Dubai royal family driving out thousands of Maasai to oblige rich foreign hunters

PLEASE BE AWARE: Some images lower down depict the result of violent assaults.

Indigenous Maasai, widely acknowledged as exceptional wildlife conservationists, are being dispossessed of the lands of their birth in order to hand some of the finest wildlife territories of Tanzania to wealthy foreign hunters. And the government is bending over backwards to make sure it happens.

The area under dispute is Loliondo, a vast wild paradise on the northeastern boundary of the Serengeti plains. The area is rich in plants and endangered animal species such as the black rhino. It’s connected to one of the world’s most desirable wildlife tourist attractions: the breathtaking dry-season migration of wildebeest, zebra and gazelles into the northern plains. 

In terms of the country’s 1999 legislation that governs land management, Loliondo is classified as “village land”. But according to The Citizen newspaper in Tanzania, in 1992 the country issued a hunting licence for 1,500km2 of the area to Lieutenant-General Mohammed Abdul Rahim Al Ali, assistant under secretary at the Ministry of Defence, who procured the land for the exclusive use of the Dubai royal family. 

Operating under the name of Otterlo Business Corporation (OBC), the Emiratis built a campsite, a substantial airstrip and mobile telecom infrastructure. During the hunting season, the campsite is said to host hundreds of people at a time. 

Otterlo clearly see it as their territory and are upping the pressure to get rid of people in red blankets herding cattle. The Maasai are not welcome. Nor are they welcome at two other Maasai strongholds – Ngorongoro (a World Heritage Site) and Lake Natron. Otterlo is now calling for the “clearance” of 70,000 Maasai and about 200,000 livestock from Loliondo.  

This pressure is being responded to by top politicians in favour of evictions. On 3 June, in her budget speech for 2022-23, Minister of Natural Resources and Tourism Pindi Chana said her ministry expected to upgrade the Loliondo Game Controlled Area to a game reserve and to do the same with other huge areas over most of northern Tanzania, and beyond. Local people and livestock are not allowed to live in game reserves. 

A few months ago the government began erecting concrete boundary posts to delineate the perimeter of the designated area in Loliondo earmarked for Otterlo. Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa claimed the boundary posts were being placed to protect the environment and that the local Maasai would “not be affected”. 

What followed was quite the opposite: a flurry of activity and violence in the area by police, the army and ministers in Loliondo making statements and delivering threats while standing beside beacons. The Commissioner General of Immigration,

Anna Makakala, arrived in Loliondo to announce that there would be 10 days of flushing out “illegal immigrants”. 

Large groups of Maasai held protests and local leaders issued statements to stop the demarcation process. In response, a number of local leaders were arrested and charged with murder that occurred while they were in detention. Others went into hiding.

On 24 June, village and ward executive officers were reportedly instructed to tell people to leave the illegally demarcated area within 24 hours, or their livestock would be confiscated. That evening, there were reports from Sanjan in Malambo ward of how the Maasai, under fear and panic, were loading their belongings onto donkeys.

A Swedish blogger with considerable networks among the Maasai, Susanna Nordlund, writes that although the government claimed the evictions were “participatory”, it was arresting everyone speaking against it – “which means basically every single Maasai in Loliondo”.

Clashing ownership views

What’s taking place is essentially a collision between three notions of land ownership. All are problematic, with an impact on the legendary wildlife of Tanzania. 

The human footprint on these plains, which includes the Maasai, stretches back millions of years as palaeontology in the Olduvai Gorge has shown. In terms of traditional ownership, they stand first in line.

Famous wildlife sanctuaries such as the Serengeti, Manyara, Tarangire, Arusha, Mkomazi and Ngorongoro were carved out of Maasailand and the reason wildlife has survived so well in these areas is a tribute to them. They are excellent conservationists and hunting wildlife is taboo. Most other community-owned land in the country is being steadily depleted.

A British zoologist, Marcus Colchester, noted that “it is exactly because the areas that indigenous people inhabit have not been degraded by their traditional resource practices that they are now coveted by conservationists who seek to limit their activities or expel them altogether from their customary land”.

History of dispossession

It’s been a long history of creeping dispossession. In 1959, the Maasai were evicted from the vast Serengeti plains by the British and resettled in Loliondo and Ngorongoro, promised to them in perpetuity as compensation. 

