The dense Messok Dja rainforest has been home to the Baka Peoples since time immemorial. But now the forest is being closed off to them to make way for a new national park. Although the park hasn’t been formally established, the Baka are being driven from their homes and deprived of their vital lifeline of forest resources—with devastating results.
For nearly a decade, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has been working with the Congolese government to set up the Messok Dja National Park with the help of funding bodies like the European Commission (EC), the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
During this time, WWF-funded park rangers have actively patrolled the area. The Baka, who are vehemently opposed to the national park, have routinely denounced the rangers, whom they accuse of violence, discrimination and torture.
One Baka woman described how “The wildlife guards just want to kill us. Once, I had just gone to do some dam-fishing. I was coming back with some fish to grill in packages made of leaves, to eat with my husband and children. I’m coming back with the pot of fish, I put it down. Just like that, the ecoguards grab me: Bam, bam, bam. For no reason. I hadn’t provoked them, I didn’t owe them anything. They just beat me and I don’t even know what for.”
Another man reported, “We just suffer these terrible beatings here for nothing. If they see us, they just beat us with machetes. Bam, bam, bam [on your body].”
In the face of such persecution, many Baka have retreated from the forests to live in road-side camps. Already they are being forced to abandon their age-old tradition of “molongo” – going deep into the forest for extended periods to hunt and gather. This is now impossible as one Baka woman explained:
“How can I go into the forest?…I just go round in circles here. At this time of year I gather wild mangos, [but] now I just stay close to the road. I just gather the mangoes that are near here.. that’s their forest – they’ve taken it.”
Confronted with an alien way of life outside of the forest, the Baka face the very real possibility of food scarcity. “We live from the Lipolo forest: wild mangoes, fish, meat, wild honey and yams, everything… but it’s now blocked off and we’re left to suffer. We don’t know how we can live.”
Conservation-related malnutrition among tribal peoples in the Congo is already a well-documented problem. In 2017, a Congolese organization raised concerns that conservation had contributed to the deaths of several dozen Bayaka children during an epidemic in 2016. The deaths were attributed by a medical expert to malaria, pneumonia and dysentery, aggravated by severe malnutrition.
“We’re suffering here. We don’t know how we’re going to survive. There is nowhere for us to live. It’s as though any value we have is gone.”
And of course, when the Baka now fall ill, they are unable to collect the medicinal plants they need from the forest.
To make matters worse, the Baka communities have never given their consent for the national park, with one local Baka chief explaining, “We can’t agree to it. Everything is there: food, life, health all come from that forest. If we were to give up the forest, we’d be sacrificing our children’s lives, our parents’ lives, our own lives. It would be as if someone were committing suicide.”
The Baka remain resolute in their opposition to the project. The forest is not only key to their survival, it lies at the heart of their sense of community and identity. Life outside it is simply inconceivable to them.
“We Baka, we’re not the type of people who just stay in the village. We’re forest people… Our life, our future is out in the forest. For us and for our children. I know the forest from A-Z. Every root, every tree.”
Many Baka communities have written signed letters of complaint which they asked Survival International to forward to the funders of the proposed park. One letter reads, “If the park is established in our forest, it will be very serious. Instead of working with us, the park rangers have made us suffer so much: they beat us, they whip us with their belts. If that carries on, how will our children live? We are told that according to international law, before starting a project in our forest they need to ask our consent. So we ask you to come here, listen to us and see our suffering, and make sure the law is respected.”
The Baka’s understanding of their legal rights is sound: international law indeed dictates that the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of local communities must be obtained for major projects undertaken on their land. Without their consent, Messok Dja National Park is illegal.
In spite of this, WWF is pushing ahead with its plans for Messok Dja and the project continues to enjoy the support of the EC and USFWS as major donors. Neither of these funding bodies or the conservation giant show any signs of pulling the millions of dollars they have committed to the project.
The Baka–who are excellent conservationists in their own right–are adamant that this must change, and reproach those funding the project for their lack of financial responsibility: “[We] want those funding the park to take action. We’ve never seen a white person come to see where their money is going.”
Despite the considerable body of evidence of terrible human rights violations committed against the Baka, WWF has thus far denied any allegations of wrongdoing. A recent tweet read: “As if WWF would allow local communities to be systematically abused, that really is too crazy for words!”
“[We] want those funding the park to take action. We’ve never seen a white person come to see where their money is going.”
