This story is the third in our three-part environmental justice series “Peril in East Africa.” Read the first part here and the second part here.
It’s early enough in the Maasai village of Ololosokwan in northwestern Tanzania’s Loliondo Ward, for the fog to still hug the brushy landscape and its people. But underneath the semblance of somnolent normality are the undercurrents of a deep-seated fear: evictions from their ancestral land.
Many Maasai still live traditional lifestyles similar to their forefathers, forgoing running water and electricity, and herding livestock for their livelihoods. As people emerge from their manyattas (huts) built from mud and sticks, they shake the sleep out of their eyes. The bomas (animal enclosures) are already empty, as herders and cattle are up with the sun. Several women and children walk by with plastic jerry cans to fetch water. The few who do have basic phones often walk long distances to trading centers with kiosks to charge their phones.
In 2009, tens of thousands of Maasai were violently evicted as part of governmental deals with foreign companies, and again in 2022, 2023, and this year. Each spate has left deep trauma on survivors, who say that thousands — mostly young men — fled, unable to imagine a future left in their home villages after militarized government agents razed down homes, stole animals, and even abducted elderly villagers.
Yet these Tanzanian security forces were not acting alone; in 2009, community members in Loliondo recalled Emirati employees from private game reserves accompanying the police and overseeing the forcible evictions, which included arson of Maasai property and livestock theft.
But the United Arab Emirates’ activities are hardly confined to Tanzania. Over recent years, several Gulf states have introduced different economic strategies to secure African continent interests: carbon credit businesses that encroach on vast tracts of pastoral lands, trophy hunting, and tourism schemes at times thinly veiled as “conservation” efforts. These are strategies that secure Arab economic stability but leave the African continent impoverished, according to a policy and programmes specialist at the World Wildlife Fund who wishes to remain anonymous for security reasons.
A popular strategy many carbon companies employ is to use relatively pristine land such as the Maasai’s to turn a profit while claiming to uplift communities considered impoverished by Western societies. Tanzania has a storied history of “grabbable” land, where officials evict people under the pretense of conservation.
“We have experiences of this–multiple-use areas where people coexist with wildlife such as Ngorongoro (a UNESCO-heritage site),” says a community member from Loliondo, who wishes to remain anonymous for security reasons. “But such places are upgraded to nature reserves that evict locals when the government sees how much money it could bring in.”
“The future of our land has never been more precarious,” says a member of the Pastoral Women’s Council in Loliondo, who wishes to remain anonymous for security reasons. “The government, [and] private companies have seen how good our land is and want it for themselves.”
Tanzania, an East African nation almost 1.4 times the size of Texas, is blessed with nature at once abundant and diverse. Serengeti National Park is one of the world’s most coveted wildlife safari destinations; more than half of the mainland, which is about 50 million hectares, is forested with mosaics of tropical rainforests, mangroves, and woodlands.
Yet many local communities are at risk of losing access to their lands as the government, under President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s leadership, jumps on the bandwagon to cash in on lucrative business deals that claim “environmental conservation” without anything to show for it.
There’s a relatively new emergence of economic relations between Africa and the Gulf Cooperation Council, a regional political and economic union comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, according to the World Economic Forum. The UAE alone has invested $59.4 billion in the continent and is now the fourth largest foreign director investor in Africa after China, the European Union, and the United States.
Migrants constitute high proportions of the total national populations in Gulf Cooperation Council states: in 2020, migrants — many of whom are African — accounted for 88% of the UAE population, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration.
The Tanzanian government’s covert relationship with the UAE royal family dates back to at least the 1980s, according to older Maasai from the Loliondo District, but the first documented involvement was in 1992. Around then, the Maasai elders recall rumors of the Otterlo Business Corporation, an Emirati game-hunting firm, being interested in their land. Brigadier Mohamed Abdul Rahim Al Ali, the UAE’s deputy minister of defense, owns the Corporation and is also believed to be either a member of, or closely linked to, the royal family.
