On a cloudy morning in late June 2024, more than 4,000 Maasai warriors – their faces painted with milk and honey – descended the Ngorongoro crater as their war cries filled the volcanic caldera.

For three days and nights, the Maasai celebrated Enkipaata, the first of three rites of passage that every Maasai male must undergo in his lifetime. The event took place in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA), a territory where lush nature, spanning 8,000 square kilometers, fills every corner and coexists in a perfect symbiosis with its ancestral inhabitants – the Maasai.

Included in the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding in 2018, Enkipaata is the rite of passage through which a group of Maasai boys pass together from being children to being Morans – warriors in the Maa language. “Enkipaata brings people together. It’s something that builds the community and fosters a sense of mutual love and understanding that you are equal to others,” explains one of the Irmirishi – the mentors, who organize the ceremony.

Maasai males must go through three interrelated rites of passage in their lifetime – the first being Enkipaata, a circumcision rite, inducting boys into the first stages of moranhood. The second is Eunoto, celebrated eight years later to mark the passage to adulthood. The third and final stage is Olng’esherr, which represents the end of life as a moran and the start of eldership. These three celebrations take place in the Ngorongoro Crater, a sacred place for the Maasai, where the spirits of their ancestors reside.

Today, these ceremonies face potential extinction under the threat of Tanzanian government’s plan to exploit these lands as leisure and hunting reserves for foreign tourists.

The government's scheme to evict the Maasai from their lands, with complicity of organizations like UNESCO, the World Bank, and USAID, among others, has been in works for decades. This not only endangers the human rights of the Maasai, but also jeopardizes ancient cultural traditions that have been practiced “since always,” as one of the Enkipaata organizers, who requested anonymity, explained.

“Where are we going to hold our ceremonies if the government expels us from our ancestral lands?”

Whereas the tourism sector already represents 17.2 percent of the country’s GDP, the government aims to attract five million visitors a year to generate US$6 billion from the sector by 2025. To reach this goal, it is clearing villages where the Maasai reside and expel tens of thousands of Indigenous people from their lands to allow the massive influx of tourists and the creation of hunting reserves.

“The place where the government wants to evict people from is sacred. They are trying to move us from where they practice their traditional lifestyle, to another place that isn’t even Maasai land. They want to move us to Msomera, in the coastal region of Tanga. It is a town; we can’t practice our lifestyle there. In Msomera, there is no crater, there are no swamps. This is a threat to the Maasai culture.”

This sentiment is backed by reports showing that the land designated for NCA residents who have been evicted lacks sufficient water and grazing areas. The absence of basic resources and the expropriation of land from Msomera residents without their Free, Prior, and Informed Consent heightens the risk of conflict.

When asked about their opinion on tourism and the fact that, day after day throughout the year, thousands of safari Land Cruisers cross their lands, the locals’ response is not surprising. “It doesn’t benefit us at all…Tourists arrive in their big 4x4s, eager to see wild animals, and we live under the threat of being expelled from our lands.” Meanwhile, schools are being closed, and hospitals and medical services are being cut, endangering the lives of the Maasai.

The Endulen Church Hospital, the main hospital for 100,000 people in the NCA, has been downgraded to a clinic, with ambulance and emergency services discontinued; all government nurses, therapists, and radiation specialists have been relocated to other areas. In August 2023, the Flying Medical Service, which had served Indigenous populations without access to healthcare for 39 years, was halted.

In August 2024, the government delisted all the villages in the NCA without consulting the over 100,000 Maasai impacted by the drastic decision that removed local government services, stripped voting rights, and paved the way for evictions. In response, over 40,000 Maasai gathered to block roads leading to the NCA and Serengeti. The pressure generated by the historic mobilization led the government to make a stunning reversal as it reinstated the villages and voting rights. Despite the victory, communities are not secure in their ancestral lands.

These evictions not only threaten the lives of the Maasai but also have implications for the survival of traditions and culture – including pastoralism – the way of life by which they have sustained themselves for hundreds of years. Land for grazing and watering cattle has significantly reduced in recent years, decimating livestock herds and livelihoods.

It is ironic that whereas UNESCO claims it protects rites of passage like Enkipaata, Eunoto, and Olng’esherr as Intangible Cultural Heritage, it participates in their destruction when it justifies the evictions of the Maasai by the need to protect Ngorongoro as a World Heritage Site.

The Ngorongoro Conservation Area was established in 1959 following a multiple land-use model (MLUM), where wildlife was to coexist with semi-nomadic Maasai pastoralists practicing traditional livestock grazing. The primary objective of this model, implemented by the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA), was to protect natural and cultural resources while safeguarding the interests of local residents and boosting tourism.  

In March 2019, a joint mission report from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and the International Council on Monuments and Sites stated: “The NCAA urgently needs to implement stringent policies to control population growth” to protect the site. In October 2019, commenting on the government’s plan to relocate the Maasai from the NCA, the UNESCO commission was among the groups to suggest “abandon MLUM by relocating people to establish Ngorongoro Nature Reserve [and only] retain historical bomas for cultural tourism.” 

A local resident warns, “UNESCO’s comments on the MLUM are legitimizing and encouraging our eviction…The government and international organizations don’t understand the relationship between humans, livestock, wildlife, and nature for the Maasai. It is our entire way of life.”

Tanzania is positioned on the global stage as one of Africa’s most stable economies and one of the world’s top tourist destinations. Brochures celebrate the iconic Maasai, as much as the elephants, zebras, and the giraffes. However, the same dirt roads traveled by foreign visitors, the same forests that delight their eyes, have today become the most treacherous grounds for the Maasai, with the government’s decision to prioritize revenue from tourists and trophy hunters over the lives of the Indigenous cultures that have inhabited these lands for centuries.

---

Despite increasing repression from the government, Maasai communities continue to courageously defend their rights to land and life in the NCA. In partnership with these communities, the Oakland Institute provides research and advocacy support to power their struggle.

Learn more about our work in Tanzania Cover photo: Kerika, the young leader of Enkipaata also known as Alaigwanani in Maa language, poses for a portrait in Oloirobi village, in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.