The continued displacement of the Maasai shows how tourism harms more than it helps, Part I

Google “Maasai” and search under the Images tab. You can either glance at the first few results or scroll for an hour and still come away with a singular image in mind, that of East Africans wearing red cloth (shuka), holding long sticks (rungus), and jumping in the air (the adamu ritual). You’ll also see them adorned in intricate beadwork and large facial and ear piercings, which, coupled with shuka and rungus, are popular tourist souvenirs, while the adamu, a traditional ceremony, is often performed as a dance for touring groups. National Geographic magazine covers, coffee table books, tourism brochures, travel blogs, and documentaries will show you the exact same image. Then, search under the News tab, and you’ll see a completely different picture.

In early June of this year, about 700 Tanzanian military, police and park rangers descended upon Loliondo, a town in the north of the country, to initiate the government’s plans to demarcate 580 square miles of Maasai land for conservation and safari tourism, despite a 2018 ruling by the East African Court of Justice against the plan. Maasai community members peacefully protested in response, which the security forces met with mass violence, shooting about 30 people, killing one, beating others and arresting dozens more. Tear gas was deployed at protests in nearby Kenya where more people were arrested. The police then raided homes in northern Tanzania, village by village, beating and arresting people, some on suspicion that they’d shared disturbing images and videos of the attacks on social media that sparked international outrage. About 150,000 Maasai people will be displaced if the land grab continues.

But this isn’t the first time the Maasai have been displaced by tourism. The main offender is the Otterlo Business Corporation, a United Arab Emirates-based luxury game company that organizes the Emirati royal family and their guests’ hunting trips (its Twitter bio states that they are “100% for conservation,’‘ though they’ve been accused of killing thousands of rare species) who’ve been evicting, attacking, and intimidating the pastoralists in the Ngorogoro Conservation Area since 1992. However, the Maasai only live in the NCA today because they were displaced from the Serengeti by British colonists to make way for the famed national park in the 1950s. “This is not to say we have lived here since 1959,” when the Serengeti and NCA were established, said a Maasai elder at a protest earlier this year. “We were here in Ngorogoro [for] over 7,000 years.”

They are only one of many “conservation refugee” groups—Indigenous people who are forced out of their lands in favor of the Western conservationist model of environmental and wildlife protection—in Africa and across the world. OBC employed the eugenicist rhetoric central to fortress conservation in a statement made to the Financial Times: overpopulation. This model purports that environmental protection necessitates the displacement of long-term inhabitants (not short-term tourists), despite studies dispelling this assertion as well as the fact that Indigenous people are stewards of 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity.

“It is very telling that many of the wild animals that still exist in East Africa reside in Maasailand,” Laibor Kalanga Moko and Jonas Bens recently wrote in the Review of African Political Economy. “History clearly shows: The economic system that systematically destroys wildlife is capitalism, not pastoralism.”

Notice that the African continent is mostly blamed in the overpopulation defense and not places like North America. As Mordecai Ogada, co-author of The Big Conservation Lie wrote in 2020, “It is obvious to any observer that the target of this ‘protection’ is the tropics, which are home to Black and brown people. There won’t be any biodiversity gains by turning London, New York (or Boston) into a protected area.”

With safaris, game reserves, national parks, and sustainable tourism all conflated under the umbrella of ‘conservation,’ can we really blame the well-intentioned tourist for being drawn in by this language? For example, Kenya has 24 national parks, which are usually state-run, but it also has 15 national reserves, six marine parks, and over three dozen private conservancies (which alone account for 11% of the country’s land), and hunting land could fall under both reserves and conservancies. Most of these are privately owned. How shooting zebras for the purpose of displaying their taxidermied heads in some rich guy’s house counts as wildlife protection is unbeknownst to me. But what we do know is that, even if you’re not hunting animals, tourism continues to drive the displacement of the Maasai.

Bani Amor is a gender/queer travel writer who explores the relationships between race, place, and power. Their work has appeared in CNN Travel, Fodor’s, Teen Vogue, and Lonely Planet, among other outlets, and in the anthology Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity. Bani is a four-time VONA/Voices Fellow who leads workshops and delivers lectures on decolonization and travel culture. Follow them on Instagram at @baniamor and Twitter @bani_amor.

This story was originally published August 4, 2022 at 12:00 PM.