Day 6 – Land Rights and Fights

Sunday is not a day of rest for my colleague Christine and myself. Today we are meeting an organisation based just outside of Arusha, CEDESOTA, working on land rights. Jackson, the Coordinator is taking us out to one of the wards (consisting of 4 villages) where they work. 

We set out on the road to Kilimanjaro – one of the highways in Tanzania. Again I am impressed by the well maintained lawn and flower beds which surround the businesses and hotels we pass. They take such care of things in this country. We drive past a car dealership selling shiny new 4x4s, blue tractors and red motorbikes. The scene is juxtaposed by the herds’ boy passing with his goats, grazing along the road as they go, and framed by the tree covered hills and mountains – old and new Tanzania. 

I am enthralled still by the ‘garden centres’ one finds by the side of roads in Tanzania – beautiful plants, trees and shrubs lined up carefully in neat lines , ready for buyers to jump out of their cars. There are no garden gnomes here, instead, a pair of tall ceramic geese.  The further we get out of Arusha the more coffee plantations we see, mixed in with maize and the banana trees, looking as though they are ready to launch into the sky, and which, it appears, can grow virtually anywhere. 

About 30 kilometres outside the city we leave the “tarmac road” as Jackson calls it. At the mouth of the track we’re taking stand the usual assortment of stalls and small shops: a hair dresser, vegetable sellers. Soon we have driven through these and there is nothing for miles except a sea of sunflowers. Initially they are green and growing but as we clock up the miles the plants become brown, the leaves tissue paper like, brittle. There has not been enough rain here. The local villages will suffer. 

We pass a boy with an 8 foot metal joist balancing precariously on the back of his bike; another is leading a solitary cow by a rope. The road is bumpy, crumpled by a giant’s hand. We are now in pastoralist areas we are told. Some have been forced to settle due to increasing pressure on land and we catch a glimpse through the sunflowers of a small blue house with an immaculate garden and chicken coup. 

Land is an issue in Tanzania. Pastoralists, traditionally nomads who travel with their herds using the different seasons as their guide, are now fighting against those who wish to put the land to other uses, whether they be tourist companies, multinationals or the Tanzanian government. African Initiatives are about to start a new project with the Ujaama Community Resource Trust (UCRT), an organisation who has worked in the Ngorongoro district for many years. In the past African Initiatives has supported UCRT and their communities to put together Land Use Plans, legal documents which legalise the pastoralist right to use their land, their way. This new programme goes a step further. For the first time UCRT will work with multiple villages to secure rights over communal grazing land, so important for their livelihoods and, of course often the only water sources in the area. The project will reach 64,000 pastoralists. Importantly, it will also secure land rights for 33,000 women- traditionally unable to own land. 

As we drive back towards the tarmac road I wonder how my community would act if we had to suddenly fight for our right to live there. The villages which UCRT will work with, and those supported by CEDESOTA would, I think, have a big advantage over us – they are united. And as Jackson says, “We cannot succeed if we are not united.”