Category: Tanzania

Urgent Appeal for The Serengeti

Urgent Appeal for The Serengeti

by Arusha ♥ 12 Comments

Dear Grace & Other Careful Readers
Thanks. This blog is in error. The “petition site” (automatically) contacted me (their deadline for the petition is next week, June 1, 2014) and fed me the links that I took to be current. Fellow bloggers did the same and we contributed to each other’s errors. All the news below is one year old. As far as we know the eviction process is on hold as a result of a suit filed by Maasai leaders which is still alive in the Tanzanian courts.

Petition site organizers believe if they reach 34,000 signatures by June 1, 2014, they will continue the pressure needed to keep the evictions on hold, so please proceed reading and sign the petition. But my apologies to all my readers for syncing off by a year.

– Jim Heck

Desperately needed: your signature on and broadcast of a petition to stop Tanzania from giving away part of the Serengeti to Mideast princes.

Sign this petition and circulate it, now, now. We have little time.

Last year I reported that Tanzania President Kikwete announced that he was going to evict 30,000 Maasai from their homeland in Loliondo in northern Tanzania to enlarge an existing hunting preserve owned by potentates in Dubai and Jordan.

As with the stopped Serengeti Highway, the outcry was substantial, especially locally from the Maasai. Nothing more happened. Until now.

Presuming the resistance had died out, Kikwete announced last week the sale was going ahead.

Manipulating Tanzania’s incredibly corrupt laws, Kikwete has decided to designate this area as a “wildlife corridor” which allows hunting but forces the eviction of the Maasai.

Don’t be fooled by this sinister sobriquet. Kikwete and past Tanzanian presidents have close relationships with Mideast potentates, where most of these old politicians’ money is stashed.

This is a land grab if ever there were one.

And this time the impact is actually less on conservationists and tourists than on local Tanzanians.

“My people’s livelihood depends on livestock totally,” a prominent Maasai politician, Daniel Ngoitiko, told the Guardian. “We will die if we don’t have land to graze.”

And don’t think this means there’s a bunch of dirty nomads running around half naked chasing dying cattle. Loliondo has become an important agricultural hub for Tanzania. We’re talking about modern ranching.

Ngoitiko’s comments could just as easily be said word-for-word by any Texas rancher afraid of a government land grab.

I’m infuriated by Kikwete’s dictatorial stance on this, his total disregard for the Maasai community which is trying so hard and doing so well to modernize.

So just as they begin modern farming techniques, he drives a stake through their back forty. There’s everything in his actions to suggest he’d rather send the Maasai back to the Stone Age than help them develop.

Ngoitiko told the Guardian, “We will fight against it until the last person is gone,” he said. More than fifty local Maasai officials said they will resign if the move goes through, effectively leaving a huge area without any local governance.

In an incredibly condescending dismissal Tanzania’s minister for natural resources and tourism, Khamis Kagasheki, was then quoted in the Guardian article as saying: “If the civic leaders want to resign, they can go ahead. There is no government in the world that can just let an area so important to conservation to be wasted away by overgrazing.”

This is equally a blow to the Serengeti, which the area is contiguous with. It’s a wedge between Kenya’s beautifully protected Maasai Mara and the Serengeti National Park.

Inserting hunting this far into the area could disrupt normal wildlife behaviors.

Please help. Sign the petition and circulate far and wide.

Let the Safari Begin!

Let the Safari Begin!

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment


The safari calendar in East Africa resets each year at the end of November, and the news that has poured in from our safaris just keeps getting better and better. 2014 may be an exceptionally outstanding year for safaris!

The latest bit came from safari traveler Loren Smith traveling on a safari EWT arranged for the Cleveland Zoological Society. You can see Loren’s fabulous video above.

The first is the only disturbing one: there continue to be too many elephants, but let me get that single negative out quickly. I’ve been warning of a growing elephant conflict for more than a decade in East Africa. My blogs are replete with the problems and endless attempts at solutions.

The “elephant problem” has become a political problem in East Africa. Candidates for political office in both Kenya and Tanzania now often have planks in their platform regarding what to do about elephants.

My concern is that there will be overreach. And as I’ve often written, the exaggeration and bad analysis of the elephant poaching problem in the west isn’t helping.

