Country: Tanzania
Group: Barabaig
Date Finalized: 25 October 2023
Team: Emily Allan (Lead), Natasha Chandra, Gordon Kok, Esha Kubavat, Hannah Lux
Content Warnings: Forced Away, Violence
Approximate Time Period: 1968-Present
The Barabaig are Nilotic-speaking cattle pastoralists who reside in the north-central region of Tanzania around Mount Hanang. They sustain their livelihood through migratory herding. In 1968, 70,000 hectares of Barabaig land was taken over by the National Agriculture and Food Corporation (NAFCO), a government-owned enterprise growing commercial wheat on state farms funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (Fratkin & Wu, 2010). The Barabaig were told by NAFCO that they were “trespassing” upon return to their pastures, and they were forcibly evicted (Monbiot, 1994). The Barabaig challenged the legality of their land alienation in 1981, and the Tanzanian High Court declared that NAFCO did not follow proper legal procedures for acquiring land. This ruling was undermined by a technical flaw, wherein only 6 out of 788 Barabaig plaintiffs were compensated with 300 hectares of land, but
not the true lands that they had been evicted from (Fratkin & Wu, 2010). NAFCO aggression towards the Barabaig only increased as an appeal declared that not all Barabig plaintiffs were considered “natives” within the definition of the 1923 Land Ordinance, so the land did not originally belong to them. In 1994, Barabaig herders were again forcibly evicted from their lands and forbidden from crossing farm boundaries to reach grazing and water resources (Fratkin & Wu, 2010). The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights adopted a report in 2005 from the Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Populations/Communities that found that Barabaig displacement has continued to other parts of Tanzania and Malawi (Minority Rights Group, 2015). Further, NAFCO has abandoned the project that originally displaced the Barabaig, but their land remains in the hands of the Tanzanian government (Minority Rights Group, 2015). Barabaig pastoralists have formed the Pastoralist Indigenous Forum (PINGOs) to encourage community development and enforce civil pressure on the Tanzanian government to return their lands (Fratkin & Wu, 2010).
Data Quality: The data quality is 3/3 because there is significant coverage in scholarly articles and books from unbiased international sources that the Barabaig have been forced away from their lands.
Sources
- Fratkin, E., & Wu, T. S.-M. (2010, March 25). Maasai and Barabaig Herders Struggle for Land Rights in Kenya and Tanzania. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/maasai-and-barabaig-herders-struggle-land-rights-kenya-and
- Minority Rights Group. (2015, June 19). Barabaig. Minority Rights Group. https://minorityrights.org/minorities/barabaig/
- Monbiot, G. (1994, November 23). The Scattering of the Dead. George Monbiot. https://www.monbiot.com/1994/11/23/the-scattering-of-the-dead/