencies.”
The board’s approval of this decision was expected to be made public on October 4 but was postponed at the last minute to October 25. On the day of the new deadline, the decision was again delayed as one board member called for an additional discussion on the eligibility report. On November 15, the board finally accepted the panel’s recommendation for investigation. Once the investigation begins, it must be submitted to the bank’s management within six months, which then has six weeks to provide a response. Only then will the board hold a discussion to determine the action to be taken.
While disbursements continue amid the delayed investigation, bank-funded TANAPA rangers continue to terrorize the communities with impunity.
In the six months since the complaint was filed, project funding has continued. The inability of the IP to freeze funding allows a project to move ahead with business as usual even after complaints of abhorrent abuses. The Bank has already disbursed $92 million out of the $150 project total, with approximately $28 million disbursed since the complaint was filed. The bank can continue to expedite funding until the full $150 million has been disbursed to the Tanzanian government—effectively undermining any impact the IP investigation could have. When this concern was raised with the World Bank, a self-proclaimed “global leader in transparency,” the institution responded by scrubbing the financial disbursement information from the project website.
Screenshots of the REGROW project page showing removal of disbursement information.
While disbursements continue amid the delayed investigation, bank-funded TANAPA rangers continue to terrorize the communities with impunity. On the morning of October 28, five herders were at their camp outside of Mwanawala, a village visited by the IP during their visit. Suddenly, the group’s cattle were scattered by a helicopter making a low pass. TANAPA rangers disembarked and began seizing the herd that had been driven into RUNAPA. The herders resisted and, in the commotion that ensued, 21-year-old Zengo Dotto was shot and killed by a ranger. The young herder died trying to protect his family’s cattle, vital to their livelihoods. His parents refused to claim his body from the morgue until the rangers are brought to justice for the murder of their son.
Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
The World Bank currently has 23 active projects in Tanzania totaling over $8.3 billion in loans and grants. Along with the U.S. government, its main financer, the bank holds enormous influence over the government and could use this leverage to stop the human rights crisis facing communities near RUNAPA and across the country. In recent years, the bank has taken swift action to sever funding to several countries, including Uganda, after the passage of a draconian anti-LGBTQ law and Russia, after its invasion of Ukraine. That it continues to finance the Tanzanian government is a shameful double standard. In addition to the reported abuses around RUNAPA, the Tanzanian government has been internationally condemned for its forced evictions and cruel livelihood restrictions imposed against the Maasai in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) and Loliondo.
At a recent event celebrating the IP’s 30-year history, Chair Ramanie Kunanayagam explicitly recognized: “We are very aware that justice delayed is justice denied, so we work very carefully to meet our timelines.” In this case, even if the IP meets its timelines, all the funds may be disbursed before the investigation can have a tangible impact on the lives of the villagers. The Tanzanian government and TANAPA see that regardless of its actions, money will continue to flow from the World Bank. How many more villagers must die before the bank ends its complicity in these atrocities?
Impacted villagers did not mince their words in their letter to the bank. “In desperation, we are writing to petition you, the executive directors of the World Bank, to please stop financing the REGROW project and answer our calls for justice. We are tired of living in constant fear for our lives.”
In order to be truly accountable, the World Bank must immediately stop funding the project. This is the only way to make it clear to the Tanzanian government that its human rights abuses will not be tolerated any longer.
Evictions Disguised as Conservation: Voices from the Land That Was to Run Forever
“We are the Maasai—we depend on cattle for our livelihoods. Without livestock, there will be no Maasai.” – A Maasai Village Councillor
For centuries, the Maasai have resided in the African Rift Valley, roaming the land with their cattle who graze on the available shrubbery and grass. Their deep connection to the land is woven into their identity, culture, and spirituality. This life has its challenges—the dry season being a perfect example of the elements they endure—harsh, scorching, dusty wind, with scarcity of water and grass for their cattle. But, in recent years, the resilient and courageous communities have been faced with a challenge previously unmatched—“fortress” conservation.
The Maasai face forced evictions from their homelands, where their traditional way of life is under attack. Their lives and livelihoods are getting buried under government plans for tourism and hunting desired by the foreign elites with “greed like hyenas,” as described by a Maasai village leader. This situation has sparked a fiery international debate on supposed conservationist goals, the rights of Indigenous communities, cultural preservation, and sustainable development.
“They take the land. They say for conservation—but this is not true.” – Village Chairperson, Loliondo
Zebra graze in the savanna in Tanzania.