In an article written last year, a WWF coordinator described how its ranger team in northern Congo was “fully supported by WWF, and therefore well supervised and equipped.” He went on to praise the team for their efforts to stabilize elephant numbers in the region.
The conservation organization insists that it “takes the allegations seriously.” However it has not replied to any of the community complaints submitted via their whistle-blowing mechanism in July last year regarding the Messok Dja project.
The organization says it aims to respond to complaints made within two weeks.
The European Commission has defended its involvement in the conservation initiative, stressing that Messok Dja “ought to contribute to the improvement of the living conditions of the communities around the park as well as upholding conservation objectives.”
The USFWS was made aware of the situation facing the Baka in Messok Dja in November last year. Survival International has no record of any reply.
The case of Messok Dja National Park and the fate of the Baka tribe is far from an isolated case. Survival International has already reported extensively on the conservation-related human rights abuses in the context of the Congo Basin, Africa and India; it is truly a global problem.
The tribal peoples’ rights organization says that up to 14 million people worldwide have been evicted from their lands in the name of conservation. One study even calculated that the number could be as high 136 million people. In India alone, a recent ruling by the Supreme Court means that some 8 million tribal and other forest-dwelling people could be evicted from their forests due to pressure from conservation groups.
It is clear that neither the scope nor the serious nature of conservation-related problems faced by indigenous and tribal peoples worldwide can be overlooked. Survival International says that the Baka now face “existential threat as a hunter-gatherer tribe” as a result of the Messok Dja conservation initiative.
There are reasons for optimism however.
Survival’s conservation campaign continues to gain momentum and with a damning indictment of WWF’s human rights record published this week by the news platform Buzzfeed, the pressure is now very much on the WWF, and the conservation industry at large, to dramatically change the way it operates and respect tribal peoples’ rights.
India’s Supreme Court has ordered the eviction of up to 8 million tribal and other forest-dwelling people, in what campaigners have described as “an unprecedented disaster,” and “the biggest mass eviction in the name of conservation, ever.”
The ruling is in response to requests by Indian conservation groups to declare invalid the Forest Rights Act, which gives forest-dwelling people rights to their ancestral lands, including in protected areas. The groups had also demanded that where tribespeople had tried and failed to secure their rights under the Act, they should be evicted.
The groups reportedly include Wildlife First, Wildlife Trust of India, the Nature Conservation Society, the Tiger Research and Conservation Trust and the Bombay Natural History Society.
In an extraordinary move, the national government failed to appear in court to defend the tribespeople’s rights, and the Court therefore ruled in favor of the evictions, which it decreed should be completed by July 27.
The order affects more than 1.1 million households, with experts estimating this could mean more than 8 million individuals will now be evicted – and the number is likely to rise, as some states have not provided details as to how many will be affected.
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said today: “This judgement is a death sentence for millions of tribal people in India, land theft on an epic scale, and a monumental injustice.
“It will lead to wholesale misery, impoverishment, disease and death, an urgent humanitarian crisis, and it will do nothing to save the forests which these tribespeople have protected for generations.
“Will the big conservation organizations like WWF and WCS condemn this ruling and pledge to fight it, or will they be complicit in the biggest mass eviction in the name of conservation, ever?”
An investigation by the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank, has turned up allegations that the government of Tanzania is sidelining the country’s Maasai population in favor of tourism.
The government and some foreign investors worry that the Maasai, semi-nomadic herders who have lived in the Rift Valley for centuries, are degrading parts of the Serengeti ecosystem.
The authors of the Oakland Institute’s report argue that approaches aimed at conservation should focus on the participation and engagement of Maasai communities rather than their removal from lands to be set aside for high-end tourism.
The government of Tanzania is casting aside Maasai communities to make way for lucrative high-end safari tourism and hunting, says the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank, in a report published May 10.
The four-year investigation revealed that groups of the Maasai in the Loliondo division of northern Tanzania have been kept off lands vital to their survival so that wealthy safari-goers and foreign royalty can have unfettered access to East Africa’s iconic wildlife.
The policy has led to widespread hunger and fear among the population, said Anuradha Mittal, director of the California-based Oakland Institute.
A map showing the location of Loliondo Game Controlled Area in northern Tanzania. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
After thousands of Maasai have been threatened or displaced, “Their sentiment is that the next person to be evicted and displaced will be me,” Mittal said in an interview with Mongabay. “This is a fear that the villagers live with.”
