The old life: He’d had all the things that made a person such as him rich and respected. Three wives, 14 children, a large compound with 75 cows and enough land to graze them—“such sweet land,” he would say when he could bear to think of it—and that was how things had been going until recently.
The new life: no cows, because the Tanzanian government had seized every single one of them. No compound, because the government had bulldozed it, along with hundreds of others. No land, because more and more of the finest, lushest land in northern Tanzania was being set aside for conservation, which turned out to mean for trophy hunters, and tourists on “bespoke expeditions,” and cappuccino trucks in proximity to buffalo viewing—anything and anyone except the people who had lived there since the 17th century, the pastoralists known as the Maasai.
They were the ones tourists saw through their windshields selling beaded key chains at the gates of Serengeti National Park, or performing dances after dinner at safari lodges. They were famous for their red shawls and recycled-tire sandals. They grazed their cattle with zebras and giraffes, and built mud-and-dung houses encircled by stick fences barely distinguishable from the wild landscape. They were among the lightest-living people on the planet, and yet it was the Maasai who were being told that the biggest threat to conservation and national progress was them. Their whole way of life had to go.
And so Songoyo, after considering his alternatives, had devised a last-ditch plan for his own survival, one that had brought him to a town in Kenya called Aitong, where a cool wind was slapping sand and dung into his face as he scanned the market for buyers. He was far from home, roughly 65 miles north of the village in Tanzania where he had been tear-gassed and shot at for the first time in his life. He had seen elderly men beaten and guns fired at old women, and now it was down to this: He was a herder for hire, working for a distant relative, trying to make enough money to buy one single cow.
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The forces arrayed against Songoyo, whom I met in the course of two long trips to Tanzania late last year, include some of the world’s most powerful people and interests. (I have not used Songoyo’s last name out of concern for his safety.) What these people and interests want is what the Maasai are trying to keep: the land they live on.
Global leaders are seeking what they consider to be undeveloped land to meet a stated goal of conserving 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030. Corporations want undisturbed forests in order to offset pollution. Western conservation groups, which refer to the Maasai as “stakeholders” on their own land, exert great influence, as does a booming safari industry that sells an old and destructive myth—casting the Serengeti as some primordial wilderness, with the Maasai as cultural relics obstructing a perfect view.
The reality is that the Maasai have been stewards, integral to creating that very ecosystem. The same can be said of Indigenous groups around the world, to whom conservation often feels like a land grab. In the past two decades, more than a quarter million Indigenous people have been evicted to make way for ecotourism, carbon-offset schemes, and other activities that fall under the banner of conservation. That figure is expected to soar.
For all its accomplishments, the cause of saving the planet has become a trillion-dollar business, a global scramble in which wealthy nations are looking to the developing world not just for natural resources, but for nature itself. The wealthy players include not only Europeans and Americans but Arabs and Chinese and others. On the African continent, political leaders are enthusiastic about what so-called green foreign investment might mean for their own economies (and, maybe, their bank accounts).
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Still, the threat unfolding now is of greater magnitude. It emerged soon after President Samia Suluhu Hassan took office, in 2021. “Tourism in Ngorongoro is disappearing,” she declared during one of her first major speeches. “We agreed that people and wildlife could cohabitate, but now people are overtaking the wildlife.” The Maasai listened with alarm, realizing that the people she was referring to were them.
Not long after Hassan’s speech, officials announced plans to resettle the roughly 100,000 Maasai who were living in and around Ngorongoro to “modern houses” in another part of the country. Meanwhile, in a region north of Ngorongoro, bordering Serengeti National Park, government security forces began rolling into Maasai villages. They were carrying out another part of the plan: annexing 580 square miles of prime grazing land to create an exclusive game reserve for the Dubai royal family, which had long hunted in the area. The government characterized the move as necessary for conservation. Traditional Maasai compounds, known as bomas, were burned. Park rangers began seizing cattle by the tens of thousands.
And more was coming: a $7.5 billion package with the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a part, that included new plans for tourism and conservation. A $9.5 million deal with the Chinese for a geological park that overlapped with additional Maasai villages. An offer from Tanzania to make Donald Trump Jr.—an avid trophy hunter—an official “tourism ambassador.” New maps and proposals from the government indicated that further tracts could soon be placed off-limits, including a sacred site that the Maasai call the Mountain of God.
“This is 80 percent of our land,” a Maasai elder told me one evening during a meeting with other leaders in northern Tanzania. “This will finish us.” They had tried protesting. They had filed lawsuits. They had appealed to the United Nations, the European Union, the East African Court of Justice, and Vice President Kamala Harris when she visited Tanzania in 2023. They’d unearthed old maps and village titles to prove that the land was theirs by law, not just by custom. They’d written a letter to John and Patrick McEnroe after hearing that the tennis stars were hosting a $25,000-a-person safari-and-tennis expedition in the Serengeti. People made supportive statements, but no one was coming to help.
