The international reputation of Boston-based Thomson
Safaris, a sister company of the long-established Thomson Family Adventures,
has soared. The outfitter and its trips have won almost a dozen recent awards
and accolades, including a citation in the National Geographic Best Adventure
Travel Companies on Earth list, Condé Nast Traveler's World Savers Award,
Outside magazine's Active Travel Award, and for Wineland, Thomson Safaris'
director, a lifetime-achievement award from the Adventure Travel Trade Association.
The company is a three-time honoree of the Tanzania Tourist Board: 2001's Tour
Operator of the Year, 2005's Humanitarian of the Year, and 2009's Tanzania
Conservation Award.
The company's website includes a promotional video for a
12,000-acre tract called Enashiva, a Maasai word for "happiness"owned
by an American couple named Rick Thomson and Judi Wineland, who paid $1.2
million for the property's lease under the name of their Tanzanian-registered
company, Tanzania Conservation Ltd.—leasing it because Tanzania does not allow
foreigners to own property, only extended land titles and where now at the
property's luxury tent complex tourists pay $535 a night for an all-inclusive
safari package, shows smiling Maasai dance and sing as they give thanks for the
community projects—including building classrooms and a medical dispensary—that
the company has enabled. It was set on the doorstep of Serengeti National Park,
and human encroachment had driven away what had once been a rich wildlife
population, including giraffe, wildebeest, and big cats. Thomson and Wineland
were enticed by the challenge of bringing the animals back. Their first step
was to put limits on grazing for the health of the environment, to control
overgrazing and grazing was prohibited during much of the year, particularly
during tourist high seasons—which happened to be when most grazing there
occurred. Some local residents in the area obeyed. Many did not. Tourist
development and droughts, made more intense by the effects of climate change,
have left his villagers with few viable options for their herds. The Thomson
land was the best, and only, reasonable option. For pastoralists, there is no
need more fundamental than sufficient land to feed their animals—cows and,
recently, sheep and goats—which function both as an economic foundation and as
a social system (in crude terms, the Maasai with more cows have more power).
The wilful trespass drew consequences: frequent dispersal or
temporary confiscation of herds by Thomson guards, beatings and arrests,
prolonged detention in the local jail, and two shootings to date, according to
locals' testimony. Residents speaking out against Thomson Safaris were
routinely called in for police questioning. Journalists and aid workers who
went to Loliondo to investigate started getting kicked out by local
authorities. In 2009 and again in 2011, the UN Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination ordered the Tanzanian government to look into
human-rights-abuse allegations on the property, but the requests went nowhere.
Rumors of a conspiracy between Thomson Safaris and the Tanzanian government
began to circulate. In 2008, a New Zealand reporter was murdered under
suspicious circumstances, shortly after investigating the company's operations
in Loliondo.
Loliondo elder Tulito Olemguriem Lemgume’s boma was just
inside the property newly titled to Thomson Safaris. According to Lemgume,
local authorities told him and a handful of neighbors that "the land now
belonged to an investor and we could no longer live there. We told them we have
nowhere to go. We said, 'This is our place. This is our home.'" So the
police arrived with gasoline, he said. The bomas went up in flames. Then
"the police shot at us," Lemgume recalled. "It's like we were
the animals and they were chasing us away."
Tourism was also touted as the best way for Maasai to
benefit economically from the land without "harming" it any longer.
They could sell handicrafts and charge for tours through their homes or for
performing traditional dances. In Loliondo, tour companies arrived in the early
1990s with their own objective of luring zebras, rhinos, and lions back to the
areas where pastoralists had once lived. The region had appeal for developers
because by setting up just outside the Serengeti there was access to wildlife
populations—which don't respect park boundaries—but with lower fees and fewer
bureaucratic hassles than operating in the park would have entailed. The
Ortello Business Corporation (OBC), an ostentatious Dubai-based outfitter that
flies in Arab royalty to hunt and kill rare cats for pleasure, was apportioned
vast "hunting blocks," giving the company the right to conduct its
expeditions throughout virtually the entire Loliondo territory. OBC, the
largest tour operator in the area, had been under fire for years for land
grabbing and political corruption. Maasai resistance and foreign attention
helped to thwart a bill that would have turned 40,000 square miles of Maasai
land into a protected "wildlife migration corridor," with the company
as its new lease holder.