The report cites firsthand accounts, communications with and within a safari company, and government and legal documents. It argues that authorities, eager to keep the deep-pocketed tour companies that operate in Tanzania happy, are driving the Maasai into poverty and dependence on aid to maintain the country’s tourism sector. The reason they often give is the protection of the environment.
But this issue isn’t confined to Loliondo or Tanzania, Mittal said.
“This is not just about a specific company. This is not just about a specific government,” she said. “This is happening across the world in the name of conservation, in the name of economic opportunity for governments.”
An elephant in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. Image by John C. Cannon/Mongabay.
Conservation and the Maasai
It’s difficult to pin down an exact figure, but perhaps a million or more Maasai live in East Africa’s Great Rift Valley, stretching across northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. For centuries, large numbers have grazed their livestock in the area around the Serengeti plain. The name Serengeti translates to “the place where the land runs forever” in Maa, the group’s language.
In the 1950s, the colonial government in charge of what is today Tanzania asked the Maasai to leave Serengeti National Park, which was created in 1951, so the area could be devoted entirely to conservation. The Maasai living in the region agreed and moved into the vicinity of the nearby Ngorongoro Crater. But when concerns arose that too many people living there would impact the wildlife, they were again asked to move, with many ending up in Loliondo division.
This pattern, the Oakland Institute contends, has continued, justified as efforts to keep ecosystems intact, but also as a way to maintain the flow of tourism dollars, mostly from high-end safaris, into the country. Restrictions by the government on where the Maasai could and could not go, as well as their ability to cultivate small farm plots and gardens, had by the 1990s led to widespread malnutrition, one study found. The authors, who published their research in the journal Human Organization, concluded that the government’s success in protecting the region’s wildlife was coming at the cost of the health of the semi-nomadic Maasai.
In 1992, Tanzania’s prime minister, John William Malecela, lifted the ban on gardens in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to ease the pressure on the Maasai, and laws passed in 1999 were aimed at codifying customary claims to land in Tanzania. But that wasn’t the end of the setbacks to the Maasai’s way of life, according to the Oakland Institute’s investigation.
A herd of cows in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
Mittal and her colleagues point to an emblematic example of the challenges that Maasai communities face in Loliondo, centering on a piece of land originally called Sukenya Farm near the border with Kenya. In 2006, Rick Thomson and Judi Wineland, the owners of Thomson Safaris, a safari outfitter based in Watertown, Mass., that has operated in Tanzania since the 1980s, bought a 96-year lease on 12,617 acres (5,106 hectares) of land for $1.2 million. Thomson and Wineland intended to turn the land into a nature reserve, according to the company’s blog.
“Purchasing the land in Loliondo was a way to protect a wildlife corridor from Kenya to the Serengeti, to provide a refuge for the endangered wildlife, to provide a place for tourists to see wildlife in the wilderness, to walk amongst the wildlife in an authentic setting, to meet the [Maasai] who have been our friends for years and to provide benefits to the community around us,” Thomson told Mongabay in an email.
But it would also mire them in an ongoing dispute over the land that started in the early 1980s. In 1984, Tanzania Breweries Limited purchased 10,000 acres (4,047 hectares) of this land from the district council. The sale drew the ire of some of the local Maasai, who said they grazed their animals on the land and should have been consulted.
In the ensuing years, however, Tanzanian Breweries Limited didn’t use much of the land, ostensibly abandoning it in 1990. Meanwhile, the Maasai continued to move their herds through in search of grass and water, and they would set up traditional compounds called bomas in the area.
An entrance to a new boma built by the Maasai. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
When Wineland and Thomson acquired Sukenya Farm through their company, Tanzania Conservation Limited (TCL), some of the adjacent Maasai communities objected. For one, the size of the land had grown to include an additional 2,617 acres that the Maasai say the brewing company illegally took several years before the sale. Maasai communities also said that once again, their traditional lands had been sold without their consent, and their lawyers argued that the Maasai communities’ use of Sukenya Farm in the preceding decades amounted to a legal claim on the land.
This all came as a surprise to Thomson and Wineland.
“Unbeknownst to us,” Thomson said, “we would be used as a pawn, a political football, in a broader game on the board of Loliondo that is a struggle between NGO local interests and national government interests for political, economic and territorial control of Loliondo.”