In 1992, Brigadier Al Ali submitted a formal request to former Tanzanian president Ali Hassan Mwinyi for exclusive concessionary rights over the entire Loliondo Game Controlled Area, a wild area that has been protected since 1951 and spans over 4000 square kilometers. The Corporation’s operations in the area, according to the proposal, would “demonstrate to all the seriousness that the Arab world is giving to wildlife conservation.”
President Mwinyi granted the entire Loliondo Game Controlled Area as a hunting concession to the Corporation. The Tanzanian government also provided a license to the corporation for hunting activities, allowing permits to hunt wild game and for trapped live animals to be flown to the UAE.
Loliondo residents were not meaningfully consulted nor were parties to this agreement.
The Corporation has faced violations of both legal and moral obligations: Brigadier Al Ali’s proposal included improving local people's access to revenue, creating employment, and protecting and conserving areas contiguous to the Serengeti as part of critical migration corridors. Yet, on Oct. 24, 2024, the High Court of Tanzania dismissed a case from Maasai pastoralists challenging the creation of the Pololeti Game Reserve, ruling that the value of land to the economy takes precedence over the needs of local communities.
On the tail of COP29, underpinned by the Global North countries pledging aggressive emission reduction targets, carbon offsetting has never been trendier. The industry was valued at over $1,000 billion in 2023 and discussed heavily by high-profile environmental events such as the annual U.N. Climate Change Conferences.
However, offsetting merely compensates for existing carbon emissions by creating carbon sinks elsewhere, and therefore, these emissions end up being quantified and traded as part of business deals, rather than being cut down entirely. The effectiveness and integrity of carbon credits can also be quite questionable, in many cases.
Carbon companies, including The Nature Conservancy, insist that communities are thoroughly consulted, but individuals living in places like Ololosokwan claim otherwise. Not only do villages are made to sign contracts they do not fully comprehend, they are vulnerable to being pushed off their land as the government wants to show foreign companies how serious they are about “conservation.”
When Westerners think of “conservation,” they usually mean a change in landscapes to those dense with wildlife and lush vegetation, yet devoid of people.
Most conservation or land-related developments have boded poorly for the Maasai, who have been living in Tanzania and Kenya since the 15th century. Traditionally nomadic, they move seasonally with their animals in constant search for pasture and water. When Serengeti National Park (the name is derived from the Maasai word siringit, meaning “endless plains”) was founded as the former British territory’s first national park in 1951, thousands of Maasai were booted east, with many settling in the Loliondo District.
“In Arusha, Dar Es Salam, you don’t find these animals as you do in Maasailand,” says 59-year-old Christopher Mollet, who is a former village chairperson at the Massai village of Ngarasero, which lies on the shores of Lake Natron in the northern Ngorongoro District. This village of 9000 strong is another place under threat of land-grabbing.
“But the government doesn’t see that we’re playing a part [in conservation]. Why are animals only found in these places with Indigenous people?” Attempts to push the Maasai people off their land in order to offset carbon have joined the ranks as another threat to the tribe.
Both the brutal 2009 and 2022 evictions were linked to Otterlo Business Corporation: representatives of the game-hunting firm accompanied Tanzanian state security forces throughout the evictions, according to Amnesty International.
Now a member of the Pastoral Women’s Council in Lolindo, she grew up in Ololosokwan and was taught to only harvest dead branches for firewood. A few species — oreteti, olseki — were sacred, saved for blessings and certain ceremonies, and there were others that were off-limits entirely.
“We were taught that you cut trees only when you have a specific use, like building a house, and to save enough for others and nature,” she says. The forests were sources of food and medicine, the savannahs the lifeblood for their animals.
“As kids, we learned how to manage grazing pastures — mobility is key. That’s why we migrate to allow the grass to regenerate. We also reserved certain places for weak animals,” she says. “We would never build bomas near rivers, or cut the trees there since we respect water as the sacred source of life. We were taught not to hunt for wildlife, since our god Ngai has blessed us with cattle and goats.”
