Tribal elder modernizing the Maasai to avoid extinction

updated 7:08 AM EDT, Fri July 26, 2013

Martin Saning’o Kariongi (right), a respected Maasai elder in northern Tanzania, has made it his life’s mission to save his people’s way of life whilst helping them adapt to a changing world.

Whether it’s promoting education, encouraging gender education or setting up profitable businesses, Kariongi is determined to promote self-sustainability within the Maasai of northern Tanzania.

Kariongi has started IOPA, a community-based venture company to help improve the economic conditions of his people.

The group has established a women-run milk processing company that’s producing dairy products, such as cheese, yoghurt, butter and ghee. “It has been going on now for the last five years and the life of the people, the life of the families, have changed dramatically and women are making so much money,” says Kariongi.

It’s also established several other companies, including a media house that is producing radio programs specifically catering to Maasai listeners.

“We have created facilities here — the radio station, the milk processing plant, the energy and water company, the internet, the library — all these facilities to bring modern life to people, so they don’t have to rush to towns,” says Kariongi.

One of the most culturally distinct tribes of Africa, the Maasai move around in bands, grazing their cattle in the rich grassland plains of East Africa they’ve been calling home for centuries.

For centuries, the lush national parks of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania have been called home by the Maasai, one of Africa’s most culturally district tribes.

Being traditional pastoralists with a nomadic bent, the Maasai have used the sprawling grasslands and forested slopes of the Serengeti National Park, Tsavo National Park and Mkomazi Game Reserve as a grazing ground for their cattle, which provide them with the milk, meat and blood they need to survive.

But lately, these rich lands have also lured many outsiders, including large-scale hunting companies, threatening the traditional Maasai way of living

Ancient Maasai culture in the modern world

Saving the Maasai lands

 

Empowering Maasai’s women

“The riches and the wealth that come out of it is actually flying away from Maasai land by the rich and powerful people,” says Martin Saning’o Kariongi, with a wry smile. “Maasai land is a very rich country, or rich region, but the owners, the inhabitants, are amongst the poorest in the world. It’s very sad but that’s the reality.”

Aware of the precarious position his tribe finds itself in, Kariongi, a well-respected Maasai community leader, has made it his life’s work to save his people and their way of life, whilst helping them adapt to a changing world.

As one of the few of his generation to make it through high school and further education, Kariongi started his work as a social development activist in the early 1990s, after spending time studying in Europe. Upon his return to Tanzania, he organized a legal campaign opposing a government-forced eviction of Maasai people from the country’s Simanjiro plains.

The High Court of Tanzania ruled in favor of the Maasai and soon Kariongi was working to improve the economic conditions of his people too.

“Around 2000 we started to think that despite the whole struggle for land rights and human rights of the Maasai people, poverty is growing and so many of our young people are rushing into cities,” recalls Kariongi. “That’s when we actually said we have to find a way to create opportunities for community economic empowerment.”

Generations come and go, and each generation puts its own firewood on the fire and the fire is the culture. Martin Saning’o Kariongi, Maasai leader

Kariongi’s first idea for self-sustainability was to turn the resources available to the Maasai — their animals and abundant milk — into an opportunity to create wealth for his people.

Working together with a SHGW, a Dutch NGO dedicated to promoting sustainable development in rural regions of the developing world, they launched a company and established five small milk processing units in five locations around the Maasai plains.

From milking the herds to processing the milk and producing the dairy products, the business is run entirely by women. The units can process up to 2,000 liters a day, making cheese, yoghurt, butter and ghee.

“We started the milk processing plant as one way of finding a ready market for the women,” says Kariongi, who’s based his social development plan on gender equality. “As an economic project that will create a market where women can sell milk and engage in a cash economy,” he adds.

“It has been going on now for the last five years and the life of the people, the life of the families have changed dramatically and women are making so much money.”

Today, the company has grown to include many arms, from an energy and water firm, to a media house producing broadcasts tailored for the Maasai, to a community ranch that helps improve access to quality breeds.

They are all growing organically, based on a strict business model.

“The social investor who is investing in us is investing as an investor, not as a donor,” explains Kariongi, who is a strong opponent of handouts. “This social business mentality is actually creating opportunities to awaken our entrepreneurial nature; that we use our own locally available resources to create wealth and to create sustainability within ourselves to come out of poverty, rather than depending on aid,” he says.

It’s all part of Kariongi’s determination to help his people adapt, intact, to the 21st century and avoid extinction.

“We have created facilities here — the radio station, the milk processing plant, the energy and water company, the internet, the library — all these facilities to bring modern life to people, so they don’t have to rush to towns,” says Kariongi. “When we lost our sons and daughters, rushed into towns, our women going to towns, then our lands will become empty and we might end up in an extinction.”

