by Fred Pearce
European colonialists, hunters, and conservationists have all found it difficult to believe that the Maasai and their cattle can live in harmony with the wildlife. It runs counter to the mythology of a Pleistocene landscape, to conventional ideas about conservation, and to rather more selfish notions about what an Africa safari should offer to Western visitors.
In the 1950s, with leaders in Europe talking of granting their African colonies independence, environmentalists warned that Africans could not be trusted with wildlife. Julian Huxley, then head of the United Nations science organization, UNESCO, and future founder of the environment group WWF, said they would invade the parks and slaughter all the animals in “a surviving sector of the rich natural world as it was before the rise of modern man.” The Maasai cattle were “rapidly reducing large stretches of land to dusty semi-desert,” he said.
Perhaps the most powerful message came in 1959 in the book and film Serengeti Shall Not Die. German conservationist Bernhard Grzimek, with his son Michael, proposed that the existing Serengeti National Park be sealed off from human inhabitants. “A national park must remain a piece of primordial wilderness to be effective. No men, not even native ones, should live inside its borders. The Serengeti cannot support wild animals and domestic cattle at the same time.” The ashes of the two men are buried there. Their views on African ecology were largely mistaken, but their influence lingers on. Bernhard Grzimek was director of the Frankfurt Zoo, which continues to advise on conservation policy in the Serengeti today.
The British wanted to clear the Maasai out of most of the Serengeti, including both the Serengeti National Park and the region round the Ngorongoro crater, a large basin-shaped crater rich in grassland that was the Maasai’s best dry-season grazing ground. And gradually that is happening. Before independence, some ten thousand Maasai and their cattle were expelled from the national park. A decade later, the government of Julius Nyerere removed them from the Ngorongoro crater, which he converted into the country’s most popular tourist hub, surrounded by hotels. In 2007, the government proposed halving to twenty-five thousand the Maasai population in the wider area surrounding the crater.
The Maasai are now excluded from more than 4 million acres of the plain. They are routinely blamed for the environmental problems that arise from their being corralled into ever smaller areas, while the safari revenues end up in the hands of travel entrepreneurs, the government parks service, and the new network of private, often foreign-owned nature reserves.
The law is little help. In theory, the Village Land Act of 1999 guarantees villages the freedom to use their traditional pastures. But, as in much of Africa, such vague statements are easily ignored when the overall political landscape is hostile. In his inauguration speech in 2005, President Jakaya Kikwete told parliament that: “We must abandon altogether nomadic pastoralism.” A few months later, he reiterated: “I am committed to taking unpopular steps to [stop] pastoralists, in order to protect the environment for the benefit of the nation and future generations.” Close to 40 percent of Tanzania is now “protected” in various ways—frequently by excluding the Maasai and other traditional pastoralists. A new draft plan for Loliondo, where the Arab sheikhs roam free, gives only 17 percent of the land to the Maasai.
The Maasai are not opposed to tourism. Far from it. But they want tourism “grounded in village rights and not state rights,” as Ben Gardner, anthropologist at the University of Washington, puts it. They want to be in charge of their own land, not “reduced to bead sellers and recipients of philanthropic help from foreigners.” Sadly, the huge profits to be made from tourism, bolstered by shallow environmental rhetoric, mean that they are seldom left alone to achieve that.
Some outsiders continue to believe that, in their hands, conservation and community can be reunited. But there is too much history for them to have much chance of success. Take the case of Boston-based Rick Thomson and his partner, Judi Wineland. In 2006, their tour company, Thomson Safaris (no relation to the British Thomson tour company), bought the 1,200-acre Sukenya farm on the Serengeti plain for $1.2 million from the government-owned Tanzania Breweries. The farm is next door to the brigadier’s hunting reserve and has filled with gazelle, wildebeest, giraffe, and impala—no doubt many of them fleeing the Gulf gunslingers. The couple renamed the farm the Enashiva nature refuge and began inviting tourists.