That year the National Parks Act was passed, giving the governor the authority to declare any land in Tanzania a national park. At that point, according to the act, “all rights, titles, interests, franchises, claims, privileges, exemptions or immunities of any person other than the Governor in, over, under, or in respect of any land within such area shall, from the date upon which such proclamation comes into operation, cease, determine, and be forever extinguished”.

However, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Ordinance specifically named the Maasai as having settlement rights in the region. But in 1975 an ordinance limited those rights, banning all forms of cultivation within a National Conservation Area.

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It was a massive body blow. While the Maasai are generally seen as nomadic pastoralists, for centuries they have relied on the cultivation of subsistence plots when livestock health or access to grassland are compromised. The ban put the survival of the Maasai in jeopardy.

According to the law – as explained by Tanzanian law professor Issa Shivji – the Serengeti system belongs to the local Maasai and cannot be acquired by the government without adhering to legal procedures and without their consent. 

It was given to them, the Maasai believe, by Ngai, the androgynous Supreme Creator whose name also means rain. Ngai’s home is Ol Doinyo Lengai –  The Mountain of God – a volcano in Northern Tanzania. 

But since the 1990s they are estimated to have lost more than 70% of their ancestral land to “conservation”. These moves use practices that are recognisably colonial, imposing on them conditions of life that tend towards their eradication.

In a letter to Hassan, Shivji wrote: “We the people as well as the government, should ask ourselves: is eviction of the people from their land, which is their life, livelihood and heritage, simply to protect wildlife, so that game hunting companies may operate there without obstruction and harassment by the people, in the larger public interest? I must admit, I don’t have an answer except that this question gives me sleepless nights.”

Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania have written to the British and US governments and the EU appealing for help to stop the evictions: “We are asking for your help to let our government know that our land is not for sale and that we will continue to resist this long-standing assault on our rights and the ecological integrity of our land. We are therefore calling on your organisation to speak out against these abuses and help us prevent the extinction of our people.” (see also an urgent appeal here)

According to politicians, however, all land in Tanzania belongs to the government to do with it what it pleases. In response to accusations that the government is dispossessing the Maasai, Damas Ndumbaro – when he was minister of natural resources and tourism (he was later removed) – told parliament: “Nobody owns land in Tanzania. All the land belongs to the state and the president is the sole custodian on behalf of the people.” When called for an explanation, he said it wasn’t his portfolio anymore and demanded to know how this reporter got his phone number.

Concessions, collusion and corruption

In 2021, foreigners wanting a piece of Tanzania hit pay-dirt. Under the new Special Wildlife Investment Concession Areas (SWICA) law, areas of land within game reserves and game-controlled areas can now be declared special wildlife investment concession areas. The minister is empowered to award 30-year concessions to these areas, including Loliondo. As wildlife concessions in Africa go, that’s extraordinarily long.

In the award of Tanzanian hunting concessions to foreigners, collusion between government and concessionaires has been standard practice, a process traditionally fraught with allegations of corruption. 

A billionaire linked to exclusive use of Loliondo is Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice-president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai. He generates most of his income from real estate and is described as one of the world’s most prominent real estate developers.

The Otterlo Business Corporation, with strong links to his family, organises hunts for Maktoum. For years it has restricted the pastoralists’ access to lands and water. In 2009, according to The Citizen newspaper, OBC set 200 Maasai bomas alight. At least 20,000 people were affected and more than 50,000 cattle were cut off from pastures. 

According to the newspaper, OBC’s airstrip is big enough for an Airbus A380 to land on. Why such a large plane? Since 1993 there have been unconfirmed reports of the transportation of live game, but nobody’s there to check. 

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-03-22-value-of-trophy-hunting-to-conservation-massively-overstated-report/

“However, when videos of the Emiratis marketing their game parks to the world start to circulate in social media,” writes Citizen journalist Charles Makakala, “it takes little imagination to deduce where those animals most probably came from.”

Complaints against the company include corralling animals by helicopter, trapping live animals and leaving behind wounded animals to suffer.

Bullied and beaten

The terms of the 30-year concessions offer no apparent benefit to the Tanzanian people, let alone the Maasai. The Arabs see them and their cattle as a problem, the solution to which would be a local ethnic