On Wednesday 2 and Thursday 3 June, our ‘Perspectives on Pastoralism’ film festival was part of the Global Landscape Forum conference on dry land restoration in Africa, just a few days before the start of the UN decade dedicated to ecosystem restoration. Our selection of films offered the audiences the opportunity to learn more about pastoralists and the impressive and biodiverse drylands they know to manage sustainably providing them in their livelihoods. Our film festival took place across 4 sessions of the conference.
Session 3: Speaking truth to power – pastoralists’ advocacy
This third session confronts political and economic injustices with the theme, ‘Speaking truth to power: pastoralists’ advocacy’.
Land grabbing in pastoralist areas is unmasked through two films in this session. The first film is ‘Olosho’, a participatory video (PV) made by 6 community members in Loliondo from 5 Maasai clans in northern Tanzania, who have been denied access to vital pasture and waterpoints for their herd and suffered mass eviction from their villages within the disputed land. The second film, ‘Lower Omo: local tribes under threat’, is an advocacy film that reveals the situation of agropastoralists in the Lower Omo Valley in Southern Ethiopia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Nick Lunch, from Insight Share in the UK shared his experience with participatory video and the making of Olosho. Thereafter, the themes presented were elaborated further by Dr. Christina (Echi) Gabbert from the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Göttingen University, Germany, who also answered questions from the audience. She has collaborated in southern Ethiopia with pastoralists over the last twenty years.
Rewatch the third session here.
Programme
