“We are tired of moving.” This is what several Maasai men and women residing in the village of Endulen in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) in Tanzania told us last July when we asked them about the government’s ongoing efforts to relocate their community.
“Our grandparents left the Serengeti for conservation,” said a local councilor. “Our parents lived inside the Ngorongoro crater and were also removed from there. We worry about moving again. We want to have a stable life.”
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area feels like a place out of time, with its lush, otherworldly Ngorongoro Crater and Maasai boma – traditional homesteads – spread across winding roads and tucked into the hillsides. The conservation area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has prehistoric footprints of early humans walking upright, as well as a rich mix of wildlife roaming in and around the crater. The indigenous Maasai have lived there for generations, but the Tanzanian government has plans to change that, flagging the increase in people and livestock in the area as a conservation concern.
Since 2021, the government has transferred and resettled hundreds of people from the conservation area in northern Tanzania to Msomera, a village near the country’s east coast. The government claims that the relocations are voluntary and claims that the measure promotes conservation.
However, a Human Rights Watch study carried out since 2022 has concluded that relocations are far from voluntary and that the government has undermined the rights of Maasai residents of the conservation area and Msomera, including the rights to education, care health and the preservation of their culture.
The government used several tactics to expel residents from their homes.
For example, it systematically reduced the availability of adequate education and health services, which were already fewer and of poorer quality than in other parts of the country.
In 2022, it demoted Endulen Hospital to a mere dispensary. The 110-bed hospital run by the Catholic Church since 1965 was the only hospital providing comprehensive medical services in the area. Now there is such a severe shortage of medicines that officials hand out painkillers and painkillers for every ailment, residents and staff told us.
The government has refused to release funds or issue licenses to improve and renovate schools in the area, many of which have old, dilapidated buildings, overflowing latrines and insufficient desks.
Authorities also restricted movement in and out of the conservation zone, arbitrarily requiring residents to present various types of identification to enter the area. They restricted residents, who mainly depend on livestock farming for their income, from grazing animals in specific areas and also blocked their access to important cultural and traditional sites. Government rangers indiscriminately attack, beat, and harass residents who do not comply. Authorities denied entry to non-governmental organizations or tracked and monitored their representatives in the area, effectively preventing them from supporting affected communities.
Despite government claims that the relocations are voluntary, authorities did not seek the free, prior and informed consent of indigenous communities, as required by international human rights law. Residents stated that the government did not adequately consult them during and after the review of a multiple land use plan for the conservation area in 2018, and refused to consider alternatives to relocation. When Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa met with community leaders in February 2022, people present said there was no discussion or consultation and that he only gave instructions on how to register for relocation.
Ultimately, the government decided where people would be relocated and built houses without any input from the affected communities. In Msomera, the government provided each resettled family with a three-bedroom house and about 0.8 to 2 hectares of land to cultivate, in addition to building and renovating roads, a primary school, dispensary, postal services, police station, water supply, electricity and cellular network to serve the area.
But the houses do not reflect the needs or complexities of Maasai families, which are traditionally large, polygamous, multigenerational and with multiple households.
The government not only failed to consult the Maasai people already living in Msomera about its plans to resettle others there, but also displaced several families, labeling them “invaders” and “invaders” and threatened them with arrest and eviction if they protest or speak to the media. Overlapping claims to limited land by existing residents and newly resettled residents have resulted in tensions and clashes between the two communities. “The relationship with the people of Ngorongoro is very bad,” said a man from Msomera. “They occupy our places, our farms, our homes.”
When people from either community spoke out against the relocations, they faced reprisals, threats and intimidation from rangers and government security forces, creating a climate of fear in a country where criticism of the government is already highly risky. “You are not allowed to say anything,” said one Msomera resident, noting that people have “fear in their hearts”.
Even if the government’s concerns about land use pressures on conservation area biodiversity are valid, addressing them should not justify human rights abuses. Instead, the government should engage with these communities to devise rights-respecting solutions for preserving their traditional livelihoods, rather than continually uprooting them from their homes.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors themselves and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
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