Mobilisation by women, online activism, media coverage, use of land laws and elected officials all helped bring Loliondo success
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| Masai wait to vote in elections in Tanzania's Loliondo region earlier this year. The land rights victory was won through political and legal interventions, with particular mobilisation by women. Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters |
Struggles over land rights have emerged as one of the foremost social and environmental challenges across much of Africa. Tanzania has been the focus of one of the most widely publicised land-grabbing cases over the past year.
The case revolves around Masai communities living in Loliondo, just east of the world-renowned Serengeti national park. A land tenure conflict has simmered there for the past 20 years
as a result of the government's allocation in the early 1990s of the
area for use by a foreign hunting company, an action that did not take
account of existing community land rights and uses of the resident
Masai.
The result has been years of conflict over access
and use of land and other resources, when the interests of the hunting
company come into conflict with the resident communities' traditional
livestock grazing practices and other land uses.
In 2009, the dispute resulted in a government operation to evict several hundred Masai households from the area, which led to national and international media coverage and criticism from human rights groups. The conflict flared again in March of this year when Tanzania's minister for natural resources and tourism announced plans to convert 150,000 hectares
– about 40% of the Loliondo area, including nearly the entire territory
of six Masai villages – into an exclusive reserve for wildlife, which
would have legally required the eviction of up to 20,000 people.
This latest phase of the conflict attracted even more global media coverage,
and has become a flashpoint for the growing debate around land rights
and different models of economic development in Tanzania and Africa more
broadly. The communities, supported by a range of Tanzanian civil
society organisations, mobilised to defend their lands through a range
of political and legal interventions.
At the end of September, in response to these efforts, Tanzania's prime minister, Mizengo Pinda, visited Loliondo and announced a reversal of the earlier move by the natural resources and tourism ministry, stating that the land belonged to the communities and there could be no eviction of the resident Masai.
This
appears to be an extraordinary victory for a remote and marginalised
rural community. The Loliondo case, with all the publicity it has
garnered – including a campaign by the online activist organisation Avaaz
that has attracted some 2 million supporters – serves as a window into
the wider struggle over lands and resources taking place across Africa.
As such, a number of important lessons emerge from the way this case has
played out over the past six months.
Perhaps the most
remarkable aspect of the Loliondo episode has been the alignment of
local and national civil society organisations within Tanzania, combined
with influential supporters abroad, behind the communities' struggles.
The
international media coverage in support of the communities' land and
human rights has been remarkable. Few communities in Africa have been
able to attract media coverage and the global public's imagination as
Loliondo's Masai, but nevertheless the case highlights the potential for
these local-global networks to greatly enhance the voice of local
people and their leverage in domestic policy negotiations.
The
networks that link local communities in rural Africa to wider networks
of global supporters depend on the transformational role of information
technology. Not only local NGOs, but many herders and farmers in areas
such as Loliondo own mobile phones, and increasing connectivity allows
enhanced communication and transmission of information, including
photographs and video evidence. As a result, external support for the
communities in Loliondo can be mobilised in days, whereas a few years
ago it might have taken weeks.
Women have helped lead the
way. Masai society is known for being a male-dominated society, but
women are beginning to assert their rights and assume a greater social
leadership role. On land issues, Masai women in Loliondo have been at the forefront of generating community-level mobilisation and solidarity, many walking dozens of miles across the bush to assemble the community for demonstrations and meetings.
Although
Tanzania has faced heavy criticism by global media over the Loliondo
affair in the past six months, two points crucial to the outcome of the
case have consistently been overlooked. First, Tanzania has one of the
most progressive land laws in the continent in terms of safeguarding
communities' customary rights, and it is the fact that the Masai in
Loliondo possess documented rights to their land that has enabled them
to make their case effectively.
Second, Tanzania is an
increasingly vibrant, if nascent, multiparty democracy where, unlike
some other African countries, citizens have the opportunity to be heard
by, and also to sanction, their elected officials.
The
national elections are scheduled to take place in two years, a fact that
encouraged leaders to listen to community grievances. This highlights
the fact that throughout Africa and elsewhere, struggles over land
rights are inevitably tied to the broader terrain of democratic
governance in which they take place.
Maanda Ngoitiko is
executive director of Pastoral Women's Council, and a resident of
Loliondo. Fred Nelson is executive director of Maliasili Initiatives.
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