The new game reserves reshaping Tanzania

The Mountain of God — Ol'doinyo Lengai to the Maasai — is an active volcano rising sharply a few kilometers from the town of Engare Sero in northern Tanzania. At its base lies Lake Natron, a shimmering salt lake. It's considered the most important breeding site for 75% of the global population of lesser flamingos.

But it's also an important site for Maasai people, who consider parts of it their ancestral land. Now, some fear another mass eviction is coming.

"I was forced to flee my home. They turned the area where I lived into the Pololeti hunting reserve," says 36-year-old Nesikar Daudi, now living in Engare Sero.

In 2022, the Tanzanian government established the Pololeti Game Reserve, and designated it exclusively for hunting and tourism. Thousands of people, like Nesikar were directly affected or even forcibly evicted.

"We suffered a lot because of this takeover. We lost our livestock, and bulldozers demolished our homes," Nesikar says. She, and hundreds of others, relocated to Lake Natron.

Since the 1990s, the country has seen a 20% expansion of protected areas. But Maasai lawyer and activist Joseph Oleshengay says the government's strategy in recent years has little to do with conserving nature.

"It is essentially a mechanism for land dispossession," he says. Behind the rhetoric of environmental protection, he argues, stand economic interests linked to tourism and trophy hunting.

"The idea is to empty these territories so they can be turned into something that makes money," Oleshengay told DW.

Authorities operate under a lawthat allows all land in Tanzania to be reclassified if it is deemed to serve the "public interest." In practice, the head of state can decide the fate of entire areas without any obligation to consult the communities living there.

Tanzania has game-controlled areas (GCAs) and wildlife management areas (WMAs). All are officially defined as tools for protecting wildlife and the environment, but differ in their rules and in how they affect local communities.

In WMAs and GCAs, human activities are restricted but not entirely excluded. WMAs allow residence, pastoralism, and sometimes agriculture. In GCAs, cultivation is prohibited, and grazing is allowed only with a specific permit from the relevant authority, while residence remains permitted. In game reserves like Pololeti, however, human presence is completely banned.

Game reserves outnumber national parks and cover a comparable amount of land. Around 43% of Tanzania's territory now falls within some form of protected area. Taken together, game reserves, GCAs and WMAs span roughly 159,000 square kilometers, an area larger than the neighboring nation of Malawi.

Engare Sero stretches along the banks of a river that descends from the volcano. Its calm waters sustain farming, pastoralism, and daily life before flowing into the vast salt lake below. For Nesikar Daudi, reports that the state wants to turn Lake Natron into a hunting reserve is worrying.

"We are not happy about this at all. It would mean yet another mass eviction," she says, adding: "You've seen the lake basin? That's where our livestock graze. If they turn it into a game reserve, our animals would have to climb the mountains to find food, and that's simply impossible."

An internal report from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, based on its 2021–2026 strategic plan, indicates that 15 new areas — nearly 7,000 square kilometers — are slated for conversion from GCAs into game reserves. The project, which would affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, also includes 4,000 square kilometers in the Lake Natron area.

"For years, the government has tried to evict residents because, from a tourism perspective, it is a strategic area," says Navaya Ole Ndaskoi, a Maasai academic and member of the Pastoralists Indigenous NGOs Forum. The land around the lake — about 3,000 square kilometers — is already classified as a GCA, with four hunting blocks leased to private companies that pay annual fees of up to $300,000 (€255,000) each.

Clients include several high-profile figures. On 8 June 2023, Donald Trump Jr., son of the United States' president, visited Tanzania, including the Lake Natron area. According to local media and sources close to TAWA (Tanzanian Wildlife Management Authority), he spent tens of thousands of dollars on a safari that included intensive hunting sessions.

Even though the area has not yet been formally designated as a game reserve, TAWA rangers seem to be behaving as if it already were. Several testimonies report that in recent years, they have begun imposing restrictions on the movement of local communities.

"We welcomed them, and they took our land by force. They no longer consult us. Now we understand their real intentions. TAWA is not a good neighbor," says Nesikar.

Authorities have also targeted essential health services, repeating patterns seen in other areas such as Ngorongoro. In 2022, without offering any explanation, they revoked the flight permits of the Flying Medical Service — a non-profit organization that has operated in northern Tanzania for 40 years, providing free healthcare to around 30,000 patients annually, including vaccinations, support for high-risk pregnancies, and emergency evacuations.

The consequences have been severe for the people living in the area. Nalotwesha, 28, comes from the remote village of Napandi near Lake Natron. The Maasai woman has suffered two strokes. The first time, an emergency medical flight saved her life by bringing her to the region's main city Arusha. But the service had been shut down when she suffered another stroke.

"The plane gave us hope. Now we are abandoned. There are no doctors or medicines in our village," she says.

The delay in receiving care left Nalotwesha partially paralyzed. She now lives near the hospital in Arusha, and is undergoing physiotherapy.

Territories like Lake Natron, Pololeti, and others earmarked for game reserves lie along crucial wildlife migration routes: adjacent to major national parks, and close to the Kenyan border. While this makes them especially valuable for conservation and tourism, their pastoralist communities are vulnerable.

For the Maasai, who once moved freely between Tanzania and Kenya in search of pasture, these new boundaries and restrictions have dramatically narrowed the land available for their herds.