Joseph Oleshangay: Honoring nomadic, pastoral, and communal land relations (Ep444)

Written By kamea chayne
“The British colonialists have changed the Maasai lives in a way that we still feel today — that is in the creation of national parks.”
— Joseph Oleshangay

How is the Maasai community continually being displaced and disenfranchised in the name of “wildlife conservation”? What are some of the common propaganda used to justify their mass evictions?

And how do the Maasai’s communal land relations, rooted in nomadism and pastoralism, ultimately challenge the laws of their nation-state — revealing the subjective worldviews and morality that define legality?

In this episode, we are honored to be joined by Joseph Oleshangay, a Maasai human rights lawyer who has litigated high-profile lawsuits against their government — notably, regarding forced evictions of the Maasai community in Ngorongoro District for tourism and trophy hunting.

What can we learn from the Maasai’s ancestral lifeways that blur the lines between life and “wild” life — showing their food, medicine, culture, spirituality, stories, and music as inextricably woven into the plains and highlands where they call home?

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Joseph Moses Oleshangay is a human rights lawyer and activist born and bred in Ngorongoro. Joseph works with the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) and has litigated high profile lawsuits against the government — notably forced evictions of Maasai community in Ngorongoro District for tourism and trophy hunting.

Oleshangay has received international recognition for his efforts, notably being awarded the 2023 Weimar Human Rights Prize which highlights his dedication to defending the fundamental rights of his people. Oleshangay has also held a Maasai title of a traditional leader since March 2024.

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interview transcript

Note: Our transcripts are minimally edited for brevity and clarity as references only and do not have word-for-word accuracy. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.

Kamea Chayne: I think sometimes people look to the different states of poverty that different communities might find themselves in today and individualize the problem. They forget about how events from the past helped to lay the grounds for present conditions. 

To first provide a bit of a historical context, how would you say the legacy of British colonization continues to impact the Maasai people to this day, contributing to the conditions and struggles that your family and community are facing?

Joseph Oleshangay: Thank you very much. This is a very interesting question. Like any other community in Africa, the Maasai fell to European colonialism. It started with the Germans and ended just after the First World War (1918). Then the British took over. They lasted until 1961. And so in those years of colonialism, the colonialists shaped what happened not only then, but the reality that is happening now. 

The British colonialists have changed the Maasai lives in a way that we still feel today — in the creation of national parks.

I said earlier that the Maasai are nomadic pastoralists. Pastoralists are nomadic because they need to look for water and pasture with the livestock, but also for range management which supports their livelihoods. And so the British, for the first time, forced the Maasai out of Serengeti National Park in 1958. So the people who were forced out of the Serengeti included my grandfather, who was living in a place known as Meru, part of the Serengeti National Park. 

This has affected the Maasai in many ways. I’d always listened to this story from my father who had always spoken of this. The Serengeti and Meru were so good for the pastoralists because there were no diseases. There are no cattle diseases, except one they call malignant catarrhal fever, transmitted by the wild beasts. You can only avoid it from December to April. So all the Maasai will have to go to Serengeti after April because then you can avoid the fever and other diseases on the highlands. 

So after pushing the Maasai out of Serengeti, it means we have lost a very valuable land without disease. The land is big, it's almost 14,000 square kilometers. But also it is a place the people are attached to. When you listen to the Maasai women singing, and I have been keen to try to listen carefully, there is so much attachment to the history of the Maasai with Serengeti. Of course, Serengeti was once one with Ngorongoro, so it was divided by the British.

After dividing Ngorongoro, the Maasai were pushed into the highlands to one side and lost to the west. So on the eastern side is Ngorongoro, which is where I am from, they then, in 1959, introduced a conservation area. This is now different from a national park. It is an area by law that allows the coexistence between people and wildlife. Of course, the Maasai did not have an issue because they were coexisting before the arrival of the first colonists.

