A Glimpse at Maasai Mara: Evictions, Water Inadequacies and Conservation

The Serengeti Ecosystem has long been a centrepoint of biodiversity. The Serengeti National Park is familiar to most –from conservationists, Lion King aficionados and instagram influencers alike. But it is important to note that the Serengeti’s rich ecosystem extends far beyond the park’s man-made boundaries, stretching across Tanzanian and Kenyan game reserves and conservation areas. Drained by the Grumeti, Mara and Mbalageti rivers, the fertile ecosystem is home to the world’s most diverse combination of grazing mammals.

This blog will focus specifically on Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the water deprivation of its indigenous Maasai population, who have lived in Ngorongoro and across the Serengeti ecosystem sustainably for thousands of years. In order to understand questions of water access, it is important to broaden the discussion to reflect on the multiple deprivations of land, water, and other resources, with a view to provide a holistic analysis.

Despite their contributions to conservation and the Serengeti being their ancestral land, the Maasai have historically and contemporarily been at the receiving end of exploitation and deprived from their land’s natural resources. The most striking of these deprivations is water.

Maasai women in Tanzania protest evictions from their ancestral homelands

During their occupation of East Africa, German and British colonialists stripped Maasai communities of their fertile lands, knowingly forcing them into reserves with few resources. Reserves were seen as a solution to the issues posed by Maasai nomadism, and land allocations became a constant subject of contention between colonial governments and Maasai communities. At the heart of these discussions and agreements of lands, was access to water.

While ‘British East Africa’ (modern day Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda) gained independence in the 1960s, the artificial borders carved out by the British remained intact. Moringe Ole Parkipuny, Tanzania’s first Maasai MP, discusses the implications of independence on the Maasai and other marginalised Indigenous communities:

“[African nation-states] have thrown wide open the floor for prejudices against fundamental rights and social values of those peoples with cultures that are distinctly different from those of the mainstream national population. Such prejudices have crystallized in many African countries into blatant cultural intolerance, domination and persistent violations of the fundamental rights of minorities”  

(Parkipuny, 1989)

When the borders of the Serengeti were first drawn in 1940, the Maasai people were evicted from their homelands as they refused to comply with government assigned lands. Later, the Tanzanian Serengeti was split in two: The Serengeti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The Maasai reluctantly accepted this compromise as the government had promised them occupation of land and water in Ngorongoro, as well as consultation about how resources were to be used. 

Serengeti Area Map: Expert Africa 

However, with the new marking of lands, water was not readily accessible and Maasai people were now restricted to their allocated territories. They could no longer migrate between highlands and lowlands for water as they traditionally had done. The Tanzanian government encouraged the construction of boreholes and dams in Ngorongoro as a means of increasing water supply. Yet within the first 2 years of construction the dams silted up, some even breaching their banks, while the boreholes became saline due to poor maintenance. The water sources in Ngorongoro did not take long to prove substandard to the permanent water supplies in Moru and Ngare Nanyuki that the Maasai were stripped of when the Serengeti National Park was created. These water shortfalls were never remedied at a state level, leaving the Maasai in Ngorongoro to suffer with acute water shortage virtually by themselves. 

Today, the Maasai’s land restrictions also extends to restrictions of their water supply to small springs found at the Ngorongoro crater floor, as well as small-scale NGO-funded initiatives (eg. wells). These restrictions, together with increasing and acute droughts due climate change, are forcing Maasai communities to beg for water for their cattle from the luxurious hotels that now border the crater. As a means of survival, some Maasai communities have now resorted to foreign-owned exploitative tourism, but it has been clear that tourism to see the Serengeti wildlife has taken political priority:

"A Maasai is good for a tourist's photograph, useful to carry your bags to the camp, or even to guide you to see the animals...but in the end, the animals are far more valuable than people." -Parkipuny

 

Fitness group use Maasai people as 'props' on their fitness retreat

Tourist visits Maasai village and is photographed doing their traditional "jumping dance"
 

Yet this water and land deprivation is only to worsen with growing international interest in Serengeti ecosystems and lands, most notably from the United Arab Emirates. The Tanzanian government is increasingly making arrangements with foreign tourism businesses that further restrict where Maasai communities are allowed to settle, and which water sources they are allowed to use. Some new land allocations do not have “a single water stream”, discussed one community elder.

Ngorongoro Serena Safari Lodge boasts its scenic views and swimming pool. Meanwhile, 2km away, over 700 Maasai gather in Oloirobi Village to pray together against the impending eviction of their ancestral lands. February 13, 2022.

These evictions of Maasai communities are being conducted in the name of conservation. The Tanzanian government’s have consistently adopted Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” type of conservation –that in order to protect the scenic and profitable Serengeti (ie. “the commons”), you must control its Maasai population. Yet the irony is that the idea of conservation held by the government and conservation organisations alike, is likely to be more disruptive to Ngorongoro’s biodiversity. Mass tourism has shown to always be more troublesome for conservation than the practices of the Maasai people, who have lived on these lands sustainably for thousands of years.

The Maasai people have amongst the most limited accesses to water in East Africa, and are amongst the most deprived in terms of basic services like healthcare and education. However, as discussed in this entry, this is not because of water scarcity or scarcity of social resources. Instead, it is because national governments have followed the "modernisation" development model that colonialists left behind in East Africa, using land occupation and water restriction as a means of controlling the Maasai population. The Tanzanian government prioritises tourism and foreign expansion into the Serengeti, rather than allocating these lands and resources for the benefit of local use. Depriving Maasai communities of basic rights such as water and fertile lands for their cattle and cultivation, is simply a way of quietly forcing these communities to move elsewhere, abandon their 'indigenous' lifestyle and slowly assimilate them into Tanzanian national fabric.

This thus not only poses an ethical question as it blatantly violates their human rights to security and resource equality, but it also poses a threat to the continent’s biodiversity. Without the indigenous knowledge and practices passed down generationally between the Maasai people, there is little hope for conserving Africa’s great Mara-Serengeti.