I want to write about the last two weeks, but I’m at a loss. Its the same kind of loss for words as when someone asks me “hows africa?” as if I can just give a quick answer for the whole continent. It just feels so big. But hey, I’ll just try my luck at giving you a history of the Serengeti and the Maasai people as a warm up. This is full of generalizations and I am unqualified to be writing any history of anything, but hopefully it will give you an idea/context.
So here’s what I know:
The Serengeti is a national park in Northern Tanzania. Prior to becoming a “playground for white tourists” as Rod Neumman calls it, the Serengeti was home to a group of people called the Maasai.
The Maasai are an ethnic group in Tanzania who originated in Egypt and traveled down through the Great Rift Valley, settling (sort of) in Kenya and Tanzania (the Serengeti area) where they are located today. Maasai are for the most part pastorialists and they love their cows. No really, they love them. Cows for the Maasai symbolize power and wealth. Without cows, Maasai culture could not exist. Maasai also practice polygamy and female circumcision (2 things I’ll come back to). As many groups in Tanzania have become increasingly Westernized, the Maasai have been particularly resistant to cultural globalization, and though they have incorporated many aspects of “modernity”, they continue to practice distinctly non-Western cultural habits—ie you can pick a Maasai out from a crowd because he will probably be wrapped in a number of different red fabrics, have lots of jewelry, and have an affinity for cows.
I have definitely just made several generalizations, reifications and probably mistakes in my description, but that is a vague idea of who the Maasai are.
So, when some international conservationists decided they wanted to preserve the Serengeti ecosystem in the first half of the 20th century, they promised the Maasai that their rights to land and resources in the area would not be taken away. Over time, the Serengeti was eventually gazetted as an official National Park, and the rights of the Maasai unfortunately conflicted with the goals of the conservationists who defined “nature” as void of people.
As an attempt to alleviate the situation, the Serengeti was split into several units, and all the Maasai living in the park were told they needed to move. Only the Ngorongoro area remained open for residence-- Ngorongoro became an experiment in wedding conservation with development (something else to talk about bc the Maasai were very restricted in their lifestyle and basically frozen in time so that they too could be a tourist attraction). Outside of Ngorongoro, the Maasai were told that they had some time to vacate the park, but an unexplained fire destroyed all the Maasai villages in the Serengeti, and the government essentially chased them out.
In Ngorongoro, only Maasai born with in the Park were permitted to live there, and life was extremely restricted so that they would not destroy the park’s ecosystem by living inside of it. Ironically, these people who have lived on the land for hundred of years without destroying it, watched fancy safari lodges go up around them—lodges that tap into the crater’s water table and potentially have severe ecological effects.
The goals of Ngorongoro were technically to promote conservation of species diversity and simultaneously promote the development of the Maasai people. I don’t know what development is, but as far as I can tell most people agree that Ngorongoro has failed on that front. Promises for cattle dips and water systems have gone unfulfilled. Conservation-wise there have been mixed results. The rhino population in the crater has almost disappeared (only 12 left), but predators like lions and hyenas have skyrocketed, to the point that we may see changes in the prey populations, particularly as safari lodges block routes out of the crater and populations face the trouble of inbreeding. Sounds complicated, right? And I haven’t even scratched the surface of it all.
I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer about how the Serengeti should look today. I feel angry about the way that the Maasai are treated, but I don’t think conservation is a worthless endeavor, I just think it might be impossible. And I am not sure what the goal is, or how we even define nature. And who is it for? Because most Tanzanians certainly can’t afford to see their own national parks. But I sound harsh, and it isn’t all bad for Tanzania. Tourism is a big part of the GDP here—creating jobs and brining in capital.
So here’s a question, if you worked for Tanzania’s national parks association, and you had the choice of whether or not to open another park, would you? It is a pertinent question, because after leaving the Serengeti, we traveled to Lake Natron, an area that may soon be annexed to the Serengeti. And… we lived with Maasai families.
That’s where things get really complicated.
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