In this sense, it is different because it's now managed by a body of law, in which the Maasai did not have a say. And for the last almost 64 years, the Maasai have been in a situation where they cannot decide everything for their own.  There are policies either framed by the government, international conservation NGOs, or international actors like UNESCO. [The Serengeti] then became a World Heritage Site in 1979, then a mixed World Heritage in 2010, and again in 2018 it became a global geopark. 

So, some unknown actors, who in many ways cannot meet with the Maasai, cannot interact, cannot listen to us, decide what happens.

We are the ones who feel the pinch of the policies that are created by external actors who do not even know how this [place] operates.

So it is the history that originated from the British. It is very important to understand that the Maasai are still being forced out of Ngorongoro. They are being forced because of a conservation legacy laid out by the British. It's a conservation that was then tied with colonialism. So it was brought between the colonialists and the subject of colonialism—the white versus the Black. 

The Blacks have to give way for the Whites to occupy the land, which of course has not changed anything because I went to Serengeti, for example, trying to look into what happened in the 1950s within this conservation. I went with my father, and we found that part of his home, some of their nomadic settlements in the Serengeti, are now hotels. So the Maasai were displaced to create the economy, which I think is very unfair.

And so we are now being pushed because this kind of conservation is colonial by nature, which includes four elements… One is expansion. That's how colonialism reached Africa, some of it conservation. It always keeps growing. So it started with the Serengeti, and now we are almost losing the entire Maasai land with this kind of conservation. And, in Tanzania, almost 43 percent of the Tanzania land mass is now “protected.”

The second element of colonial conservation is commercial. For this type of conservation to work, it has to be monetized. It cannot work without money. 

The third element is militarization. It's not a friendly system where you say, “We can talk and maybe think about planting trees.” [Fortress conservation] does not believe in reforestation. It believes in displacing people, allegedly for the Earth to regenerate. Expansion has happened through violence. This has happened in Loliondo, for example, where many people were shot and displaced. Their land was taken to be given to hunters.

In Ngorongoro, our people are starving without social services so that other people can establish an economy. That is the legacy of the British. 

Kamea Chayne: When you put it this way, I think it's very clear that this is very much colonization by way of conservation, in the name of “conservation” …

Joseph Oleshangay: Of course, it is colonization. It is the occupation of the land justified in conservation rhetoric. But if you go to Serengeti now, it is a town with big five-star hotels, and they say it's “conservation-friendly.” But a small Maasai house, made by women, maybe in one day, is said to be ecologically threatening nature, which of course is not true. It is just a justification. 

I forgot one element of this which is that conservation is always very propagandist. So there is so much more propaganda than reality. And they always say, “The Maasai are too many”, “the livestock are too many,” and “The Maasai are so poor, and so we need to liberate them from poverty.” And there is always scarcity, there is always extinction narratives. 

The people formulating the policies have not lived in the place for a day. They don't know anything about the Serengeti.

They justify colonization with propaganda, either to attack, demonize, or to cover up reality.

Kamea Chayne: This is important because I think a lot of people hear the terms “conservation” and “wildlife conservation,” and it sounds good, but the reality on the ground is very different from what it is being presented as. And as you shared, there's a lot of propaganda and political narratives pushed by the government that aren't true.

Joseph Oleshangay: For us, the most difficult part is saying this is evil. Because conservation should be a good thing. And we have been doing this before the colonists came, before the first modern conservation came. We need a place with rich biodiversity because it supports our economy, our livelihoods. We have an attachment to the lands, which is spiritual, and cultural. We need it.

So when we say this conservation is “evil,” some people believe we are anti-animals, that we want to wipe out the forest and everything. This is not the case. The people displacing us for trophy hunting is legal in Tanzania. People were displaced in Loliondo in 2022 in thousands. Then the government created hunting. Is hunting conservation? Never. But of course, they say it.

If you were to ask a lion, an elephant, a giraffe, or a gazelle, “Should we allow trophy hunting?” Maybe they will take up arms and fight. [Trophy hunting] is never for the interest of the wildlife.

So it's not for the interest of the people, wildlife, or for nature. It's in the interest of a few groups. The people who need the luxury of carrying a trophy, and of course, the guy who received the money, who is not in the community—the big guys in the government.

