Kenya's rural growth pits man against beast (more accurately, against environmental extremists)

Masai near Nairobi have killed 12 lions in recent months to protest 'over-protection' of wildlife.

KITENGELA PLAINS, KENYA - In these vast golden plains spotted with acacia trees, herds of domesticated cattle graze contentedly beside fleet-footed gazelles, while zebra thunder past homesteads belonging to colorful Masai herders.

Here in the Kitengela Plains, with the high-rises of the capital, Nairobi, visible on the northern horizon, humans and animals share the land. Lately, however, their cohabitation has been anything but harmonious.

For decades, Kenya has aggressively protected its wildlife and turned safari holidays into the country's second-largest source of foreign exchange. Supported by Western donors, they've protected 6 percent of the land in national parks, and placed wild animals, both inside and outside those parks, under government guardianship.

In the process, say a new generation of conservationists, wildlife is being protected more than people, leading to bitterness among local communities that continue to lose livestock, crops, and even family members to protected animals.

"Conservation here has been driven by the West," says Dr. John Waithaka, executive director of the African Conservation Center in Nairobi. "You have activists who have fallen in love with an animal, like an elephant, and that love drives conservation. For a long time, the indigenous people have been left out."

In the Kitengela Plains, Masai have killed at least 12 lions in recent months - showing their severed heads on local television - in retaliation for hundreds of lost cows, sheep, and goats. The high-profile conflict involving one of Kenya's proudest tribes has put the tension between humans and wildlife into the spotlight.

John Marmeres lives with his family a few miles from the booming town of Kitengela, in an area where plains are rapidly giving way to new houses. A month ago, in the early morning hours, he heard the frightened bellow of cows and the barking of dogs, followed by a lion's roar.

By the time he and his wife emerged from their concrete house, it was too late. One of his nine cows was already dead.

"We do not want to kill the lions because we have lived together for all these years," says Mr. Marmeres, who has lost three cows, 10 sheep, and five or six goats to lions in recent years. "But they are coming into our homesteads and killing our livestock."

The 12 dead lions represent about half of Nairobi National Park's estimated population, at a time when wildlife groups have issued dire warnings about the future of Africa's great carnivore. The growing tension between local communities and wildlife is threatening conservation efforts.

An estimated 75 percent of Kenya's wildlife lives outside its national parks, much of it in areas inhabited by the Masai. Unlike the country's other tribes, the Masai do not eat game, and until recently were nomadic and did not grow crops, allowing them to largely coexist with wildlife.

But growing populations and the privatization of communal land have shrunk the land that people and animals share, leading to a greater number of conflicts. Wild animals are the property of the government.

Once there were programs to compensate families for lost crops and livestock, as well as plans to help communities combat diseases that spread from wildlife to domesticated animals. But they were stopped due to corruption. Nor have local communities seen much benefit from tourism.

"It was a protest," says James Ole Turere, chairman of the local Kitengela Ilparakuo Landowners Association or KILA, of the recent lion killings. "We went to the government and they just kept saying there was nothing that could be done. But we as landowners are burdened with a lot."

Increasingly, conservation groups are realizing that local communities must become partners in wildlife protection. They are working to strengthen communal organizations that can advocate for local rights, launch ecotourism projects, and teach local people about the benefits of conservation.

For Morintat Ole Kasio, a Masai elder whose land borders one of the proposed campsites, the calculation is simple: "I can get money from selling a cow, milk by milking a cow, meat by killing a bull," he says. "But I cannot get milk or meat or money from a lion. So it is only if we see a benefit from wildlife that we will protect it."

... colorful Masai herders.

The patronizing CSM and the reporter can't get over just how colorful those dang natives are.

Good wrap up, Mr. Kasio.

Lot's of interesting info in this article, CW. Unfortunately Africa continues to be a black hole as far as interest goes and nothing is ever printed about what hellholes the big cities are. Talk about wildlife.

But he summed it up nicely.

Africa needs to lose these types.

The Perils of Designer Tribalism***Henry’s quip about the bone in the nose elicited the expected quota of outrage from culture-cultists. But the outrage missed the serious and, ultimately, the deeply humane point of the observation. What Sandall calls romantic primitivism puts a premium on quaintness, which it then embroiders with the rhetoric of authenticity. There are two casualties of this process. One is an intellectual casualty: it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the truth about the achievements and liabilities of other cultures. The other casualty is a moral, social, and political one. Who suffers from the expression of romantic primitivism? Not the Lauren Huttons and Claude Lévi-Strausses of the world. On the contrary, the people who suffer are the objects of the romantic primitive’s compassion, “respect,” and pretended emulation. Sandall asks:

Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all costs? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices?

Sandall is right that the answers, respectively, are No, No, and No: “The best chance of a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job.”

This is a truth that was broadly recognized at least through the 1950s. With the failure of colonialism, however, came a gigantic failure of nerve. (It might be said, in fact, that the failure of colonialism was a gigantic failure of nerve.) More and more, confusion replaced confidence, and with confusion came the pathologies of guilt.

Since the folly of locking up native peoples in their old-time cultures is obvious, but it is tactless to say so, governments have everywhere resorted to the rhetoric of “reconciliation.” This pretends that the problem is psychological and moral: rejig the public mind, ask leading political figures to adopt a contrite demeanor and apologize for the sins of history, and all will be well. Underlying this is the assumption that we are all on the same plain of social development, divided only by misunderstanding.

But this assumption, Sandall emphasizes, “is false.” And it was recognized as false by governments everywhere until quite recently. Around 1970, the big change set in. Then, instead of attempting to help primitives enter the modern world, we were enjoined to admire them and their (suitably idealized) way of life. As Sandall observes, “the effect on indigenes of romanticizing their past has been devastating.”

If your traditonal way of life has no alphabet, no writing, no books, and no libraries, and yet you are continually told that you have a culture which is “rich,” “complex,” and “sophisticated,” how can you realistically see your place in the scheme of things? If all such hyperbole were true, who would need books or writing? Why not hang up a “Gone Fishing” sign and head for the beach? I might do that myself. In Australia, policies inspired by the Culture Cult have brought the illiterization of thousands of Aborigines whose grandparents could read and write.

The statistics are grim. Between 1965 and 1975, Sandall reports, Aborigines arrived at one college with sixth-grade reading levels; in 1990, after primary education had been handed over to local Aboriginal communities, that had fallen to third grade. Today most Aborigines arrive at the college in question almost completely illiterate. ***

The whole piece is a gem.

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