But I can assure you that on safari the effect is nothing less than exhilarating as you can tell from Loren’s video. I show minute:second time points below in the video corresponding to my remarks:

0:10
Loren traveled in the last half of February, which over the last forty years of good climate statistics suggests should be much drier than shown in his first shots in Arusha National Park.

Typically the entire first half of the year is a wet season in northern Tanzania, but in February the precipitation abates at times almost completely. If you were planning your trip strictly by statistics, Loren’s video would have had little green in it.

Global warming has been changing this steadily for almost a decade, and as you can see by the green bushes, it’s not dry.

It’s hard for animals to be affected negatively by too much rain. But it definitely affects people, and that’s been one of the continuing stories in the equatorial regions of the planet as global warming progresses.

0:45
Tarangire is bit drier, which is always the case. Arusha is the wilderness around Africa’s 5th highest mountain and when it’s wet, it’s always wetter there. Tarangire is actually an ecosystem more similar to southern Africa than East Africa and is the only northern Tanzanian wilderness defined by a sand river ecology.

1:04
This lady has just eaten and washed herself off, which is why she is so close to the water in Silale Swamp. We can speculate about the three new lacerations on her hide. Two are just above her left hip and if you watch closely you’ll actually see a larger one on the far backside, middle of her left hip.

Lions gorge themselves when eating. Their very inferior molars are almost useless. They don’t chew much. They tear and swallow huge hunks of meat. A 400-pound male lion can easily chow down 70 pounds in a sitting. That extends the belly and makes it droop and is often confused in females as being pregnant.

So what caused the problem? We can only speculate but I think she was in a tussle with hyaenas, and the lacerations are the hyaena nips. In this area of the Silale Swamp there are four very grand males and for some reason they aren’t very welcoming of females. It could also have been a fight with the males.

Tarangire is actually where I think the best elephant experiences should be had, but Loren obviously had a fabulous one at nearby Lake Manyara National Park!

1:33
Notice the small tusks on this elephant, the legacy of the horrible years of elephant poaching in the 1970s and 1980s. As the video progresses we’ll see some better and longer tusks, because the elephant population is definitely on the increase and growing healthier.

Manyara was where the very first substantial elephant research was carried out in the 1950s by the famous Ian Douglas Hamilton. In those days there was no place on earth with as many and as healthy elephants as Manyara.

3:18
Junior here has a short branch in the back of his mouth. Elephant get a new set of molars about every ten years and like all good kids, he’s got to massage those tender gums!

4:36
What we see in Loren’s video is a large mass of transitory elephants: they’re moving through Manyara. They don’t live here as Hamilton’s elephants did in the last century. You can tell this by the way many multiple families are grouped together.

In a totally calm and balanced system, elephant families tend not to group. But when they’re on the move they do.

Tarangire provides a massive corridor to elephants south into central Tanzania’s great wildernesses of Ruaha and Rukwa. They move northwest from Tarangire into Manyara, and from Manyara they moved in very narrow corridors into Ngorongoro where they can then spread out widely into the Serengeti and Mara.

It isn’t that elephant are breeding so rapidly that their numbers are bulging. Poaching has been on the increase and the growth rate of the population is not high. But human encroachment is on a rapid increase, so their habitat is shrinking.

And more than ever, they have to move. Loren’s video is a magnificent documentary of this.

6:12
Until recently Ngorongoro Crater had the highest density of lion in Africa, but we need new studies since the rapid decline in lion was documented a few years ago. Even so, it is probably still one of the best places on earth to see lion.

These are two juvenile males, and despite their bravado they’re having a hard time. Look at their bellies and then look at their muddy feet. Lion like cats all over hate water.

Something was in the marsh that seemed like easy pickings, but they even missed that.

In a balanced population in the wild there are many fewer males than female lions. This is because so many young juveniles like these die of starvation. Unlike the sisters in their litter, they aren’t taught to hunt by the mothers.

But also unlike their sisters who usually remain with the mothers, the males are kicked out before they’re fully mature. A fully mature male is 50% bigger than a female, and nature’s way among lions to avoid inbreeding is to kick out the teenage males before they get as big as mom.

They have to teach themselves to hunt. Obviously enough learn, but these kids don’t seem to be doing so well. You might think what a pretty mane the one has. What I notice is their ribs and boney haunches. When the one starts to call, I think that’s a real hunger pain or possibly a pointless message to Mom for help.