Kamea Chayne: There's a lot of moneyed interests involved. And it seems like the central point being used against your community is this false narrative that to protect wildlife, we need to have people who live in these places relocated somewhere else without acknowledging that the idea of a pristine wilderness without people is colonial, and that oftentimes it's the deep-rooted presence of Indigenous land stewards that have helped to make these places so biodiverse, so beautiful, and worthy of protection. But how do they define protection? 

And then on this front, I'd also love to welcome you to share more about how your communities have historically lived alongside so-called wildlife, so it's not pit against one another. And is there even a word for wildlife in the Maasai language? How do your ancestral lifeways show that it's not an either-or? It's not about drawing borders or carving up the land to say this is for people, this is for wildlife, but you've always lived with and as a part of these networks of life where you are.

Joseph Oleshangay: Thank you very much for this question. It’s very simple. Before colonialism, we never had a place called for wildlife and cattle. Maybe except one: Home. Elephants do not live in a house or a boma. A “boma” is an enclosed place where the cattle enter for the night. This is the only place that maybe zebras do not have access. 

Almost more than eighty percent of the wildlife share interest with our cattle because the majority of the wildlife are herbivores, so they graze. So there has never been a competition between zebras and our cattle.

I can give two scenarios… The first scenario is, as I mentioned that the Maasai have a unique and sustainable approach to managing rangeland. For instance, we designate specific areas for grazing based on the needs of our livestock. Some zones are set aside for cows, others for calves, and certain areas are reserved for future use. If an area is designated for cows, even my cows cannot access it during that period.

However, we cannot prevent zebras or other wildlife from grazing there. The Maasai believe that wildlife, such as zebras, are far more respectful of the land and less likely to mismanage grasses compared to humans. The challenge isn’t with the livestock themselves; rather, it lies with human decisions. A cow would instinctively follow its natural grazing patterns, but humans often intervene and control their movement. This is where issues arise.

Despite this, we do not restrict wildlife from accessing areas we’ve preserved for the future, whether for the next season or the next three months. We allow zebras, gazelles, and others to graze freely, even in these reserved spaces. Another example relates to the challenges posed by certain wildlife diseases. For instance, some wildlife, such as wildebeests (gnus), carry a disease called malignant fever. This disease is particularly concerning during the wildebeest calving season, which occurs consistently between December and April.

During this time, the wildebeests transmit the disease, especially in areas where livestock and wildlife coexist. However, the Maasai have developed an effective system to address this challenge. The wildebeests tend to calve in the plains or lowlands, like those found in the Serengeti. To prevent disease transmission during this period, we relocate our livestock to the highlands.

Living in areas like Ngorongoro allows us to make this shift, as it offers both open plains and higher altitudes. For example, my home is just two kilometers away from the plains—close enough to monitor but far enough to manage risks. This way, when the gnus begin calving and the risk of disease increases, we protect our livestock by moving them to safer areas in the highlands. If you stay with your cattle, then they die. The Maasai will never compensate a person whose livestock were lost because of the malignant disease. They believe all the Maasai should know. So we leave the area to the wildebeest until the 16th day of the moons of April. We look into the moon, not calendar days. So on the 16th day of April, the disease is over. If you go one day before, maybe your livestock will die. So we have never had this competition of the pasture. The pasture is enough.

And one other thing is that the Maasai do not consume wildebeests. And at least even our governments with all the hatred it has against us, at least they are sure we cannot kill wildebeests for food because we have our cows. And that helps to protect the wildlife. I can give one testimony that may be very interesting for anyone to hear.

One day I was at home, and since I'm a lawyer of course, sometimes I'm in Arusha, in towns, litigating and things like that. Then I went home to Ngorongoro and around 2 a.m. in the night I woke up. While outside the house I heard the sound of grazing animals and I thought it was my cow grazing outside. And I was like, “What the hell is happening?” So I put on the torch and I saw several zebras exactly in the gates of my cow’s enclosed area.

