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The Maasai, indigenous people of the Ngorongoro Crater in northern Tanzania, are being treated in a way similar to how black people were racially pigeonholed into ‘Bantustans’ in Apartheid-Era South Africa, an activist has told Down To Earth on a day the community blocked a key highway.
“It may not be white against black as in Apartheid South Africa. But we feel like we are living in a Bantustan,” Joseph Olesangay, a lawyer and human right activist, told DTE.
The Maasai community took to the Ngorongoro-Serengeti highway at 8 am local time on August 18 to demonstrate and demand the respect of their fundamental rights, a statement by Maasai International Solidarity Alliance (MISA), an international alliance standing in solidarity with the Maasai of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and Loliondo, noted.
“We are not blocking this highway out of choice. We are doing it out of necessity,” the statement quoted one participant as saying.
“For too long, our voices have been ignored, and our rights have been trampled,” said another demonstrator. This is our last resort to draw attention to our plight and demand the respect and dignity we deserve,” another demonstrator was quoted as saying.
There has been tension in the Maasai homeland since the past four years.
On June 8, 2022, dozens of police personnel arrived to evict Maasai tribespeople in Loliondo district in order to make way for a game reserve for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) royal family. Two days of violence followed.
The Ngorongoro Crater, like the world-famous Serengeti National Park, teems with wildlife which east Africa is famous for.
Serengeti, Ngorongoro and Loliondo have been the ancestral homelands of the semi-pastoralist Maasai, who were displaced when the National Park came up in 1951.
The Maasai are now facing a fresh round of violence and targeted displacement, says Oleshangay.
“The authorities in Tanzania know that Ngorongoro is visited by tourists from across the world. Hence, they cannot openly displace the Maasai. They thus have opted for silently forcing the Maasai to abandon their lands,” he alleged.
“For the last four years, the Tanzania government has stopped all social services like health and education in Ngorongoro as a trigger to Maasai displacement,” according to the MISA statement.
Even worse, recent developments in Tanzania have alarmed the Maasai that they will soon become non-entities in law.
“Tanzania’s National Electoral Commission recently came out with a National Electoral Plan for the registration of 40,000 voters. This is meant for the local government polls this November and parliamentary elections in October 2025. When the government issued a public directive this July about where the voter registration would be done and polling stations would be, there was no mention of the Ngorongoro division which is 8,000 sq km in area and has 100,000, mostly Maasai, voters,” Said Oleshangay.
He claimed that the government wants to prevent Maasai from voting so that they do not have people in decision-making positions. “They can then manipulate and twist laws to drive the Maasai out,” said Oleshangay.
Oleshangay also compared the plight of the Maasai in Tanzania to South Africa’s Bantustans.
‘Bantustan’ is a word made up of ‘Bantu’ and ‘Stan’. The first word denotes the black peoples of central, eastern and southern Africa, who migrated into the region from the western and southwestern parts of the continent starting in the mid-2nd millennium BCE and finally ending before 1500 CE.
‘Stan’ is a Persian word meaning ‘Land’.
The Bantustans were intended as ‘homelands’ for South Africa’s black people, especially after the National Party under David Francois Malan won the South African elections in 1948 and adopted apartheid as official policy.
In reality, they were intended to ‘legitimise the Apartheid project’, notes Laura Philips from the Department of History, New York University.
“Also known as “homelands” in official parlance, the bantustans were set up in an attempt to legitimize the apartheid project and to deprive black South Africans of their citizenship by creating ten parallel “countries”, corresponding to state designated ethnic group,” she notes in her 2017 paper, History of South Africa’s Bantustans.
“The bantustan project was controversial and developed slowly, first by consolidating “native” reserve land and later by giving these territories increasing power for self-governance. By the 1980s there were four “independent” bantustans (Transkei, Ciskei, Venda, and Bophuthatswana) and six “self-governing” ones (Lebowa, Gazankulu, KwaNdebele, Qwaqwa, KaNgwane, and KwaZulu),” Philips adds.
Between the 1960s and 1980s, the Apartheid government in South Africa forcibly shifted thousands of black people and transferred them to Bantustans in pursuit of its policy of ‘Apartheid’ or ‘Separateness’, in this case, racial segregation.
All black men in South Africa were required to carry a ‘Pass’ under the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, as urban areas were deemed ‘white’. A person not having a pass book or an entry in it could be thrown into prison.
The discrimination elicited protests and resistance and tragically also resulted in the notorious Sharpeville Massacre of March 21, 1960. Police fired on a crowd of black protestors in the town of Sharpeville in the erstwhile Transvaal province. The protestors were agitating against the pass law. Sixty-nine people were killed in the firing.
“It is just like South Africa now for the Maasai. Their healthcare has been cut. If they want to go to the nearest health centre in the surrounding districts, they must carry their pass. Else the authorities will never allow them back in,” said Oleshangay.