Whose heritage is it? when the lodge goes up, we will lose this path

"WHEN THE LODGE goes up, we will lose this path,” Parimitoro ole Kasiaro was saying. “The cattle of my village pass here and go into the crater. It is the only place we can get salt.” He was standing in a quiet meadow of evergreens and thorny acacia, at a place called Kimba on the western rim of Ngorongoro Crater, in northwestern Tanzania. An international company owned by the Aga Khan had recently received permission to build a five-star hotel on the spot, and, Kasiaro went on, “We arc afraid they are going to use the water for hotel pur¬poses.” The water trickles on the surface from a few small springs, and Kasiaro and other Maasai who live in this area need it for their cattle. The hotel, of course, will want it for its guests. In a competition with the tourists, Kasiaro had good reason to fear that the villagers would lose. The Maasai were evicted from the crater floor—where Kasiaro was born—in 1974, for the benefit of tourism, and many years before that, the Maasai, Kasiaro’s father and grandfather among them, had been dispossessed (rom their land inside Serengeti National Park. Kasiaro was opposed to the Aga Khan’s hotel, but not only for selfish reasons. He was also worried about the impact 011 the environment and the wildlife, a foreboding shared by conservationists' in Tanzania and abroad, their fears compounded because another five-star hotel was also being built on the crater rim. And at the same time that the government had approved the new hotels for. the crater rim, in 1990, it approved two large hotels for Serengeti, the first to he built inside the park in twenty years.