By Soleil-Chandni Mousseau
In the early morning of August 18, the safari cars that usually creep along the Ngorongoro-Serengeti highway, slowed by their sheer numbers, encountered a different challenge. Thousands of Maasai men and women, draped in red-patterned Shuka cloth and waving grass, a symbol of peace, were blocking the highway.
They were staging a peaceful protest against the Tanzanian governments latest ruthless attempt to forcibly evict them from their ancestral lands. The police, wary of using violence in front of international tourists as they had in neighbouring Loliondo in 2022, resorted to intimidation tactics instead, blocking vehicles carrying food and water from Karatu to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) to weaken the resolve of the demonstrators.
Losing land and life: a history of displacement in the name of conservation
Since Tanzanias colonisers established the Serengeti National Park in 1951,d isplacing Indigenous residents to Loliondo and the NCA, the pastoralist Maasai in northern Tanzania have faced relentless struggles against evictions and human rights abuses. For the past four years, their resilience has endured brutal attacks designed to expel them from their ancestral lands, transforming the region into a people-free zone to enhance safari tourism and hunting, as glorified in Western media like Planet Earth.
