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Tanzania

Society

Plight Of Maasai Reveals Racism Of Africa's Conservation Policy

Thousands of Maasai people in Tanzania met brutal police repression when they demonstrated against being expelled from their land, laying bare both how ineffective and inhumane the conservationist movement can be.

LOLIONDO — "Loliondo is bleeding..."

An SMS woke me up on the morning of June 10. Scrolling through my phone were dozens of horrifying images of Maasai men and women with wounds on their legs, their backs and their heads. Lots of blood. And then, videos of Maasai running away from the Tanzanian police, who were shooting at them.

The pictures looked like war images. Like so many other people in the Global North, I was shocked. How could the idyllic images of zebras, giraffes and lions that the Serengeti ecosystem evokes in Western minds be transformed into this scene of brutal violence?

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Big Prizes For African Writers Don't Change Balance Of Power In Literary World

Novelists from Africa have been receiving some of the most prestigious literary prizes. But there are still questions around who are the world’s literary gatekeepers and what role writers from the Global South can play, writes Mauritian poet and photographer Umar Timol.

-Analysis-

PORT LOUIS, MAURITIUS — In the arena of prestigious literary awards, 2021 was the year for Africa: Senegal's Mohamed Mbougar Sarr won France’s Goncourt Prize, the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the South African Damon Galgut won the Booker Prize (for English-language novels). All are well-deserved recognitions for the continent, but is the success limited by the expectations of Western critics?

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr won France’s top literary prize for his novel La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (“The Most Secret Memory of Men”) and even he recognized how it expanded who could receive the Goncourt: “It is a strong signal [...], a way, also, to show that France is sometimes much larger and much nobler — in any case much more open — than what we can, what we want to reduce it to."

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Female Engineers, The Future Of Africa's Urban Development

As Tanzania seeks to decongest Africa's fastest growing city, more women are stepping up to become registered as professional engineers.

DAR ES SALAAM — From her desk, Zanura Miraji views a gateway to the center of Tanzania's most populous city. Beneath her, cars become snared in traffic jams, while motorcycles zigzag between them and commuters struggle to squeeze onto the city's packed buses.

But Miraji's eyes are fixed on her computer screen. An intern at a consulting engineering firm, the 27-year-old electrical engineer is focused on designing sockets and wiring for a new office building. Finding this job was not easy, she says.

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ISIS Leak, Queen's Denial, Restoration Disaster

ISIS DOCUMENTS LEAKED

A disillusioned ISIS fighter gave a Sky News reporter a memory stick stolen from the terrorist organization containing tens of thousands of documents, as well as 22,000 names, addresses, telephone numbers and family contacts of jihadist fighters. The disclosure of these documents could prove to be a boon to Western intelligence. The source is apparently a former fighter in the "moderate rebel" Free Syrian Army who later joined ISIS, before becoming disillusioned with the terror group's leadership. The documents also show how recruits are required to complete a 23-question form, asking for both personal details and past jihadist experience. According to The Guardian, the documents were first leaked to German intelligence.

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Tanzania
Alexandre Kauffmann

Tribal Life In Tanzania: Poisoned Arrows, Party Politics

A tiny African tribe, the Hadza continue hunter-gatherer lives on the edge of the sedentary world. They recognize no official leaders, but vote in national elections for the most practical reasons.

GUIDA MILANDA — It's election time in Tanzania. And though the nomadic Hadza tribe won't be changing their ancient ways, they will find the path that leads to the voting booth. These archer hunter-gatherers are camped in the north of Tanzania, not far from the Kenyan border. The women gather berries and dig up roots. Men, when they're not collecting honey, shoot poisoned arrows at giraffes and baboons.

The African country's smallest ethnic group, which counts no more than 1,000 people, recognizes no official leaders nor property rights. Nevertheless, this ancient people weighs in regularly on modern politics, participating in last October's Tanzanian presidential election, casting their ballots in a polling station set up in the rugged bushland.

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Tanzania
Emile Costard

A Trip To Rehab With Zanzibar's Heroin Addicts

DAR ES SALAAM — Sitting on a stone bench, in a shaded back alley of the historical center of Stone Town, the capital of the Zanzibar archipelago, Ali Nassor Ali is making the most of his last day in the open air. Tomorrow, this 40-year-old man with a gaunt face and eyes reddened by years of drug addiction goes to rehab.

Of the approximately 1 million inhabitants on this island, located about 25 kilometers off the coast of Dar es Salaam, the economic capital of Tanzania, an estimated 10,000 are addicted to heroin. Ali Nassor Ali is one of the them.

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food / travel
Carola Frentzen

Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania's Overlooked Tourism Jewel

DAR ES SALAAM — Tanzania has a lot to offer: safaris, mountains, tropical islands. But hardly anyone knows about Dar es Salaam. The country’s largest city offers not only culture but also beautiful beaches.

In the early evening, before the tropical night sinks into the Indian Ocean’s deep blackness, the beach at the Oyster Bay fills up. Tanzanians arrive with their plastic chairs to chat, enjoy the colors of the waves at sunset and taste the specialties of different peddlers.

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Tanzania
Laurence Caramel

In Tanzania, People And Lions Face Off Over Wildlife Corridors

LOIBOR SIRET - Laly Lichtenfeld has reason to be cautious. White outsiders have left some painful memories in this region of vast plains in the north of Tanzania. Thousands of people were expropriated to create the nearby national parks of Tarangire and Manyara, as well as the Serengeti, further north on the Kenyan border. In East Africa, there are few tribes who have paid as heavy a tribute to conservation as the Maasai. A third of Tanzania is a designated protected area, three times more than the world average.

Laly is a white American who has devoted most of her life to lions, the subject of her Yale doctoral thesis in social ecology. She founded the wildlife conservation organization African People and Wildlife, and lives at the top of a hill overlooking the savannah. It sounds romantic, like the stories of many of the Westerners who have figured in African history since colonial times. But the reality in Loibor Siret is tougher.

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