And then behind the pathway where they were grazing, I saw into the dark the eyes of a dog. It was our dog. So the dog saw me and saw the light and then the dog came. He passed through several zebras on both edges of the pathway. And I thought maybe he would chase the zebra, but he never did. And he came directly to the place I was, and the zebra wasn’t bothered that this is a dog, that we are wildlife and we have to run. So the zebra wasn’t bothered by anything, and neither was the dog. Our dogs cannot chase gazelles.

So you can understand the friendly nature we have created for the wildlife. But of course, the government says these animals are close to extinction. We continue to maintain the Maasai in Ngorongoro.

In Ngorongoro, the largest terrestrial mammal on Earth [resides] in the Serengeti, Ngorongoro. So we have proof that we can keep the wildlife in a very friendly way. 

We [the Maasai] don’t kill animals for no reason. Some animals have some spiritual relations that if you kill them you may have problems for several generations. So the Maasai never kills. Of course, some species are used for certain ceremonies, but it’s never through killings because they believe it's wrong and it can create problems for generations for the family. This is how friendly the Maasai are with nature.

Kamea Chayne: I do not doubt that. And just the amount of place-specific stories and accumulated knowledge, generational knowledge that your community has been stewarding to live as a part of your lands.

Joseph Oleshangay: There is another example, which happened again in my village. There was a very old elephant, very old. And so this elephant in 2018, 2019 was very old and I think was afraid of staying in the bush at night, just as in the zebra case. They were coming home for protection because it's not easy for a lion to come, and that's why the zebra came. 

So this elephant was coming to our neighbor's boma (animal hut) and of course, the Maasai always enclosed the gates at night and the elephant came and opened and then entered. It almost came around 7:30 in the evening, so it was still the milking time for the livestock. And it would always come and stay close to five in the morning and then get out.

And the people ask, “Is this elephant sick?” And “Why is it always coming?” And it never actually threatened people. It came in and then stayed. And in the morning, it went away. And the issue happened. He was afraid because he's old, and cannot easily fight, so he was coming home as part of the protection. Then he would go out in the morning. He never killed our cows. He never bothered to threaten anyone.

Of course, I cannot purport to say there are no cases of wildlife attacks on humans. And of course, since 2016, I'm saying the elephant was 2019, but since 2016, there has been a case, for example, of elephants killing people. But these elephants mostly come from hunting areas because Ngorongoro Serengeti is surrounded by, in the south, in the north, hunting areas. And these animals from the hunting areas see humans as dangerous creatures because they kill them anyway. And so they come, including attacking the Maasai if they arrive in Ngorongoro because of the regional borders.

We never had borders with the wildlife ourselves. We accessed resources together with gazelles, zebras, and a mix of grazers, including even buffalo sometimes, as well as elephants, without problems.

Lions cannot graze because they do not even consume grasses anyway, so they are carnivores. They are not only a threat to our cows, but also to the zebra. We coexist with [elephants] as the zebras coexist with them. It's a very simple way to live.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing this. So from my understanding, these evictions of your people are largely happening through the political directive of your nation-state government…

And something that is also very troubling is when the resolution is presented as, “We're going to relocate you and we'll make sure you have a home and a place to live, but just not here.” Because there are false presumptions of what it means to be a Maasai community embedded within this idea that they can just relocate you so long as you have a place to live and sleep, then it's an equal substitution, but not a loss. 

So what do you have to say back to this kind of a resolution that completely disregards relationships, and thinks that you can split land and place from culture, identity, foodways, spirituality, cosmologies, and community?

Joseph Oleshangay:

Ngorongoro is not a piece of land that you can trade for tour operators, hotels, or luxury hunting reserves.

Land, to the Maasai, particularly I'm referring to Ngorongoro, is an institution with many purposes and is home to people. It supports the livelihood because of economic pastoralism, of course. We know places with disease, we know places without. And so the government will not look into that idea. Like the place that you will be relocated to is a place of this nature. It's a circled area, where our synagogues, our mosques, and our churches are.