So far, so good. But it turned out that the brewery had never farmed much of the land, which it had annexed from Maasai pastures in the 1980s. The Maasai had soon gone back to herding their cattle there. So when the American pair showed up two decades later with an ambition to practice “sustainable and responsible tourism,” they met instant opposition. Disputes over grazing rights have proliferated. There have been standoffs, often involving the police, during which one herder was shot in the jaw. Journalists who have gone to investigate have been arrested. One was declared a “prohibited immigrant.”
The couple feel aggrieved. “We have definitely gotten a bad deal,” Wineland told me. “We are ethical people who have not stolen land or mistreated anyone.” She says they have good relations with a couple of local villages, who are allowed to graze some cattle on the reserve during the dry season. But one clan, the Purko, “continue to oppose any and all limitations on grazing.” She accuses them of “spreading lies, inciting fear and co-opting the legitimate cause of Maasai rights” in a campaign against the couple that has made some of their leaders rich. Anthropologists now discuss what went wrong here as an example of how good intentions are not enough when foreigners take land that others claim.
A similar cultural clash occurred at the Manyara cattle ranch after it was bought up by the Tanzania Land Conservation Trust, a creation of the Washington-based African Wildlife Foundation. The plan was to buy land and manage it in trust for both the locals and wildlife. The Manyara ranch is the Trust’s flagship project. It covers 45,000 acres and sits a little south of the Serengeti plain, between the Tarangire and Lake Manyara national parks, both of which are full of elephants. The trust wants to conserve the grassland as part of the re-creation of the 25-mile wildlife corridor between the two parks.
When the government put the ranch up for sale, the local Maasai villages, Esilalei and Oltukai, wrote to the president asking for the land to be returned to them. Instead, the government gave the Conservation Trust a ninety-nine-year lease, perhaps attracted by funding offered from USAID “to conserve . . . a critical wildlife corridor and . . . to benefit partner communities.” The omens looked good. “The Maasai initially welcomed the ranch as a jointly run conservation area, which they thought they owned,” says Mara Goldman of the University of Colorado, a geographer who has studied the project in detail. It turned out that nobody had got around to telling the villagers that the land was not theirs, and had been bought by the Trust.
Villagers sat on enough steering committees and other bodies to feel involved. But the Trust board was dominated by conservation “experts” from the African Wildlife Foundation, which formally owns the land, along with others from WWF, the UN Development Programme, and the country’s National Parks Authority.
To make matters worse, says Goldman, most of the outside experts believed that the local community was causing ecological decline. They held to the conventional view that livestock grazing was fundamentally incompatible with wildlife. The ranch managers began to make decisions without doing more than notifying the Maasai herders. They introduced fines for trespassers, while the wildlife roamed free. Though many of the villagers have jobs on the ranch, says Goldman, “they resent what they see as an outsider-run conservation area on land taken away from them.”
The cultural drift escalated with the opening in 2010 of an elite private safari camp, which now dominates most of the reserve. The $650-a-night Manyara Ranch Conservancy swiftly applied to build its own airstrip. Such developments are logical steps, no doubt, to ensure long-term funding for outside management of the ecosystem.
But what about the residents? Goldman relates how, at the start, the Maasai’s proposed name for the conservancy—Ramat, meaning stewardship—was rejected as “sounding too Arabic . . . during the war on terror.” Now she says, among themselves, the Maasai call it Sunguni, meaning the white people’s place.
The Serengeti extends north into Kenya, where land ownership is different from Tanzania, though no less contentious. Most recently, land disputes between tribes boiled over into riots and massacres in 2007. But many of the disputes date back to mass movements of people initiated by the British to create land for themselves.
The district of Laikipia on the edge of the Rift Valley is a hotbed of land grabs. A century ago, it was mostly controlled by the Maasai. British colonialists subsequently shipped many of the Maasai out, leaving a majority of Kikuyu, Kenya’s biggest tribe. But even though the Kikuyu run the country and form the majority in Laikipia, they don’t run the district. It is mostly owned by a motley mixture of old white settler families and a new high-roller international elite. Independence? Maybe they missed it.