The land has been the subject of several court cases. In 2015, a Tanzanian court upheld TCL’s claim to the land for 10,000 acres, but said that the extra 2,617 acres had been illegally acquired.
If it should not have been part of the sale, Wineland contends that the addition happened before she and Thomson purchased it. “The title deed reads 12,617 acres,” she wrote in an email to the Oakland Institute on Nov. 21, 2017. “Any changes made to the size of the land did not happen under the ownership of the land by TCL.”
In the 12 years since TCL acquired the land, according to the report, Maasai communities point to several instances in which herders have been driven off the land, now called Enashiva Nature Refuge. The Oakland Institute surveyed the testimony by both sides of the recent court case over the land involving several communities and TCL, which alleges that at times TCL staff would call in the local police to force the Maasai off the land. That led to arrests, beatings, shootings and the destruction of bomas, the report says.
A leopard in Serengeti National Park. Image by John C. Cannon/Mongabay.
“All these will remain allegations as the villages could not provide evidence in court to prove any of the allegations,” Wineland wrote in her emailed response to the Oakland Institute.
Thomson also told Mongabay that Mittal’s team “failed in its due diligence” because it didn’t speak with representatives of Thomson Safaris while in Tanzania. Nor did the researchers include the perspectives of village leaders who are supportive of the company’s work.
Mittal said she aimed to find unvarnished accounts of what was happening in Loliondo, and she said that in village after village, she saw people who weren’t happy with TCL and Thomson Safaris’ presence in the area.
Thomson, who said that Thomson Safaris “vehemently” denies any allegations of abuse, insists that the company’s relationship with local communities is quite different than how it’s portrayed in the report.
“There are no conflicts with our neighbors, in fact we have letters requesting more dispensaries, water bore holes and school buildings,” he said, referring to the clinics, wells and schools that the company has helped fund in communities near Enashiva. Wineland also co-founded Focus on Tanzanian Communities, a nonprofit charity involved in social and economic development.
In his testimony during the court case, Thomson said, “The police are only called when the situation is escalating and people are feeling like they’re being threatened or something of that nature.”
However, Mittal points to internal communication within TCL that surfaced during the discovery phase of the litigation, indicating that TCL staff would call the commissioner of Ngorongoro district (which includes Loliondo) in response to herders grazing livestock, cutting wood or farming. The district commissioner would then call the police, according to court documents.
On July 30, 2012, a TCL staff member wrote in an email, “Nice to know that it is the [district commissioner] and police that are dealing with this, that we are out of that picture in the sense that we did not have face to face conflict and the usual thing of being accused of beating people …”
People from the village of Naiyobi line up for water. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
A hunting concession
In another part of Loliondo, a land dispute has long simmered between Maasai communities and the Otterlo (sometimes spelled Ortello) Business Corporation. In 1992, the Tanzanian government gave Otterlo permission to hunt on 4,000 square kilometers (1,544 square miles) in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area, which the Oakland Institute estimates is home to 50,000 Maasai.
The Oakland Institute reports that the license has effectively turned the Loliondo Game Controlled Area into a private hunting reserve for the family, complete with an airstrip and Emirati cellphone networks.
Otterlo has also played a part in keeping the Maasai from using the land, according to the report, as in a 2009 eviction of 200 bomas by Otterlo security and a government “paramilitary” unit. Accounts hold that the action affected 20,000 people and rendered 3,000 homeless. Government officials said the Maasai were evicted because their cultivation of the land was degrading it.
Otterlo did not respond to several requests for comment through social media, and the telephone number listed for the office in Tanzania is no longer in service. The Oakland Institute’s attempts to reach out to Otterlo by telephone and postal mail also went unanswered.
A boma in Ngorongoro District. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
John Cannon is a Mongabay staff writer based in the Middle East. Find him on Twitter:@johnccannon
Citation
McCabe, J. T., Perkin, S., & Schofield, C. (1992). Can conservation and development be coupled among pastoral people? An examination of the Maasai of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania. Human Organization, 353-366.
Peru is to create two Amazonian reserves for the protection of uncontacted tribes , covering more than 2.5 million hectares. At least seven distinct groups of uncontacted tribes, including Matsés Indians, are known to be living in the areas comprising the new Yavari Tapiche and Yavari Mirin reserves in Peru’s NE Amazon state of Loreto.