So, many of the Maasai are not Christian, are not Muslim, are not Hindu, are not Jewish, are not in these mainstream religions. But they believe in God. It doesn't mean they are hopeless people. That doesn't mean that our God is inferior to the rest. And so, our synagogues are formed from the land. Mountains as a prayer area, or in the form of trees. And that's why we are good at conservation because some trees are sacred. We only use it on occasional demands like what the Christians do with the Christmas tree.

We use certain trees for rituals and ceremonies, so we cannot cut and extinguish the forest because they have spiritual value. There are places or trees where we pray not because the tree is the God, but because it is a platform to pray, like a church or a mosque. The church is not God, and neither is the mosque, it is a platform to pray. And so we have our platform which this government will not give due consideration.

We have, as a community, an institution of age grouping, for example, formed into the rite of passage and then different other stages. So a Maasai from death is born. One, and this is very interesting for everyone to know, the day you are born, we have our baptism process, not the church with water and others. Of course, it has some relationship with the livestock.

So we don't say a female child is born, or a male child. How do you communicate that we have a baby child, a baby girl? Maybe some people want to know the sex of the child. So how we communicate is we take the blood of a female cow. And it's living, so it's not like we slaughter. The Maasai never had a blood transfusion, for example, during mother delivery. So we use cow blood as a sort of transfusion of the blood, which of course many people will not understand how it works. 

But then how do we communicate? We attempt to take off the male cow, then we go for the female because it was a probable birth, but the female child is born. If it is a male, we attempt to take off the female, or the male cow, then we leave, then we go for the female and we take the blood. That's how you communicate with people. So without the livestock, you're telling us that our formula founded on generation will not pass.

Our relationship with the cattle is not only an economy. It has cultural, spiritual, and medicinal properties. The same applies to the land.

So you cannot say, there is a land in America that we can relocate you to, or in southern Tanzania, or in whatever, because that land does not have the value that we have.

Kamea Chayne: Like you said with the sacred trees and your different cultural practices, your value systems aren't recognized or valued by people and institutions that don't have a relationship to your culture and your land. 

I want to go into your practice as a human rights lawyer. Being a human rights lawyer is one of the ways that you've been supporting your community's struggles. So you've had to learn the legal system of your nation-state government to know how to best use those tools and language to fight for your community's rights within their game. 

Sometimes, when something is all that someone knows, we forget the subjectivity of how everything works. So you've had to learn the laws and logic and sense of morality of what is right or wrong as imposed by your nation-state government's rule book. But they and other foreign interests coming to your ancestral territories that your people have the deepest relationships with didn't have to learn the language, laws, and ethics of your land and your community to engage with you. 

So I'm just curious what it has been like for you to try to work within the rules of this system you've had to learn to support your community as a lawyer and how maybe some of the underlying values and logic embedded within this system might feel either limiting or even contradictory to the values and worldviews of the Maasai.

Joseph Oleshangay: Thank you very much, and it's a very good question again. 

I grew up in a place some call a “conservation area” or “World Heritage Site.” But it is my home. But the policies that operate [here], it is not me nor my father nor my community who make them.

I remember I was undertaking my undergraduate study maybe more than 10 years ago. And in the course of the research, my father told me to see someone, who was one of the old men in our village. So I went to see him, very old. Maybe someone would overlook him and say he doesn’t have any knowledge. 

And in the course of interacting with him, he says, “The problem of this area of Ngorongoro is that these people, the government, do not see us as bad.” He said, “All the creatures of this world look down on their survival. So a cow is feeding on the grass, people tilting on the lands, and maybe birds in the air always come down. They don't consume anything in the sky. They come down to feed. This government is making us the reverse of it. They want us to look into the sky.” 

Of course, we will always look into the sky waiting and praying for the rains. But if the rain comes, we look down because it's where the grass is. And so we look up praying. But at the time of realizing the result of our prayer, we must look down into the land. But this government has to be looking into the sky. 

To the Maasai elder, looking up at the sky and not the Earth was akin to looking up to what the government is saying and the government is not here, looking up to the international NGOs and they're not here, looking up to what the police or UNESCO formulates, and they're not here. We [the Maasai] become a recipient of policies that we didn’t create. And that itself is a problem.

