East Africa - Pastoralists.
Author: Dr. Charles Lane
Pastoralists in east Africa are being dispossessed of their lands. Private interests using fair means and foul often acquire land for commercial purposes. Governments appropriate land in the 'public interest' that tends to favor the few. It is always the best pasture land that is taken. This undermines the pastoral economy and can cause wider ecological decline. Rarely compensated or adequately relocated, pastoralists are left to swell the populations of peri-urban slums where they are forced to eke out a living in the alternative economy and suffer poverty.
Indigenous pastorlalists are now coming together to resist this decline. Through their organisations they are attempting to assert their rights. They have lodged cases in the courts and mounted public campaigns in defense of their lands. This has sometimes brought them into conflict with governments and other competing interests.
They are mostly engaged in individual cases to assert their customary rights to land that are theoretically protected in law. In this they are only effective locally, and more often than not cases are lost because the law can be interpreted to deny them recognition of their claims, or fail because of procedural technicalities.
They too often miss the possible benefits of adopting more strategic approaches which influence national legal frameworks that otherwise confine their challenge and limit remedies.
Success Is proving hard to achieve. However, unless they stop being dispossessed of their lands they will have to endure the further break-up of their communities, the destruction of their production systems, the inevitable eradication of their cultures and the environments on which the depend.
