By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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Part 1: Blessed, cursed land: Ngorongoro crisis shocking but not surprising

I have been seeking information and opinions and experiences from a variety of sources over the course of the past month in order to try and distil my thoughts on the Loliondo and Ngorongoro Conservation Area situations.

What links the two separate but similar human/conservation/tourism conflicts is the Maasai people. That’s the common factor that stands out the most, making the speakers of Maa who live in Loliondo and Ngorongoro (both bigger than the conservation areas they are named after) the focal point of a complex issue. Man and land, wildlife versus the state.

I learned that conservation in Tanzania is a whole history subject unto itself.

Both Loliondo as part of the Serengeti system, and Ngorongoro Conservation Area as they are now, are well documented from pre-colonial times. Far from being the “original occupiers” of these lands, the speakers of Maa are travellers who found folks like the Datoga already living in the Ngorongoro crater.

Every tribe in Tanzania has an origin story, very few can say with absolute confidence that where and who they are now is what “has always been.” But I respect a good social construct: 100 years of doing things a particular way is time enough to call it “culture.”

Romantic view

Why the Maasai? Because, as I said before, the Europeans had a romantic view of pastoralists. I can understand why. If you visited my people of yore I don’t think we would be particularly impressive outside of the courts of the kings. Our traditional bark cloth is brown. Our ululation sounds like a funeral cry. We are cattle folk who used to sing to our beasts and know each one by name and temperament. We have beauty in our songs and dance and appreciation for love and romance. None of this makes good fodder for movies like Out of Africa.

In comparison, the pastoralist life is dramatic. Colourful clothing, rituals with a shock factor, all that “freedom to roam” spending time spearing lions rather than bent over beans and millet plants? Dude, I get it.

Their way of life isn’t like that of the farmers, said the colonials. They will not have an impact on the ecosystem, said the colonials. They will remain Noble Savages forever, imagined the colonials.

Of course, the first to roll their eyes at this notion was the newly independent Tanganyikan state, which has maintained — to date — the tension between its notion of appropriate land stewardship, the rights of the Maasai people, and lucrative conservation-cum-tourism.

And you know who is perfectly aware of these tensions and contradictions and capable of exploiting them to their advantage? The Maasai people.

Perhaps you are aware, they are citizens in Kenya and they are citizens in Tanzania. Sometimes both, I imagine — and why not? But they are not savage and that nobility is more of an aspiration, just like it is for the rest of us who have traditions to uphold.

You know who I didn’t ask about the current situation in Ngorongoro and Loliondo? The Maasai people in my life. And there are a few. I don’t know why, but ever since I was in my 20s I have got along particularly well with Maasai men.

Actual age

The morans I come across have finally stopped asking me to marry them, since I now look about half my actual age. The elders seem amused by my habit of freely joining “male” spaces and regularly offer to make me a junior wife by way of jest and compliment. Sometimes, I have been trusted enough to be told a Maasai’s real name and the meaning thereof. And some Maasai I know live amongst us, wearing sharp suits and practicing highly skilled, highly paid professions.

All this to say: it is weird for everyone in Tanzania to continue to be saddled with the Noble Savage trope as part of this recurrent conflict between the Maasai, the state and conservationists over the use of the lands of Loliondo, Ngorongoro Crater and elsewhere.

It is disingenuous to believe that there isn’t a profit motive behind some of the Maasai actions in recent years, nor exploitation of credulous, if well-meaning, defenders of human rights — me being one of them.

The more I learn about this situation and its history the more uncertain I am about what to say, let alone what should be done.

Look towards

I am a romantic at heart and always will be. But in times of strange emotional manipulations and trouble, I tend to look towards King Suleiman and wonder: how would he handle this?

In this case, I am inclined to ask the Government of Tanzania and the speakers of Maa: So you both claim this land as yours to keep healthy and well? Then divide it into pieces and let it die.

Whoever protests the hardest that it should be given whole to the other is the Mother.

Tanzania, Tanzania... twakupenda kwa moyo wote. (Stanza one)

Elsie Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report: E-mail: [email protected]