Of course, then I became a lawyer. And now you try to defend the communist land, which is strange to use law for. We, as Maasai, as pastoralists, don't have the concept of private ownership of the land. So we say this is our land, not my land. Except for your house, which mostly belongs to the mother or the wife. It does not belong to the husband. So the child cannot say, “I'm going to that house of Joseph.” It is not my house. It is my wife’s house. 

We don’t own private land except for the house, then a big area for pasture for everything. So you go to a court where the jurisprudence, the idea of law, is founded in a capitalist way. You must prove that this land belongs to you. This is the major problem.

We lose so many of the cases because, maybe we use 200 people going to court and saying they are pursuing a case on behalf of the community because we cannot bring 100,000 people to court. And the court says, “This cannot be representative of the other.” So you fail to prove it, not because you don't have evidence, you have it very clear, you are saying, this land belongs to us. He said, “When did you acquire this land?” You try to say, “No, no, no, this is not how it works. We have been doing this for generations.” It's a concept that is not in law.

One of the bigger challenges is the jurisprudence point of view. We have, as a community, collective rights which are not written in law. Second, 100,000 people are being displaced in Ngorongoro. Then you take that to one or three judges.

It's always very complicated because even for me, some people say, “You are a lawyer, go to court,” which of course we always go to. But the question we always ask is, these things are complicated because this one person, we take a general struggle of 100,000 people in a setup of a judicial system that is not working in line with our principles, what we think is a just way of working. These people can be compromised. These people can bend procedures. These people can be intimidated, and they can make mistakes. One mistake could mean losing the land for all your people…

It's challenging to be a lawyer in this context because the Maasai are late to school. So very few of us are educated, particularly becoming lawyers. So all the people put their trust in you like you are going to do justice for them. And you try to explain this is not a home for justice, literally. We litigate particularly when there is no other option. For example, if you are displaced in Loliondo, I will easily file the case because whether we're going to fail to get justice in court, we have lost the land already. So we're not going to lose anything.

If you are still on the land, going to court should be the last resort because it could be the channel for you to lose the land.

So yeah, it's complicated, but of course, we use it as a platform to get the rights. And at least now you understand the law, you understand the zigzags of what they do. And so you also try to play with the rules and ensure that your people get justice. And that's what we do.

Kamea Chayne: So even though the values are not fundamentally aligned, you at least can learn to use their language, the things that the system values to be able to achieve some wins.

Joseph Oleshangay: Exactly. And we have won massive cases, by the way. As I said, we take a lot of precautions, but we use the courts to get them. Sometimes we get justice. And because the violations are so open that even a madman can say, “This is unjust.” And even in that circumstance, sometimes we lose.

I remember, for example, we went to court and said, “This land has been occupied by Maasai for centuries.” The government, and of course even the court, played with the colonial propaganda by saying it was not documented. So the Maasai were there, but the Maasai could not put individual titling. They cannot register lands. The only document that shows you have been here is when the village was registered. But the village was registered by the government. It doesn't mean before the formation of governments we were not here. We were formed by the colonialists. It means we are here. 

We continued to be here until the village was registered because those are legal entities. Even if you deregister, as they did in Ngorongoro, it doesn't mean you deregister our rights because we are formed by the government. We are not brought here by the government. The government formed us. So any legal legislation that purports to legitimize our presence doesn't legitimize it because it formed us. We were legitimate before the government came. We predate the formation of the modern set—which many people find difficult to understand.

Kamea Chayne: Well I know it might feel like swimming against very powerful currents. And of course, you've supported some big wins. And with this, I would like to ask you, what are some of the best ways that the international community and people outside of your community might be able to support you from afar?

Joseph Oleshangay: In many ways, I think they can support. Always the first one is to become the messenger of the word, saying something for the people. And this way I always speak openly, because if we stay calm then our people will perish. But we cannot do this alone, we are fighting giants. One is the government, with all the resources, including our taxpayers. And then we don't receive a [word indistinguishable]. 