The remote region has been under intense pressure from oil exploration, logging and a proposed road that could wreak devastation on the tribes. Those wishing to exploit the area’s natural resources have long denied the existence of tribes living in these forests, whose presence would obstruct their plans.
However, the Peruvian government has not ruled out further oil exploration and has taken over two oil concessions inside the new Yavari Tapiche and Yavari Mirin Reserves. Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples, and the only organization fighting worldwide to stop the extermination of uncontacted tribes, has written to the government, along with thousands of supporters, calling for a total ban on all resource extraction in the reserves and for the two existing oil blocks to be canceled.
The reserves are crucial to the future survival of the uncontacted tribes, who face catastrophe unless their land is protected. Whole populations are being wiped out by violence from outsiders who steal their land and resources, and by diseases like the flu and measles to which they have no resistance. Entire groups can be rapidly decimated.
A Matsés man told Survival International: “Life before contact was incredible. Our uncontacted brothers still live in the forest. They live like we did before. Because the uncontacted people are out there, we want the government to protect the land.”
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said: “Though we welcome the creation of the Yavari Tapiche and Yavari Mirin Reserves, the Peruvian government’s refusal to ban all resource extraction is a serious concern. Uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable peoples on the planet. They’re our contemporaries and a vitally important part of humankind’s diversity.”
The creation of the two new protected areas in Peru follows years of intense campaigning by indigenous peoplesand their supporters. However, three more proposed reserves are still awaiting formation. The longer the government delays the creation of protected areas, the greater the threat to the tribes who live there.
Background Information:
– Uncontacted tribes are tribal peoples who have no peaceful contact with anyone in the mainstream or dominant society. These could be entire peoples or smaller groups of already contacted tribes.
– Some may have been in touch with the colonist society in the past, and then retreated from the violence which that brought. Some may once have been part of larger tribal groups, and split off and moved away, fleeing contact.
– Uncontacted tribes are not backward and primitive relics of a remote past. They are contemporary societies and where their rights are respected, they continue to thrive.
Hundreds of Baiga people from the area that inspired Kipling’s The Jungle Book are rallying to oppose the authorities’ attempts to evict them from the forests that they have lived in and managed since time immemorial.
Baiga tribespeople are joining forces from over 70 different villages in an area of 1,500 square kilometres. The protests have been sparked by official efforts to evict two Baiga communities from a wildlife “corridor.” Dozens of neighboring Baiga communities are now terrified they will be next, as they face poverty, exploitation and misery if forced from their homes.
The Baiga are particularly worried by the two upcoming evictions, as both state authorities and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) promised that evictions would not take place in the “corridor” areas, which run between the protected nature reserves.
By law, any resettlements of tribal people must be voluntary, even for those living in designated conservation areas. However Baiga people report threats, intimidation and violence until they have no choice but to leave their homes.
Baiga elder, Bhardan Singh told Survival International: “The forest guards beat me until I fell from the tree. I split my hip bone and couldn’t stand. I crawled to the edge of the park. The guards just left me and walked away.”
This weekend’s protest is a local flashpoint in an ongoing national issue. Tribal peoples living in tiger reserves across India are being forced to leave their ancestral homelands in the name of tiger conservation. However, tiger numbers have increased rapidly in the first reserve in India where a tribe won the right to stay on their land, showing people and tigers can flourish alongside one another.
Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, launched a tourist boycott in November last year, urging visitors to India not to visit any of India’s tiger reserves until the Indian tiger authority respects tribal peoples’ rights to live in and protect their forests.
Survival Director Stephen Corry said: “These evictions, both inside and outside the tiger reserves, are totally unjustified, as well as illegal. Not only do they destroy the lives of the people forced from their homes, but they don’t help the tigers either. The authorities and WWF promised there would be no evictions – as so often in the past, such promises have proven worthless.”
Background briefing
– Baiga means “medicine man.” Baiga people are known for their distinctive tattoos, and for their very close relationship to their environment.
– Tribal people were evicted from Similipal tiger reserve in 2013, and were soon after found living in dire conditions under plastic sheets.
– Many Baiga were evicted from the nearby Kanha tiger reserve in 2014. They received no land, houses, or support but were supposed to find land to buy with their compensation money, an alien concept for those who’d lived all their lives in the forest. They told Survival: “We got some money, but we are lost – wandering in search of land. Here there is only sadness. We need the jungle.”