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Hassan eased his more repressive policies and embarked on an ambitious plan to bring foreign investment into the country, especially through tourism. She branded herself a forward-looking environmentalist.
And she found willing collaborators. The World Bank had been encouraging more tourism, arguing that it could help Tanzania achieve what official metrics define as middle-income status. One of the country’s main conservation partners, UNESCO, had been pressing Tanzanian authorities for years to implement what it called “stringent policies to control population growth” in Ngorongoro, although UNESCO also says it has never supported the displacement of people. A German conservation group called the Frankfurt Zoological Society, a major partner in managing Serengeti National Park, has expressed concern that traditional Maasai practices are becoming less tenable because of population growth. “There is a risk of overuse and overgrazing that should be addressed,” Dennis Rentsch, the deputy director of the society’s Africa department, told me. “I don’t want to vilify the Maasai. They are not enemies of conservation. But the challenge is when you reach a tipping point.”
In response to these pressures, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism produced a report that blamed rising Maasai and livestock populations for “extensive habitat destruction” in conservation zones. It recommended resettling all of Ngorongoro’s Maasai. It also recommended designating the 580-square-mile Osero tract, farther away, as a more restrictive game reserve, describing the land as an important wildlife corridor and water-catchment area for the Serengeti ecosystem. The designation left the Dubai royal family with an exclusive hunting playground. But none of the Maasai who lived in the area would be allowed to graze their cattle or continue living there.
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But there would be no debate, no discussion of complexities. Hassan moved forward with her agenda. She was finalizing the $7.5 billion package with the United Arab Emirates, the fourth-largest (after China, the EU, and the U.S.) investor in Africa. One deal turned over management of roughly two-thirds of Dar es Salaam’s port to DP World, a company owned by the U.A.E. government. Another deal turned over management of some 20 million acres of forest—roughly 8 percent of the nation’s entire territory—to a company called Blue Carbon, which is run by a member of the royal family, Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, and uses conserved land to generate carbon credits that it sells to other companies. The package also included money for tourism.
Hassan invited travel agents to the country for a “tourism reboot.” She spoke of wanting more five-star hotels. She filmed a promotional documentary called The Royal Tour, which at one point involved helicoptering with a travel reporter over some Maasai villages near the Serengeti.
“All those round things down there are the Maasai bomas,” Hassan says in the film, as several villagers look up into the sky. The reporter then comments in a way that Maasai leaders found ominous: “Over the years, the Tanzanian government has tried to persuade the Maasai to become traditional farmers or ranchers, but they’ve persisted in clinging to their ancient ways. And yet, they may not have a choice now.”
Some 400 miles to the south, in the hotter, flatter farming area of Msomera, bulldozers broke ground on a new development. The military was building 5,000 cinder-block houses intended for Maasai families. Officials had been dispatched to villages in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to present the government’s offer: a free house on 2.5 acres. Electricity. Piped water. New schools. A cash bonus of roughly $4,000 for early takers. At one such presentation, a crowd pelted the officials with rocks.
I requested an interview with Hassan to better understand her decisions. In response, a government spokesperson arranged interviews with several other officials, one of whom was Albert Msando, a district commissioner, who told me, “Whatever I am answering is whatever the president would have answered.” We met in the town of Handeni, near Msomera. Msando’s office was inside a former British-colonial building, where a portrait of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s founding father, hung on one wall and a portrait of Hassan hung on another.
“For the public interest,” Msando said of the Maasai, “we have to relocate them.” A lawyer by training and demeanor, Msando emphasized that any relocation is voluntary, at least for now. He also made it clear that if persuasion fails, the government maintains the legal right to remove the Maasai from conservation areas, by force if necessary. “That’s why there are guys here with their shoulders decorated,” Msando said, pointing around the room to police and military officers.
He told me that anyone in Tanzania would be lucky to get what the Maasai were getting. “We are giving them nice houses, I believe, according to modern standards.” He said that the Maasai currently live in “filthy conditions” and should be helped to “live a better life.”
He and other officials I spoke with said that they disliked even using the term Maasai. They invoked the spirit of Nyerere, saying that Tanzania was supposed to have a national identity, not tribal ones. Msando said he could understand the Maasai’s concern about losing their culture, even if he had little sympathy for it. “Culture is a fluid thing,” he said. “I am Chaga—the Chaga were on the verge of having their own nation. Today look at me. People do not even know I’m Chaga. My kids don’t even speak Chaga.” He was unapologetic: “The Maasai are not exempted from acculturation or cultural acclimatization, or cultural extinction.”
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