(Photo: Soleil-Chandni Mousseau)
The rationale behind the evictions that the Maasai face uses euphemisms of environmental, wildlife, and biodiversity protection. International conservation groups and the Tanzanian government justify “fortress” conservation by asserting that these measures are necessary to combat habitat destruction, poaching, and other environmental challenges.
Contrarily, villagers and community officials blame safari tourism as the cause of their plight. The tourism sector in Tanzania has ballooned rapidly—rising from $1.74 billion in 2004 to $4.48 billion in 2013. Today, it is second only to manufacturing in contributing to the country’s national income. This boom doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon; the Tanzanian government’s goal is to attract five million visitors annually to generate US$6 billion from tourism revenue.
A member of the Maasai community, whom I met in the Ololosokwan village, shared, “Tourists enjoy this beautiful landscape and wildlife that has been conserved by the Maasai pastoralists. And we face displacement.” Not honoring the true conservators—the Maasai—demonstrates the twisted logic of the Tanzanian government and the promoters of top-down neocolonial conservation models—tourists trump the livelihoods of the Maasai people.
“Government is very powerful, demolishing our communities… Compared to them, we have no force.” – A Maasai Village Councillor, Soitsambu Ward
Displacement from their ancestral lands has profound consequences for the Maasai. They are losing their livelihoods, social structures, and access to essential services like hospitals, water, and grazing lands for their cattle, and more. Disruption of their way of life is leading to increased poverty, loss of cultural identity, and disintegration of the communities’ social fabric.
An end to organized attacks on the Maasai’s traditional way of life is nowhere in sight. The government has not hesitated to use military force in villages, inflicting fear and chaos among the communities. On June 8, 2022, during the demarcation of 1,500 square kilometers (approximately 579 square miles) for a game reserve in Loliondo, community members who were protesting were shot at. Dozens were severely injured, including an 81-year-old who remains missing. Thousands, especially women and children, were forced to flee to the border with Kenya, facing the challenges of homelessness and displacement. Twenty-five Maasai villagers, including 10 local district councilors, were arrested and kept in jail for months on false charges. One of the arrested leaders spent six months in prison—away from his then-pregnant wife and his sons. He shared, “I had two prisons. One that I lived in and one of my thoughts, as I think of her [my wife]. The baby was born when I was in jail.”
“More than 700 families in Kirtalu lost their homes.” – A Maasai village representative
Though they face severe hardships, the resilience and bravery of the Maasai shines through. In May 2022, a group of villagers went to Germany, one of Tanzania’s colonizers, to advocate for their human and land rights. They met with the Frankfurt Zoological Society, which continues to play a key role in promoting the neocolonial conservancy agenda that devastates countless lives. They would have five to six meetings each day, informing people on what the Maasai face as they struggle for their future. “I spoke for the Maasai community who undergo these sufferings,” said one of the participants of this trip.
Another village representative powerfully stated, “They take my land. They take my life. If land is taken—it is the end of life.”
“This is a village where our ancestors were born. And today we cannot live in peace and harmony on our land.” – A Maasai District Councilor, Loliondo
A member of the Maasai community in Tanzania points into the distance.
(Photo: Soleil-Chandni Mousseau)
The forced evictions of Indigenous communities contradict the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which recognizes their rights to self-determination, to land, and other vital resources. It also undermines the goal of achieving sustainable development, as the well-being of both the environment and the people living within it are connected. Critics of the “fortress” conservation model argue that these evictions are not only an infringement on the Maasai’s human rights, but that they are also counterproductive to conservation efforts. The Maasai people’s traditional knowledge, built over centuries, contributes to sustainable land management practices that help preserve biodiversity and prevent environmental degradation.
“We wish for our voices to be heard.” – A Maasai elder
As the summer comes to an end, and the reality of junior year looms over me, I think less about my college admissions and exams. My experience in Tanzania not only gave me photographs and souvenirs, but a profound appreciation for the true stewards of the land, the Indigenous Maasai—for whom land is life. Their sacred connection to the land and their commitment to preserving it is a powerful reminder of what true conservation is.
As I return to the Bay Area—in my privileged bubble of air conditioning and concrete roads, dogs in strollers, and six-lane highways—I hold on to the Maasai’s powerful words. Their resilience fuels my determination toward continuing to learn about their struggle to protect the delicate balance between humanity and nature, while challenging this form of neocolonialism—another chapter of the West scrambling to get a fraction of Africa’s eternal wealth and beauty.
“We’re fighting together for our future.” – A Maasai Leader
The author stands with two members of the Maasai community.
(Photo: Soleil-Chandni Mousseau)
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