31/10/2025

FRIDAY | OCT 31, 2025

23

LYFE

A Maasai woman milks her community’s cows at dawn at one of the settlement areas for community residents at the conservancy.

A tourist vehicle drives past a road sign advertising the conservancy. – ALL PICS FROM AFP

Female impala grazing among dry scrub at the conservancy.

Co-existing with nature o Kenya conservation areas evolve to keep Maasai, wildlife together

A T dawn in a village in Kenya’s Maasai Mara wilderness, zebras rouse themselves and head away from the huts where they like to sleep as protection from lions. Bernard Kirokor, 21, recounts watching an elephant give birth across from his village a few days earlier, showing a video of the mother protecting the newborn, its trunk poking up like a periscope to sniff for danger. “The wildlife are our neighbours and we love them,” he said, as the villagers milked the herd of cattle gathered around their huts. The village lies in the Nashulai conservancy, which prides itself on how the local Maasai community and their cattle continue to live alongside the lions, elephants and giraffes for which the region is world-famous. Community conservancies emerged in the 2000s to protect wildlife corridors, with locals pooling their individual plots and pulling down fences so animals could roam freely. To make it pay, locals often leased their land to tourist companies and moved away. Nashulai, which means “co-existence” in the local Maa language, was founded in 2016 with a determination to keep its 6,000 people in the conservancy. It prides itself on being the first that was formed, owned and managed by local Maasai without help from an outside tourism company. “We don’t want to create conservation refugees. The Maasai have lived with the wildlife for the longest time possible. Why do we have to move them because of conservation?” Nashulai’s conservation manager Evelyn Aiko said. Nashulai earns money through a college in the conservancy, training locals to become rangers and tour guides, and study programmes

including a declining human population and climate change. The film tells the story of a desperate university student applying for a shady part-time job that takes him deep into the woods where he encounters a ravenous, man-eating bear. The producers said their gruesome portrayals of bear attacks were not gratuitous violence but a form of artistic expression “inherent to a monster thriller”. Nonetheless, “we will be considerate toward our real-life situation and make sure to create a screening environment where viewers can feel safe and fully immersed”, they said in a statement. – AFP connectedness to the land... which contains all our stories for living, this land where the bones of our ancestors are buried,” said founder Nelson Ole Reiyia. Nashulai is run by a council of elders who decide on grazing and conservation areas. “It revives their old tradition of stewardship and their connectedness to the land and the wildlife. It has really given them a lot of pride,” said Ole Reiyia. Lacking commercial tourism investors, Nashulai relies on donors for more than half its funding and faces many pressures. One is climate change, as unpredictable rains make it hard to plan cattle-grazing and keep the area habitable for wildlife. The team is responding with regenerative programmes such as tree-planting. The other threat is wealthy tourism operators next door. Last year, a fifth of Nashulai’s landowners were enticed into leasing their plots to tourist camps and moving away. ‘Not one-way’ But Maasai landowners across the region now play a very active role in managing conservancies across the region, sitting on joint boards with the tourism companies. “It’s not a one-way system where someone dictates the payments. These negotiations go on for years and then they get renegotiated. If people aren’t happy they’ll tell you about it,” said an expert who has helped negotiate the deals, but requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. Many Maasai landowners have signed new leases in the last couple of years as the original deals expired, he said, so “clearly many people feel they have benefitted”. – AFP

Giraffe at the Nashulai Maasai Conservancy, which is located in the Masai Mara – Serengeti ecosystem in Narok County.

Common zebra at the conservancy.

with universities. Its model earned international recognition, including the United Nations Development Programme’s Equator Prize in 2020 and a Collective Action Award from the Rights and Resources Initiative this year. Connectedness The system of conservancies has changed radically over the past decade, with almost all now embracing the idea that people should stay living in them, albeit with limits on development. “A lot has changed in how they are governed,” said Eric Ole Reson, chief programmes officer at the Maasai Mara Wildlife has

This was important in Nashulai from the start. “There was a present and clear danger of losing the cultural

Conservancies Association. “As we extended into more areas, with more settlements, we could not keep moving people,” he said.

Travel agency unveils plan for 60-minute Tokyo-US space travel

Japanese film about man-eating bear delayed after deadly attacks

A recentstring of deadly bear attacks has prompted Japanese filmmakers to postpone the release of a gory horror movie with the same theme. Bears have killed at least nine people in Japan so far this year, an unwanted record that the government has described as a “serious problem”. The film, titled Brown Bear! and featuring depictions of an animal “attacking and eating” humans, was initially set to hit cinemas next month. Producers announced that the release would be delayed, adding that they “take seriously the fact that there have been a series of real-life attacks” in the country. Bears have been increasingly encroaching into towns due to factors

A JAPANESE travel agency recently announced that it will launch a point-to-point transport service in the 2030s, which could connect Tokyo and US cities such as New York in just 60 minutes via outer space. According to Kyodo news, Nippon Travel Agency Co plans to offer the service in partnership with a reusable rocket development startup, with a round trip expected to cost around 100 million yen (RM2.7 million) per customer. The transport vehicle would

space-food tastings and tours of ground facilities related to space in fiscal 2026, followed by a service in the 2040s that will offer stays in orbit. Under the partnership, Nippon Travel will design and market related products. Kojiro Hatada, president of the Tokyo-based startup Innovative Space Carrier Inc, said his company aims to reduce travel costs by increasing the number of flights each vehicle can make in its lifespan. – Bernama-Kyodo

be launched from an offshore site and could connect any two points on Earth within an hour, according to the companies. They hope to link Tokyo and the US initially. “We hope this business will be a new starting point to connect space travel and tourism,” Nippon Travel president Keigo Yoshida said at a news conference in Tokyo. Advance applications will be accepted starting in fiscal 2026. The project will proceed in stages, beginning with