In fact, just twenty people and institutions own three-quarters of Laikipia, an area of more than 2 million acres. Many of them are converting old cattle ranches created by white settlers almost a century ago into chic wildlife sanctuaries that have attracted high-roller tourists. Much buying and selling is going on among the elite here. And a colorful lot they are, too.
One of the largest holdings is the 90,000-acre Ol Pejeta ranch. This land was taken from the Maasai in the 1920s by Lord (Tom) Delamere, the son of one of Kenya’s first English aristocratic settlers and a founder of the notorious hard-drinking, loose-living Happy Valley set. Imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reset in Africa. Delamere’s family, the Cholmondeleys, who have another huge ranch at Soysambu in the Rift Valley, eventually sold Ol Pejeta to the father-in-law of Christina Onassis, Henri Roussel, who was President of Roussel Uclaf, a huge French pharmaceuticals company. (The Cholmondeleys themselves hit the headlines again in 2005, when the heir to the family estates, another Tom, became the only white inmate in Nairobi’s high-security prison after being convicted of shooting dead a poacher on Soysambu.)
The next owner of Ol Pejeta was the Saudi billionaire arms dealer and playboy Adnan Khashoggi, who used it as a hideaway for activities that brought back memories of the Happy Valley. But he departed after a dispute over a loan made to him by the buccaneering British entrepreneur Tiny Rowland.
Rowland was born in a First World War refugee camp in India. He initially made his fortune running tobacco farms in Rhodesia. Later in London, where his London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Company (Lonrho) was based, his feuds were almost as well known as his business activities. He was once famously described by British prime minister Ted Heath as “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.” He took over Ol Pejeta for a while, before selling to conservationists. The ranch is now run as a nature refuge and tourist resort. It is owned by Jon Stryker, the American heir to a fortune made in medical technology, through his Arcus Foundation. Environmental management is done by the British conservation group Fauna and Flora International and the Lewa Conservancy, of which more later.
The 67,000-acre Ol Jogi ranch is owned by Liouba Stoupakova, the Russian model widow of Alec Wildenstein. Wildenstein was a French billionaire racehorse breeder. He reputedly owned the world’s largest private art collection, which he stored in a former nuclear bunker in New York City. Wildenstein’s first wife, Jocelyn, whose scandalous New York divorce case against him had the tabloids agog for weeks, said the ranch cost $150,000 a month to run. When he died in 2008, one obituarist said the ranch had become “a sort of African Versailles, importing giraffe, leopard, lion, white rhino and other big game, some from South Africa.” It had “120 miles of road, 55 artificial lakes, a swimming pool with rocks and waterfalls, a golf course and a racetrack—all maintained by an army of 366 servants.”
The largest estate in Laikipia, Ol ari Nyiro, is the property of Venetian-born Kuki Gallmann, author of the bestselling book I Dreamed of Africa. She has dedicated the 100,000 acres to her late husband Paolo, who died in a road accident while bringing home a cradle for their first child. Down the road, the 70,000-acre Loisaba cattle ranch was bought in 1971 by an Italian Count, Carletto Ancilotto. He called it Colcheccio, meaning “mind your own business.” His heirs have leased it to the Kenya-based Wilderness Guardian Company for $2,800-a-night safari tourism.
An American, George Small, inherited the 44,000-acre Mpala ranch from his brother Sam in 1969. He created the Mpala Wildlife Foundation there, which he bequeathed to biologists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., on his own death in 2002. Other huge foreign-owned properties in Laikipia include the 50,000-acre Segera ranch, bought by the German wunderkind boss of the Puma sportswear company, Jochen Zeitz, as a “global ecosphere retreat”; Scotsman Guy Grant’s El Karama 15,000-acre former hunting ranch; Englishman Robert Wells’s 50,000-acre Lolldaiga Hills tourist ranch; and the 50,000-acre Mugie Ranch, property of California vineyard owner Nicky Hahn and his artist wife Gaby.