7:50
The video ends in the central Serengeti and notice how wet the track is. Good for the critters to be sure. Not so good for the farmers.

Thanks Loren for an outstanding quick story of Tanzania’s wilderness in 2014!

Still Stuck in the Mud

Still Stuck in the Mud

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Tremendous new natural resources have been discovered in Tanzania; some say that’s why Obama visited there recently. Isn’t this good news?

Many including myself have lamented African development over the last half century, flipping from feeling totally pessimistic to totally optimistic in the course of a few elections or natural catastrophes.

But always the bugaboo has been the culture of dependency presumed intrinsic to any society deft of natural resources and not yet matured of any of its own technology or innovations.

That has changed dramatically in the last decade with the discovery of so many now extractable resources that were either not known or too deep or complicated to collect in the past.

Almost 20 years ago the world’s second largest gold reserve was discovered in Tanzania near Lake Victoria. And for twenty years we’ve watched the Tanzanians botch one mining deal after another, screw up every national taxing proposal that’s reached the legislature, and kill and main hundreds if not thousands of mine workers.

And now, enormous new natural resources are being discovered in Tanzania almost daily.

The most impressive are new uranium deposits. In fact, such huge reserves have been found that the Tanzanian government quickly created a “Tanzania Atomic Energy Commission.”

(Sad that its website, thrown up in a few days, is better than for the national parks.)

In Arusha recently, President Jakaya Kikwete said, “If all the reserves we have are fully exploited, Tanzania can become the seventh leading uranium producers in the world,” said Kikwete.

Already Mantra Resources and a Russian firm ARMZ have entered into a joint venture to mine uranium. Tanzania has so far confirmed the presence of multiple thick zones of sandstone-hosted uranium mineralization at shallow depths at the “Nyota Prospect” where it is presumed there are 35.9 million pounds of extractable uranium.

That’s a lot.

But there’s more. Coal, and (good grief!), diamonds.

But even more, still:

Unimaginable numbers of deaths and disabilities from the local Tanzanians so far employed to extract these resources. The latest was only several weeks ago. I don’t understand why progressives are livid with the sweat shops supplying Walmart and Nike, but shrug at the horrific deaths and disabilities Tanzanians suffer every single day.

Last week the estates of numerous gold miners who died at the horrendous Barrick Gold mine near Mwanza filed suit for shameful work practices.

Yet there was more support in the media for the mining company than for the miners. Well, I guess it can make sense: After all, gold has declined in value, and the owner of the mines just took a $700 million writeoff on the quarter’s earnings.

Tanzania isn’t handling all of this very well.

I suppose that’s understandable, since the government of Tanzanian doesn’t handle anything very well. But this is, literally, a “gold mine” for the population, if the government can get its act together.

So far, it hasn’t, and it’s incredibly depressing.

Mining licenses are being given out willy nilly at the entire discretion of President Kikwete; there is no vetting process, and currently, there is no national policy regarding taxing or royalties.

Current Tanzanian law, which enshrined local control of local lands (sometimes to a ridiculous extent, see my blogs on WMAs and other big game related lands), is being completely ignored.

Near the capital, Dodoma, a mining company several months ago began digging giant wells without even advising the local community at Bahi Makulo what they were digging for and who they were. An expert has surmised it was Mantra Tanzania, a subsidiary of a Russian mining group.

When confronted by local officials, the management offered a handful of jobs instead of explanations, which were readily accepted. These jobs included handling chemicals that weren’t identified, and without any training.

It’s likely that at least one of the chemicals was mercury. Human Rights Watch has consistently bashed Tanzania for being one of the lone countries that has refused to sign a mercury chemical standard treaty.

Numerous human rights violations by multiple mining companies in Tanzania, and the refusal of the Tanzanian government to enforce its even poor but existing laws, has left the population completely unprotected.

Feeling totally marginalized, many Tanzanians are now desperately trying to mine gold on their own, like the original gold rushers of the 1850s. It’s dangerous and mostly unproductive, and the government is doing nothing to either regulate or discourage it.

It’s a crying shame Tanzania’s been unable to get its act together over the last two decades since Lake Victoria gold was discovered. Now with uranium, diamonds and more, that sadness has turned to desperation.