Maasai Evicted from their Lands to Make Space for Trophy Tourism in the Serengeti

Mike Mwenda

Indigenous Maasai people have been ordered to leave their homeland in Tanzania's Serengeti Park for it to be turned into a hunting ground for tourists, a report highlights.

Maasai people from four villages in Loliondo, on the outskirts of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, famous for the annual wildebeest migration, are being evicted from territories they’ve occupied for thousands of years, according to an investigation by think tank the Oakland Institute, in a case of land grabbing. The Maasai represent one of the largest known pastoral groups worldwide, with about one million people roaming across southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, but “hundreds of homes have been burned and tens of thousands of people driven from ancestral lands in recent years to benefit high-end tourists,” the report highlights.