A little while later, Wineland and Thomson read a newspaper
ad for a plot of land with a title for sale. They were enticed not only by the
possibility of reestablishing wildlife populations but also by the property's
proximity to the Maasai themselves. Pioneers in the global-adventure-travel
business, the couple had been specializing in "community-based
tourism" for decades in more than a dozen countries. Rather than
attracting business with exotic animals, Wineland said, they had always placed
"pictures of people on the front cover of [our] brochures." They had
done some charitable work in other Maasai areas of Tanzania and were excited to
bring their business model to Loliondo. For Wineland and Thomson, making their
business benefit the local Maasai was a prime objective. "We believe in a
symbiotic relationship," Wineland has said. "Tourism has to benefit
us, our guests, the wildlife, and the communities." They hoped this land
would be the newest jewel in the company's emerging ecotourism empire, "a
beautiful thing for us and our mission."
"The problem is not tourism," Ndekerei said
"That can be OK. Sure, let women sell jewelry to foreigners. Build a
school. The problem is when others make decisions without including us. If someone
comes to your land and there is no conversation and they didn't get the land in
the right way, that man cannot fit into your society. It's not right that they
decide what is right for everyone."
In 2010, three villages adjacent to the Enashiva property
filed a case arguing that the land's former titleholder, TBL, the state brewing
company, abandoned the property so long ago that it legally reverted to village
land long before the sale to the safari outfitter. Since Maasai villagers had
not been consulted regarding the sale, this would make the 2006 transaction
invalid under Tanzanian law. The case is based on a legal principle known as
adverse possession. If an owner of a land does not prohibit someone coming in,
doesn't do anything to dispute them using the land for a certain period of
time—in Tanzania it's twelve years—then that piece of property reverts to that
person. It's like squatter's rights, but much stronger. They argue that the brewery that sold the title to
Thomson Safaris' owners abandoned the property 16 years before Wineland and
Thomson ever saw the ad in the newspaper. The sale was therefore illegal, they
argue, and the land title should be returned to its rightful owners, the
villages.
"We are victims of our own conservation," Maanda
Ngoitiko explained. Ngoitiko is the founder of Pastoral Women's Council (PWC),
a Maasai women's organization that provides scholarships for girls and
organizes women's rights groups nationwide. But the arrival of tourist
operators in Loliondo has pulled her into the land struggle.
An expert in Arusha on land issues. "There is no
question the government is on the side of Thomson Safaris," he told me.
"The government gives a kind of respect to investors so long as they pay
taxes and bring in tourist dollars. For the public, the government uses the
reasoning of putting the environment above all else. Investors can even violate
human rights and the government is not going to look into it or punish them for
it."
The court battle holds significance far greater than the
fate of 12,000 square acres in the geographic center of Africa. "This is
not an exceptional story of evil conservation," said Ben Gardner, an
anthropologist who chairs the African studies program at the University of
Washington. What's unique, he said, is that the plaintiffs are arguing in favor
of the most controversial idea in conservation politics: giving the land back
to its original owners. "If something is for sale and you buy it, how
could you possibly be culpable of wrongdoing? Investors get a veil of moral
cleanliness. You don't have to account for any history of dispossession or
colonialism or the consequences of conservation work."
There are community-based tourism models in Tanzania and
elsewhere in the world in which locals retain land rights so that they can
negotiate whatever matters most to them, be it grazing rights or farming
acreage or fishing access. ‘&Beyond’ leases acreage from a local community
on which they operate tours. Members of the community limit their herding and
police themselves. It's not a perfect arrangement, the company and villagers
told us, but both sides benefit from a peaceful coexistence. There are also
conservation models in which native groups administer their own business
projects—touristic or otherwise—on protected land. Success of these projects
will be essential for the health both of natural environments and indigenous
communities in an era of climate change and growing populations.
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