Slow Like Honey

Change is coming to Tanzania. Mainly driven by climate change, much of Tanzania is being forced to turn to other sources of sustenance. For the Maasai in Longido, this means a shift from a pastoral lifestyle where the livelihood of the livestock dictates survival, to including more agriculture and other options.

Generally, in the Maasai community, the men and boys take charge of herding the cattle and making sure they get adequate food and water; since being evicted from prime grazing land this has become a strenuous undertaking. This leaves women to do most of the other tasks: gathering water, cooking food, taking care of the young, etc. With the impending shift of nomadic pastoral life to sedentary agriculture, it will probably be the Maasai women who will be in charge of maintaining the gardens and harvesting.

Ownership Leads to Empowerment

The threat of pastoral living not being sustainable for much longer not only affects the Maasai’s source of food, but also their wealth. If they can no longer manage large herds of cattle, they will not be able to generate much income. In response to this, there have been micro-businesses starting up in the area, for instance selling handmade jewelry. This trend is vital for the changing climate–environmental and gender–in the area. With a growing population of women who want to be heard, and to make a difference, the opportunity of being able to generate income to support their family is important. By gaining financial independence and contributing to their families’ livelihoods, they gain status and decision-making power within the community.

This sort of change is slow, however, it’s still taking place in the West. The first step is to educate the community on how to practice sustainable beekeeping. Much of Tanzania already practices a form of beekeeping, although it involves log-based hives that are destroyed upon harvesting. This method, albeit cheap and easy to practice, leads to impurities in the honey/wax, and is less safe for the humans and the bees. With the knowledge of modern beekeeping practices supplied by several organizations in the area, many communities in Tanzania already have been able to start stable bee colonies and develop micro-businesses–some even in the Arusha region.

The next step is to source beekeeping equipment so that it is affordable for the community. Certain products like the hive are wooden and simple, but others like the suit and centrifuge for harvesting could be hard to obtain for the Maasai in Longido.

Sources:

Beekeeping Empowers Maasai Women in Northern Tanzania | Transforming Lives | Tanzania | U.S. Agency for International Development. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2018, from https://www.usaid.gov/results-data/success-stories/beekeeping-empowers-maasai-women-northern-tanzania

Ngelime, N. (2017, September 8). How To Start A Successful Bee Keeping Bu… Retrieved September 20, 2018, from https://www.zoomtanzania.com/blog/start-successful-bee-keeping-business/

Successful African Beekeeping. (n.d.). Retrieved September 20, 2018, from http://www.africanbeekeeping.com/

Conservation vs Development

The Maasai, much like many other sub-saharan communities have long lived a semi-nomadic pastoral lifestyle; basing survival on livestock: as both food and currency. For several thousand years, this had been done sustainably in the grassy savannahs where cattle were able to graze freely. In the past century, however, there has been a large push to conserve certain areas of land in attempts to preserve the species that thrive in those environments.

The general consensus of this movement was that human interaction with the land and animals was leading to species endangerment in addition to land pollution. Granted, this is very true of many of the humans not indigenous to the lands. The people who had been living on this land for centuries beforehand, however, were abruptly forced to move. In some cases, like the Maasai, this happened multiple times over the course of the 20th century. Not only is this jarring to the cultural psyche, but is also damaging to the sustainability of the pastoral lifestyle that the Maasai hold on to so dearly. In the past, the herds of Maasai cattle had free access to a surplus of grazing land, which in turn, was able to sustain the Maasai people indefinitely. Having now been pushed off said lush land, the Maasai have been forced to forsake their traditional nomadic pastoral lifestyles for pseudo-sedentary agro-pastoral ones. Granted, this may not seem immediately problematic, however, there are many factors that lead to this lifestyle being less easily sustainable, especially in the hot, arid environment the Maasai find themselves forced into now.

• As fervent pastoralists by culture, the Maasai simply do not have much interest in agriculture, perceiving it as being solely meant for the livestock.

• With 595mm of rainfall annually, most regularly harvestable crops would have trouble growing.

• Through sedentary life, populations have a tendency to rise, and without adequate ability to sustain that growth, there will be widespread malnutrition

Sources:

McCabe, J., Perkin, S., & Schofield, C. (1992). Can Conservation and Development be Coupled among Pastoral People? An Examination of the Maasai of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania. Human Organization, 51(4), 353–366. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.51.4.d20010q600v50240

Muhumuza, R. (2018, May 12). Thousands of Tanzania’s Maasai evicted from their land “for tourism.” Retrieved September 26, 2018, from https://www.smh.com.au/world/africa/thousands-of-tanzania-s-maasai-evicted-from-their-land-for-tourism-20180511-p4zert.html