"From Tanzania to Cambodia, green groups say Indigenous peoples must be part of conservation strategies"
"JOHANNESBURG - For a week, the green hills around Tanzania's famous Ngorongoro crater have been chequered with the blood red shuka cloths of tens of thousands of Maasai herdsman protesting their eviction from their land - all in the name of conservation.
It is not the first time the Maasai have been forced to move on so tourists can see the pristine wilderness teeming with wildlife promised in so many films and documentaries.
The British colonial government forced thousands of Maasai leave the Serengeti in the 1950s after it made the vast area a national park. The Maasai were told they could live in the nearby Ngorongoro Conservation Area, later named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the 1970s.
Successive conservation measures each added restrictions on the Maasai, but now the Tanzanian government wants to evict tens of thousands of them from Ngorongoro to make more space for conservation sites, lucrative luxury tourism and trophy hunting."
Kim Harrisberg reports for Thomson Reuters Foundation August 23, 2024.
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