the nature we share
by Neil Caudle

Will banishing Maasai from parks protect Tanzania's wildlife, or make things worse?

he last time he was in Tanzania, Paul Leslie was first a lion then a witch. Or that's the way some Maasai children saw it.

"We'd gone down to an area in Maasai land where there aren't many tourists," Leslie recalls, "so there are a lot of people, particularly children, who have never seen white people up close. My friend Terry McCabe, a cultural anthropologist, and I were there to talk to people about the herding and so on as part of our work. But the young people were afraid of us because they thought we were lions. We looked like lions with this facial hair and hairy arms and pale eyes."

To reassure the children, Leslie and McCabe gave them cookies and sat with them under a shade tree. After a while, it was time for Leslie to call Chapel Hill on his cell phone. So Leslie strolled away from the shade tree and phoned home, wandering and gesturing as he talked. Five minutes later, when he turned back to the shade tree, "all hell had broken loose," he says. This time, the children were clamoring that Leslie was a witch. Why else would he wander and talk to himself in such an astonishing way?

.: Young Maasai women. Paul Leslie's team is studying the consequences of change for women's fertility and reproductive health. Photo by Paul Leslie; click to enlarge. :.

For Leslie, professor of anthropology, this small episode illustrates a larger problem he studies — the clash of old and new. After many generations of herding their animals across the savanna, Maasai people are forbidden to live in the Serengeti National Park. Conservation groups believe Maasai represent a threat to Serengeti's wildlife — wildlife that now attracts 500,000 tourists and more than $700 million a year to Tanzania.

While Leslie is all for conserving wildlife, he points out that the Maasai are a part of Nature, too. "That area in northern Tanzania is where you get the stereotypic African experience — the zebras and elephants and lions and the lone Maasai herder standing on one leg with his spear, overlooking the plains," he says. "And people see the savanna as natural, and we try to preserve it in parks. But humans have been herding their animals in that environment for hundreds or thousands of years, and there's good reason to believe that what we see as natural is at least in part a product of human actions."

Leslie points out that herders have for generations burned the grasslands because the new growth is tender and lush. "If you exclude humans and their herds, you sometimes see a change in the grasslands toward more scrub brush and more species that do better in the scrubbier brush. So you may get fewer gazelle and more wildebeest and then more cape buffalos, for example."

n Tanzania, the conflict pits those whose top priority is wildlife conservation against those who believe that indigenous peoples like the Maasai have a right to maintain their way of life. Leslie says he has to be careful not to seem to fall into either camp as he interviews Maasai people and studies their culture.

"Our research depends on good relations and our ability to talk with people," Leslie says. "If we're perceived as being part of the environmentalist camp, people won't want to talk to us."

If a resolution is possible in the conflict over the fate of Maasai in Tanzania, it may well arise from the kind of knowledge Leslie and his students and colleagues are seeking. While each faction in Tanzania has a theory about the effects Maasai have on the environment, no one really knows.

.: Leslie celebrates with friends in Turkana. Over his fifteen years there, Leslie earned the confidence fo the people he relied on for information. Photo by Paul Leslie; click to enlarge. :.

Leslie explains that Maasai have been implicated in the two foremost threats to wildlife in the region — farming and hunting. Even though traditional Maasai are herders, not farmers, some of the farmers moving into the Serengeti before the expulsion were closely related to Maasai. And while Maasai generally don't do a lot of hunting, they have killed lions when their herds were threatened. Young warriors traditionally have shown their bravery by taking on lions with spears, Leslie says. "So there are some legitimate concerns over the impact on wildlife. But I think the conclusion was a bit overdone. The actual fate of the Serengeti National Park and the other parks in northern Tanzania, and the resources and wildlife there, are influenced by a number of factors, of which the Maasai are only one."