How Maasai lost their ancestral land to British in 1904

Maasai morans with their livestock, 1960s. [File, Standard]

Naboth’s vineyard. That is what the bewitching undulating grazing lands straddling Kenya and Tanzania, the home to the Maasai community, have been for over a century.

Today, the cries of an estimated 70,000 herders from this pastoral community echo around East Africa as they are hounded out of their homes in Ngorongoro.

The Tanzanian government has justified this uprooting of indigenous people from their ancestral land arguing that the number of livestock kept by the Maasai is a threat to wildlife and tourism from which “the government earns billions...