So you can see we pay taxes using our livestock and others, and then we don't receive anything that is provided by the government to other communities. So we are sort of in an open prison, so to speak. Open and so large that you can easily move within. You want to get out and they ask you what is the ID, and identification cards, and you ask “Which one?”

They say, “What is your national ID?” And, you ask, “Do you think I'm not a citizen?” They say, “What is your voter ID?” But I’m not voting here. I'm going home. So you'll be asked for something that doesn’t exist. And because our people were not educated in many ways, they get crushed sometimes.

Because there is a crushing of social services, including health services for someone to get fair health service after travelling to a neighboring district known as Karatu. Before going to Karatu, before looking into the bus fare, and the money to pay the doctor, you first have to ensure that you have the ID to be allowed to come back. 

We have found ourselves in what was akin to apartheid South Africa. Like, you are in Bantustan (a separate Black homeland), and you’re not allowed to go somewhere else. And this within our own country is very, very sad.

We want many people to understand. As a community alone we cannot fight, but we can with the support from others acting as a message of the word, speaking out against this, and particularly, debunking the narratives. We are being told, these people are being pushed because of conservation. They're threatening what? Ecology? Never.

It's important to understand what the government is saying. They are saying we're becoming so many. I said earlier, “So many us against who?” Tanzania has 64 million people. The Maasai are close to 800,000. They're not even that way. So they are essentially a minority in the sense of the word.

Second, Ngorongoro, which they are displacing us because of the population has a population density of, according to the government data, 10 people per kilometer squared. But where the president is from, who is bringing this narrative, there is a population density of 700 people per kilometer square. So if population is a problem, I think the president could have started displacing people at her own home.

Second, they're saying our livestock are so many. And we tried to investigate whether this is true or false. Of course, we knew it was not true. We found in 2022, this is a study we did actually as a community in 2022, we found the livestock in Ngorongoro in 2018 and we compared it with 1957—before the Serengeti eviction. We found a difference of three cows. So if this was the case in 1957 why did the British not displace people out of Ngorongoro because of the same narrative? If the livestock were the same number in 1957 and 2018, then this could have been the case of course even in 1957.

The [government] comes and says, “You Maasai are so poor.” They forgot that poverty is manmade. It is purposely created by the government as a tool for displacement.

Then they come and say, “You are not educated.” And for that, we are taking you out of here to get an education. What is more costly? Transferring 100,000 people or bringing the schools? But second, this is the government that threatened to demolish nine primary schools in the name of what they call conservation. Six dispensaries, because they say it's for conservation purposes. Four churches and some of the churches have been there since 1937. Some of the schools were from the 1970s. 

You can imagine the rhetoric in play. So they bring humanitarian fact rhetoric, they bring fact conservation theories, including the extinction narratives, saying we are threatening animals as if the person is saying there is one gazelle in the area. Almost all of the people say “The Maasai are a threat to nature”. And I always try to analyze all of them, all the areas they come from. You cannot see an antelope. They have killed all of them. And then they come to teach us how coexistence can happen. They could have at least come and said, “You people, how did you manage to make this happen so that we can do the same in our areas?” And of course, they never do that.

So debunking the narrative is very important for everyone to understand and support us in many ways. We cannot just go to courts and end there because even the courts work better if they see there are many eyes and that the support of the community is there. That's the reason why we always also try to mobilize the people to protect the courts. On October 22, there must be some hundred people. This is what we try to do. At least for the people to see the process of justice happening. To see for themselves. Not only so you can easily become a lawyer to look on from the start of the case to the end of it.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for sharing this. We are coming to the end of our main conversation and I want to come back to honor your people as a nomadic community and also learn from nomadism in maybe a metaphorical way too. In the face of the harsh political landscape of today, what are you following or looking towards for guidance and what is it that keeps you going?

Joseph Oleshangay: Sometimes, and I cannot afford to be a serious Christian, but looking into these problems and sometimes reading even the Bible and looking into the struggle of people and reading the history. Reading not only the Bible but also what was happening with the people around the world from slavery from everywhere.