Several of the big landholdings were originally carved out of the Maasai lands in the 1920s by British soldiers who were given the land by the colonial authorities in recognition of their service in the First World War. Major Gerald Edwards created the Sosian ranch. After he died in 1977, it fell into disrepair in the hands of Munene Kairo, an aide to the current Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki. But it has been spruced up since the late 1990s by the owners of Offbeat Safaris, polo-playing Tristan and Lucinda Voorspuy.
Another beneficiary of the “soldier settler” scheme was Alec Douglas, who created a 35,000-acre ranch on the Lewa Downs. Eighty years later, converted into a discreet luxury retreat, it was where Prince William, a frequent visitor, proposed to Kate Middleton. In between times, the ranch has become a beacon of enlightened conservation. Douglas handed it on to his daughter Delia. She and her husband, David Craig, decided in the 1980s to turn 5,000 acres into a high-security rhino sanctuary, where Kenya’s fast-declining population of black rhino could be collected and protected from poachers behind an electric fence.
The Lewa Wildlife Conservancy eventually took over the ranch, and later the whole 100,000 acres of the Lewa Downs, including 15,000 acres of national forest. The conservancy is the largest employer in the area and has essentially privatized a huge stretch of spectacular landscape and its wildlife. It is patrician, of course. And some of the Craig land is used by the British Army for tropical training. But the Craigs, headed now by their son Ian, have also become pioneers of community conservation. They helped create the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, a democratic association of ranchers, smallholders, and native pastoralists dedicated to protecting the land and wildlife for tourism and their own use; and also the Northern Rangelands Trust, which is trying to do the same thing on a larger scale across northern Kenya.
I discovered what these ideas could mean in practice when I went to the Il Ngwesi eco-lodge. It is Maasai run, part of a collectively owned “group ranch” on a corner of Laikipia that they have managed to hold against all comers. And it is the one tourist place in this part of the world that I would thoroughly recommend.
Perched on a cliff top about 6 miles northwest of Lewa Downs, the eco-lodge has been in business for more than a decade now. My Jeep ride from the grass airstrip took me slowly through a tightly packed herd of about a hundred migrating elephants, one of the most breathtaking experiences of my life. Below the lodge there was an animal watering hole visited by buffalo, lions, giraffes, gazelles, warthogs, and impala. There were solar panels on the roof, but the “rooms” were otherwise open to the air. “Watch out for leopards,” the guard joked as I settled down for the night. I didn’t sleep for hours.
Over breakfast, the secretary of the Il Ngwesi group ranch, Morias Kisio, told me how the lodge came about. In the 1970s, European tour operators had set up a camel-trekking operatio
n on the collectively owned 16,000-acre ranch, but without offering any payment. “We thought it was their right,” he said. But the Maasai elders met Ian Craig from Lewa Downs, who “told us we should be paid. So we charged the operators 50 shillings per person per night for everyone who stayed on our land.” That is worth only about 50 cents today. Not much, but it was sufficient to open a bank account, and the community used the money to pay for schooling for their children. “Then Ian showed us how we could get into business ourselves. He said we could get money to build this lodge. We designed and built it ourselves for under a million shillings. Now we can make two million shillings [about $22,000] a year from the lodge. It means we can send students to university.”
There have been conservation compromises. They keep their cattle away from tourist areas now, for instance. And the management is no idyll of social harmony and equality. As geographer Ameyali Ramos Castillo, now at the United Nations University, noted in a fascinating master’s thesis on the lodge, it is run by “the traditional leadership of male elders, and the involvement of the rest of the community has been minimal, at best.” But she concluded that it is nonetheless “highly sustainable.” They have found a new, and profitable, way of living in their landscape. And exposed as nonsense the belief that the Maasai, their cattle, and wildlife are incompatible. “We still milk our cows,” Morias said with a smile, “but now, with the tourists, we can milk the elephants, too.”