Salangat ole
Mako has in his own words become a – nightly - grass thief in his own land. He is
a Maasai pastoralist and a small-scale commercial cultivator of vegetables and
fruits in Ololosokwan village in Loliondo. As lobbied for by OBC, that
organizes hunting for Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai, 75% of his, and everyone’s, grazing
land has brutally and lawlessly been taken by the Tanzanian government for a “protected
area”, and then there have been threats of taking his farm. On 25th
January, Salangat was waiting in vain for a much shambolic and government co-opted
visit by the African Commission of Human and People’s Rights (I hope to very
soon post a blog post about this). A brief clip of what he would have wanted to
tell the Commission was shared online. The following day the Officer Commanding
Ngorongoro District came to Ololosokwan to say that the gathering waiting for
the international organization had not had a permit and that Salangat had been
talking thrash. Then Salangat received more threats and fled to Kenya.
These are his spoken and written words:
