Wildlife Tourism – has to be a good thing for developing countries, right? Wrong. It’ll end in tears

The cattle-tending Masai of the Serengeti plains of Tanzania are under notice to abandon their traditional nomadic lands to make way for tourism. And tourism that shoots the wildlife with something more deadly than cameras. Trophy-hunting – once the pastime of wealthy Americans and Europeans is back on the agenda for the oil-rich super-wealthy of the twenty-first century.

Despite being offered compensation to the tune of around £360,000 for social and economic development projects, representatives of the Masai say they cannot be bought off by financial inducements for the lands they have inherited from their ancestors.

It had been assumed the threat of eviction from their tribal hunting lands had gone away following widespread fury at the original plan for big-game tourism and a possibility of violent resistance. However the government of Tanzania has been accused of back-tracking on their climb-down of a little over a year ago despite their offer of compensation.

It has not been a good week for indigenous people in Africa. Earlier in the month members of the San tribe of the Kalahari, part of the bush people were reported to be under threat in Botswana. They have been removed to run-down settlements on the edge of a vast safari park and ordered not to hunt within the park to protect wildlife for tourism. It is just part of a wider trend for indiginous hunter-gatherer communities in the developing world to be evicted from traditional lands, whether the justification is to protect endangered species, conserve habitats, reduce water use or bring people together into larger communities for education and health services. Some argue that rather than being in the interests of the tribal members, it’s more about conserving scarce resources for urban majorities or an attempt to exert more control over previously independent groups of people.

The arguments were much the same for moving native people of North America into reservations or moving them hundreds of miles from their original lands as inflicted upon the Cherokee in the early 1800s in the USA. An ethnic removal that was termed ‘Trail of Tears’ for its lethal impact.

Photo: Abir Anwaar Creative Commons