Preserving the Masai ‘way of life’ in Tanzania

At the Paris climate talks before Christmas, the former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern heralded the end of what he called the fake horse race between the twin goals of tackling climate change on the one hand and eradicating poverty on the other.

In his conceptually neat view the COP21 agreement, in which 195 nations, led by the United States and China, agreed to cut emissions in order to limit global warming, will involve no economic cost.

In the savannah and highlands of northern Tanzania, reducing poverty while preserving the environment is a high-wire act.

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Harvesting coffee in Tanzania

Twelve million Tanzanians live in dire poverty despite economic growth of 7 per cent last year. A large population – 47 million people – a high birth rate, and an economy based largely on subsistence farming mean that pastoralists, smallholders, commercial farmers and game reserves are competing for land.

This is all happening amid rising temperatures brought about by global trends, uncertain rains and vanishing tree cover.

In 2012 Nasa warned that the ice cap that crowns Africa’s highest mountain, Kilimanjaro, could disappear by 2020. The volcanic Mount Meru, 80km to the west, has been mostly ice free since the 1960s. Today the people who live and work on its slopes feel the heat very keenly indeed.

“It’s much warmer around here now than in the 1970s, even in the early 1990s,” says Ernest Kaaya. A small farmer in the Luguruki ward of Arumeru district, with two wives and 10 children, the 66-year-old is a genial, paternal figure in the small community. “The snow on the mountain disappeared decades ago,” he says. “Until recently a lot of the trees on the mountains were being cleared by the villagers, but the government stopped it.”

While climate change affects the mountains’ ice caps, forestry has been blamed for robbing the slopes of moisture. Kaaya started a small tree nursery in 2011, selling jacaranda saplings for about 8 cent each, after being trained by Cedesota, a community organisation funded by Irish Aid, via Care International.

“After the seminar I started growing trees so locals could plant on their farms on the mountain, to help the soil,” he says. “Now the conflict with the government is over. It’s my ambition to spread the training, because it’s good for everybody. It’s very easy to erode the soil on the mountain without trees, and the trees provide shade.”

Kaaya is also part of a co-op that exports avocados, papayas, coffee, beans and timber. In addition to nurseries and cash crops, Cedesota has helped the locals, who come from the Meru and Masai tribes, to mitigate the depredations of drought by keeping poultry and goats.

“It opened my mind: chickens are like insurance when there’s no rain,” says Rosemary Mosembise, a 37-year-old who runs a small restaurant from a tiny shack. “My firstborn is in secondary school because of the money I get from selling chickens.” The tuition costs 1.2million Tanzanian shillings a year, about €500 – a sizeable sum.

Northern highlands

Compared with the tropical south and the arid interior, Tanzania’s northern highlands are blessed with rich soils and a superb, relatively cool climate despite being just shy of the equator.

In the area around Luguruki village, where I visit small irrigated plots of coffee, avocados, papayas and bananas, I pass oxen pulling ploughs, fields teeming with corn, and plantations of beans and peas.

“They are poor people here – they live in the mountains – but they know how to use the land,” says Jackson Muro of Cedesota. “They take their cows’ manure to fertilise the crops, and the cows eat fodder. There is no grazing here, because there is no space to graze. It’s mainly agroforestry.”

Here, at least, among Meru tribespeople, economic development seems to go hand in hand with looking after the land. Farther north and west, near the vast Serengeti plain, Masai communities practise pastoralism. Although the government officially encourages agriculture as more economically and environmentally sound, no crops or trees are planted on the plains to the west and north of Arusha, the regional centre. Instead Masai pastoralists drive cattle across them in ever-increasing numbers.

Although the vast majority of Irish Government aid to Tanzania goes on health services and nutrition, Irish Aid policy is to support the pastoralist

way of life.

To experience it at first hand I travel to Loliondo, in the heartland of Masai territory, on the border with Kenya. The 360km journey takes about 10 hours – the route includes deeply rutted tracks – but we sweep through the sunlit uplands of Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a Unesco World Heritage site where Masai herdsmen share green pasture with wildebeest, zebras, giraffes and elands. The vast lands north of the conservation area, around Loliondo, are also populated by Masai tribes, although wildlife is not afforded the same protection here.

In the boma, or fenced village, of Enguserosambu I meet Masai widows who, in 2014, were part of a group that received 100 cows funded by Irish Aid via Palisep, a local group. Robert Kamakia of Palisep explains how they help the women produce and market their dairy produce.

A Masai, Kamakia admits that work among the tribe to combat female genital mutilation, forced marriage and a widespread denial of the existence of sexually transmitted diseases has a long way to go.

Customarily forbidden from remarrying or owning land, Masai widows are usually shunned by the community and even by their own families.

Nanyikai-Sironet, who is 48, says that her late husband’s alcoholism frittered away their resources and that she suffered dire social exclusion for not owning cattle. “When I received the cow from Ireland I was so happy. It was the end of a very dark time. It was the first time I ever owned livestock. Things are changing, but very slowly,” she says of the deeply patriarchical Masai society.

After another hour’s drive we come to the boma of Ngarwa, about 10 huts overlooking a marshy plain. I meet Noosupuia-Kosiom, a 24-year-old who was widowed five years ago, when her husband died in battle. After she sold her remaining livestock to feed her two children she was forced to work part-time as a labourer, collecting firewood and water. “It was very difficult having nothing. Since receiving my cow from Irish Aid” – via Oxfam – “people here treat me completely differently.”

Sagging, grey, grassless land

Although flies swarm around us and the cattle, the land is lush and green up here in the far north, and some areas show bursts of agriculture. Not so between Karatu and Arusha, where the sagging, grey and often grassless land shows, even at the end of the rainy season, the effects of overgrazing.

Local officials say that pure pastoralism is unsustainable in the long term, as nomadic herders require much more land than the agroforesters of the Arumeru region.

Given the Masai’s staggering birth rate – the population has more than doubled in less than 30 years – there is huge pressure on the land in many areas. Oxfam has called for the Masai lifestyle to be embraced as a response to climate change, because of the Masai’s experience of living in arid bushland. Yet the rapid growth in the Masai population, and subsequent overgrazing, is one reason why some previously fertile lands have turned to desert.

Mental health: the culture is to repress and suppress

The population pressure in northern Tanzania is especially evident in Arusha, whose population estimates put at anything from 500,000 to two million. A city who bustle is partly due to its status as a safari staging post, Arusha consists mostly of slum dwellings, wooden or earthen shacks with neither running water nor electricity. The area around Esso Road is among the fastest-growing slums in east Africa.

Evanna Lyons, a Meath woman, sees the problems first hand in her work as a psychotherapist at Arusha Mental Health Trust, the city’s sole mental-health clinic. “The patients we see have no words for depression, anxiety or stress. Emotive words like ‘sad’, ‘hurt’ and ‘angry’ are not used a lot,” she says. “The culture is to repress and suppress; a lot of members of the community can by silenced for the greater good.

“They find it hard to express feelings and report a lot of psychosomatic symptoms. You might have someone say they have a pain in their head, and then you find out their father died in front of them a few weeks beforehand.”

Arusha Mental Health Trust was founded in 2000 by another Irishwoman, Dr Sheila Devane. Last year Minister of State Sean Sherlock awarded €10,000 to fund a psychotherapy education programme on sexual abuse.

“As part of the programme we train ward officers, social workers, nurses, teachers, religious workers and orphanage staff on the dangers of various physical, mental and emotional abuse,” says Lyons, “as well as abuse related to child development.”

This article was supported by the Simon Cumbers Media Fund