“It’s hard to find the right life partner in my soum (district). Most of the girls went to school, then to university in the city. Not many of them are good at herding.” Like most young women who grew up in the city, I usually think of herders as quiet men with closed faces that…

In this article Robin Palmer reviews Land to the Tiller: an interview with Zegeye Asfaw by Ann Oosthuizen. This is an interview with Zegeye Asfaw from 2012, telling the story of his life, of the struggle for land reform in Ethiopia, and of the personal cost of that struggle for himself and others.   This…

Anna Letaiko is a middle-aged woman with a soft voice that carries wisdom and strength. Her husband is an older man, and together they live in small mud house in Mundarara – a remote village in Longido district in Tanzania, accessible only by a rough dirt road. It is a Maasai community similar to the…

As a Swahili speaker from Tanzania, I have not often had the opportunity to meet or work with people from remote Maasai communities. However, I recently visited the villages of Naisinyai and Mundarara in the north of the country as part of a global research project on women’s land rights in pastoral communities affected by…

In 1964, I went with my parents and my brother to live in Lesotho. Since then, there have only been two years when I did not set foot there at all. In quite a few years, I was living and working there. Across all the others (except 1972 and 1975), I have made many short…

When I was young, I was taught through my Maasai heritage that a woman is the property of her husband and is valued on the basis of how many children she can produce – and not by her education or economic success. I was also taught that the position of Maasai women is lower than…

I have now been running the Land Rights in Africa website for 20 years. It existed in Oxfam space from 2000-2012 and has been in Mokoro space since 2012. So a HUGE THANK YOU to Mokoro for agreeing to take on the site in 2012 when Oxfam suddenly pulled the plug – and for maintaining…

I write this blog as our project team embarks on a fifth year of work on women’s land tenure security (WOLTS) with pastoral communities in mining-affected areas of Mongolia and Tanzania. Just before Christmas 2019, we were in Mundarara village in northern Tanzania. Exceptionally heavy rains made getting around much more challenging than usual. Locals…

Every week I receive an email from the pressure group GRAIN offering updates on the global land grab and the varied responses to it. From time to time I forward some of these to Zoe Millington to be posted on Mokoro’s Land Rights in Africa website. I found it really striking that in the week…

Ruby mining is driving rapid expansion of the Tanzanian village of Mundarara. While earnings from mining are providing new opportunities for the majority Maasai population, two members of the community spoke to Jim Grabham about the socio-cultural impacts of the mining boom and the threats facing the pastoralist way of life. Rosa Lopelel was returning…