Newly elected President William Ruto has his work cut out crafting a coherent political strategy to address the crises bedevilling the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa.
The ludicrous proposal that every African country should put 30 per cent of its land under “protected areas” by the year 2030 to conserve biodiversity is mere window-dressing to enable Western capitalism to annex over 80 per cent of Africa’s landmass.
Across Africa projects of capitalist extraction still ensure evictions, mass expropriations of land and misery. Today the government of Tanzania wants to expand the space for luxury tourists to enjoy picturesque views of nature – a wildlife fantasy of nature supposedly untouched by humans. Laibor Kalanga Moko and Jonas Bens argue that justification for the dispossession of indigenous communities has shifted from “economic development” to “wildlife conservation”.
While conservation NGOs have condemned the violence meted out against the Maasai in Loliondo, they do not want herders or subsistence hunters on land that they seek to control and profit from and will fight to retain their power with the immense resources at their disposal.
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A solution to the Ngorongoro conflict lies in finding consensus through inclusive dialogue.
By building a broad coalition beyond factions, and pursuing a largely safe reform agenda, the President of Tanzania, Ms. Samia Suluhu Hassan, is proving adept at placating factions — at least for now.
Unless the leaders make good on their statements about using the greater scale of the economic bloc to demand better terms of trade globally, the expanded Community is likely to be a continuation of the already damaging experience suffered by the ordinary people.
Grzimek’s racist vision of African conservation—without Africans—remains embedded in much of conservation, and is ultimately destructive of both the environment and people.
Muslim leadership, whether political or in civil society, is crucial if the instrumentalization of grievances to entice Kenyans to join al-Shabaab is to be avoided.
The Manzese Working Women’s Cooperative, or UWAWAMA, unites women in Tanzania seeking a cooperative alternative to the “slavery” of financial institutions. A recent meeting on International Women’s Day, was a chance for women to unite, organise, and articulate their demands. The women who participated in the day’s discussions summed up their demands for working women in a declaration. We post the English translation of the declaration and an introduction by Michaela Collord.
The Tanzanian government is threatening to evict more than 80,000 Maasai from the Ngorongoro world heritage site, claiming that the Maasai must be cleared from their land in the interests of conservation and wildlife corridors.