But life in her community shifted, reflecting the changes Tanzania was undergoing. In 1987, when she was 13, she remembers grazing animals with her siblings and neighbors close to the Serengeti, where they were following the new pastures that had come with that season’s rain. Suddenly, they were chased away by rangers, who also burned the place where they had been grazing to keep them from returning.
After reaching the safety of her home, she asked her father why this happened. “This place used to belong to us, but we had to migrate because of tourism,” he explained.
In March 2007, her brother was murdered after he raised concerns regarding the luxury operator Thomson Safari’s harassment of the Maasai on their generational land as it expanded its investments in northern Tanzania. “This is something I try to forget, it was a huge tragedy to our family, but it never leaves my mind,” she says.
In 2021, The Nature Conservancy launched its first formal carbon investment program in Tanzania. Although its climate director and project managers claim that they work extensively with communities to help them understand the long-term financing process of carbon sales, the local Pastoral Women’s Council member states otherwise.
“The community is not given time to learn what carbon is, or come together to decide what we want,” she says. “The whole market is very fake–it’s not a real solution to climate change. I hear that in Europe, one credit costs $70, but in Tanzania, it’s sold for less than $5. The community should be linked to carbon credit providers. People are tired. When will we have the education to learn about carbon credits?”
According to Alphonce Mallya, northern Tanzania program director at The Nature Conservancy, the 800 hectares of land leased for carbon projects, which spans 57 villages not far from Olosokwan, generally limits human activities, including habitation, firewood collection, and farming. “They come in like they’re giving the community free money when it’s actually hiring land to carbon credit companies,” she says.
It is especially concerning for the Pastoral Women’s Council member because there’s a very gendered aspect to how the consequences are discussed and felt by villagers, she says. “The issue is not involving women, it’s just men discussing the stakes. But the women are the ones depending on the forest for firewood, herbal medicine, making sacrifices, and grazing animals. When the laws change without anyone telling us, we are the ones punished.”
In 2023, the Tanzanian government announced a massive business deal: the leasing of 1.8 million hectares of forest, which is almost 4 percent of the country’s forest cover, to Blue Carbon, a new Emirati carbon offsetting company led by Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook al-Maktoum, who has no prior conservation experience but has significant business holdings in Gulf oil, power plants, and liquified natural gas.
Blue Carbon has also signed memorandums of understanding with governments in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Liberia to manage more than 60 million acres of their forests and sell generated carbon credits. As of January 2025, Blue Carbon has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
While her predecessor, the late John Magufuli, preferred a more isolationist approach, Tanzanian President Samia has been unflagging in her efforts to put Tanzania back onto the global stage and revive the country’s economic potential, particularly through foreign investments. She resumed Otterlo Business Corporation’s game reserve management activities, which had been frozen under Magufuli’s rule.
After Samia’s visit to the UAE for COP28 in 2022, several Emirati firms trooped into Tanzania, including the state-owned Emirates National Oil Company in a $500 million investment to expand imports for fuel products.
Marc Baker, founder and CEO of Carbon Tanzania — which verified 1.4 million emission reductions in 2020 — is currently implementing projects in the Yaeda Valley, Makame Savannah, and Ntakata Mountains. He believes that the key to working in the carbon industry is to enable communities to gain value from their land, pushing against how undervalued nature is in modern society.
Regardless of the foul play that might occur in other carbon companies, Baker maintains that humans need to be realistic about what climate solutions can be implemented. “The science so far shows that companies buying carbon credits are the ones decarbonizing the fastest,” he says.
In the Maasai village of Kayapus in the Ngorongoro ward, community members lament the day when carbon companies set their gaze on Tanzania.
There are so many villages here across the north that have been contacted by carbon companies interested in our land, one of them says. “It’s causing in-fighting within communities–some are adamantly against it, unsure of what it could bring, while others tired of living in poverty want the money.”
In the nearby Ngorongoro Crater, slivers of sun peek through the gray clouds and fog, illuminating the mustard-yellow flowers blanketing the landscape. We gaze out over slopes, at the straw roofs of the occasional manyatta dotting the landscape. “Our people are perishing for lack of knowledge, ignorance, and corruption,” he says.