He adds: “Culture is not static; culture is dynamic, it grows; it’s like a fire — In order for the fire to keep on burning and giving light and heat, somebody has to be putting new fire wood. And the culture is like that — so generations come and go, and each generation puts its own firewood on the fire and the fire is the culture.”

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Maasai activist helping his people adapt to the 21st century
• Martin Saning’o Kariongi is working to protect his people’s land rights in northern Tanzania
• He is encouraging gender equality within his tribe

Will elephants still roam earth in 20 years?

June 15, 2012 — Updated 1055 GMT (1855 HKT)

According to Christo, at the beginning of the 1980s there were over a million elephants roaming Africa. Today that number has dramatically fallen to “no more than 400,000.”

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Elephant figures are dramatically decreasing due to poaching and black market ivory trade
• Christo says in 10 years time, if slaughter continues most of Africa’s elephants will be gone
• The world faces losing the “linchpin of ecology of an entire continent”

At the start of the 1980s there were more than a million elephants in Africa. During that decade, 600,000 were destroyed for ivory products. Today perhaps no more than 400,000 remain across the continent, according to Samuel Wasser of the University of Washington, who is widely recognized as an authority on the subject.

It is a tragedy beyond reckoning and humanity needs to pay attention to the plight of the elephants before it is too late.

In the past few years an epic surge in poaching has resumed the killing, thanks to the penchant for ivory in the Asian market — especially in China, where ivory is now selling for over $1500 a kilo.

Recently, Julius Kipng’etich, the head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, made a plea at the Library of Congress in Washington in an unprecedented appeal for the world to save Kenya’s and Africa’s elephants from the plague of poaching that has in recent years seen the decimation of tens of thousands of them.

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It is an appeal that follows from Kenya’s determination to torch about 10 tons of ivory last July near Tsavo National Park in a show of disdain for the destroyers of elephants and disgust at the resumption of poaching. If this level of killing continues, if elephants continue to be slaughtered for trinkets and statuettes, in 10 years’ time most of Africa’s elephants will be gone and an ineffable symbol of majesty and wonder — and the linchpin in the ecology of an entire continent — will have been consigned to oblivion.

A recent Senate hearing in Washington called “Ivory and Insecurity — The Global Implications of Poaching in Africa.” underscores the significance of this issue.

Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants, John Scanlon, the secretary general of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and Sen. John Kerry underscored not only the implications of elephant and wildlife poaching, but also the criminal syndicates who make billions on the illegal wildlife trade, as well as its impact on local populations in Africa, global security and even terrorism.

An urgent and concerted international will is needed to fund law enforcement to protect what remains of the elephant population of the world.

Read more: Kenya finds illegal ivory in boxes disguised as diplomatic baggage

Growth in human population is a major concern. Millennia-old elephant migration paths have been disrupted. Climate change is a menace to the elephant and all life.

But the wanton shooting of the innocents to satisfy vanity has reached a level of madness no one can ignore. This is perhaps made most clear in the recent destruction of 400 elephants in the Central African Republic by armed militia from Sudan.

At the start of the 1980’s there were over a million…Today perhaps no more than 400,000 remain across the continent. Cyril Christo

The killing of elephants is not just a wildlife issue. The world now understands that it is a global issue. Not long ago the United Kingdom’s Independent newspaper proclaimed that the loss of biodiversity was the greatest threat to humanity.

How, amidst NATO’s missile-defense problems in Europe, a possible nuclear Iran and the economic failings of modern nations, unemployment and inflation, can the future of the elephant be so urgent?

It is not on the radar of the media nor is it a priority for most people. The answer comes from our ability to affirm life in its moral, ethical and, I would urge humanity to consider, in its spiritual dimensions.

The elephant helped us walk out of Africa perhaps 60,000 years ago. We learned from tribal elders in east Africa that elephants, because they knew where to find water, helped humanity survive. It was alongside them that we populated the New World.

They are central to our evolution. Elie Wiesel of the Foundation for Humanity has even said that to save the elephant is “an urgent moral imperative.”

Read more: Beauty trumps beast in conservation efforts

In Nagoya Japan, in 2010, world environmental ministers agreed on a global strategy to combat the loss of biodiversity. Those countries in Asia that are the driving force behind the mutilation of the greatest land mammal on Earth must join the battle to save the elephant in Africa and the elephant in Asia and the planet’s other endangered fauna, such as the rhino and tiger and all the other species that are being so ruthlessly ransacked. In so doing they will save face.

In a society fixated on growth and money, TEEB, (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) has plainly demonstrated the irreplaceable value of biodiversity, which yearly provides trillions of dollars of value. The forests, oceans, whales and elephants of the world must now enter the balance sheet of ultimate consideration.

We have reached the point as a global civilization where we must fight for life and the meaning of life, and much of that stands in the body of the elephant and other fellow species, as well as the forests and the oceans of the world. This battle must not be lost.

Elephants are one of the pillars of existence. We must never tell nor have to tell the children — “This is where the wild things were.”