One thing that keeps me moving is if the slaves were able to overcome, definitely we will because maybe we are better than slaves at least and I'm referring to what was happening in America. I have read about Frederick Douglas and others, who were able to go through this. If the people were able to win against colonialism, maybe we are also going to win.

I believe, despite the darkness, there must be a place, a silver lining somewhere, to win. It gives me hope that we are not the first people to get into these problems…

It just explains the barbarity of human beings, putting others into a place they feel that they cannot survive. We hope that we can survive. And I get a lot of energy myself, particularly because, when you go to court and try to fight as a lawyer, speaking out like hell, but you try now to listen to the real people on the ground. 

A person whose means of life has been ruined, a person who cannot access medicine—I can myself because I mostly go to Arusha, I litigate, I have some economy. A person whose economy has been crushed by the state purposefully, a person who even is unable to because they don't have money to get to the hospital outside or don't have an ID. So, he fears coming back so he or she can manage to get out and then prevent from coming in. 

The government puts full prices high so that they can manage. Like they put accession into the food supply. These people are going to a “tourist area”. This is not a “tourist area”, it's our home. So they are supplying food to us. And they cannot manage food. And then you listen to these people and they're more hopeful, like they are going to win somewhere.

I had an idea that one of the ways we can win is through publicity. And you tell them [the Maasai], “There is a journalist I want you to be interviewed with.” And they come in hundreds. And I sometimes wonder if these people think these journalists are going to address this issue. And of course, it's me who recommended that he or she go to interview the people. And so they share the idea with me that their voices can contribute to their liberation. 

So this tells me, no, we should do more because if the real people on the ground whose means of survival is being crushed are still hopeful that there are means to get out, then you should keep fighting. So this is the one giving me the morals and the strength to push everything that I do.

// musical intermission //

Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. And as we come to a close here, for other people who are also facing a lot of challenges with their communities and who may be struggling with everything going on in the world, what closing words of wisdom would you like to leave with us as Green Dreamers?

Joseph Oleshangay: I think all that I have been saying is happening to human beings. It's happening to human beings whose only reason that they are being mistreated the way they are is because they happen to, not me saying this, but to the eyes of other people who made a mistake of preserving their areas to shape it to become so beautiful for others to see and maybe admire.

I think what I can say to anyone who is listening, they should support us in what we are doing. They should disapprove of our aggressor that it was not a mistake to preserve our ecology, to preserve our wildlife, to shape our environment into the beauty that everyone sees. And that they should share our ideals and our story and shame the devils, shame the people. If a woman is delivering and cannot access the dispensary, if a child is born and is not able to access a vaccine, not only because the government cannot provide it, but because even the private actors have been stopped from delivering. Because the government intends to create a jungle that no one can easily survive. 

I think it’s the role of every decent and moral human being to support the struggle that we are fighting.

We are peaceful people to defend our rights in a very peaceful way, in a way that conforms with morality. But we have to realize our rights.

And my last word is, these are rhetorics. This is not conservation. Because if it was conservation, the last people you can fight are the Maasai. Because we cannot survive in a place without the rich biodiversity. This place is admired because we can preserve its systems. 

We can continue doing that. Not because there is a tourist bringing money, but because we have a moral obligation that was put to us by God. That you have to protect the land for your survival and the survival of other creatures. We cannot survive on our own. We are interdependent with other formations in nature—wildlife, the trees.

Never listen to the empty words that there are places to relocate the Maasai, because you cannot carry the mountains.

We have a mountain called Ol Doinyo Lengai, or Mountain of God. And some people for some reason say this is a global geopark. This is not a global geopark. It is our heritage. And is a global geopark or a world heritage site that does not value our heritage, which I think is a very, very serious mistake. 

So my last word is that we should be respected as human beings. We are not asking so much. We have gone to a place where we were not even allowed to vote. Even the British did not attempt to do this and they were colonists and this is now being done. 

So it's sort of an apartheid, not by whites, but within the Black system—which of course always explains that some hatred is not always racially tied. Some people share everything, but they sometimes try to push you to the end.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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