When I was living in Athens I talked to Constantine, a Greek friend, about the immigration problem. He observed that borders can be real or imaginary – or both.

 I asked him to explain this point. Smiling and looking at the bright blue Athens sky, he continued: “The suffering of people who are unable to cross certain borders because they are ‘not authorized’ is real. And, of course, those borders are politically real but they are only imaginary lines that someone, once, decided to mark on a map on the basis of sometimes strange and incomprehensible criteria, or because they were somehow convenient for them and only for them, certainly not for those who lived there, in those lands.”

And now there are people who risk their lives crossing imaginary lines. Think about it. Suffering and death for something that doesn’t exist.” I thought it was a somewhat naïve reflection but ultimately, in some respects, true.

I wonder what Constantine would say if he knew that there is a real no man’s land, not that far from Athens. In fact, there are two no-man’s lands.

It’s a land where borders are real but at the same time unreal. That is to say they mean nothing, since no one claims the land that these same borders define. On the contrary, the other territory, very close to this border is strongly contested by the two neighboring countries, Sudan and Egypt.

If you look at a map of Egypt and move south, you come across a precise horizontal straight line marking the border with Sudan. At one point something strange appears.

Below this line other boundaries are marked, including those of a small patch of land called the “Bir Tawil triangle” (meaning “long well” or “deep well” in Arabic). Bir Tawil is called a triangle but in reality it is a quadrilateral with a trapezoidal shape running along the twenty-second parallel of latitude north. This patch of land, with daytime temperatures reaching up to 45°C, is the only part of the planet – with the exception of one of the western regions of Antarctica called Marie Byrd Land – that does not belong to anyone since it has never been claimed by any state.

Hence it is terra nullius. The British drew this straight line to coincide with the parallel in 1899, when they controlled the region. They established that to the north it would formally belong to Egypt – which at that time was under British rule – while to the south it would have an Egyptian representative in Sudan and hence also be controlled by Britain.

The inland region of the territory, with an area of 2,060 km, is mostly desert hills, rock and sand, occasionally traversed by a wadi (Arabic for a seasonal watercourse). However it is a completely uninhabited patch of land. Both Sudan and Egypt have no interest in claiming this barren, empty region.

By contrast there is another region just east of Bir Tawil that is disputed between Egypt and Sudan. It is called the “Hala’ib triangle.” The border area of this territory, which includes the areas of Halayeb, Shalateen and Abu Ramad, is controlled by Egypt. Since the 1950s, Sudan has claimed sovereignty over the Halaib Triangle overlooking the Red Sea coast on the Egyptian-Sudanese border and covering an area of approximately 20,580 square kilometers. Ever since Sudan gained independence from Anglo-Egyptian rule in 1956, the region was open to trade and the movement of people from the two countries without any restrictions. This lasted until 1995 when the Egyptian army took over it.

Cairo claims the Halaib triangle is Egyptian and in 2016 it refused to attend negotiations or resort to international arbitration to determine the right to sovereignty over the region, which Sudan claims, reiterating its complaint every year before the UN Security Council.

This patch of land is definitely more attractive strategically than the nearby Bir Tawil because of its outlet to the sea and 260 km of coastline, but also because in recent years minerals and oil fields have been found here. Naturally this legally uncertain situation makes it difficult for large oil companies to invest in the area, at least until the dispute is resolved. Since 2006, the area has been managed by a sort of Egyptian Sudanese co-administration.

But now cracks are appearing in the surface tranquillity. As reported by the Arab website Al-Monitor, President of the Transitional Military Council of Sudan Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan delivered an emphatic speech to army officers and soldiers on August 24, 2020 in the Wadi Seidna military zone of Khartoum marking the 66th anniversary of the army’s foundation. He once again raised the issue of the disputed border region with Egypt. Burhan said the army will not give up an inch of Sudanese territory.

“We will not abandon or forget our right until the flag of Sudan is raised in Halayeb, Shalateen and any controversial area along Sudan’s borders,” al Burhan said. While the fate of this strip of land is still being disputed, nomadic populations and small permanent groups of about a hundred inhabitants occupy the area, living by herding and small-scale trade. The most important of these is the El Shalatin camel market, which in reality is located in Egypt but in its far south on the border with Sudan, just north of the disputed territory, about 300 km from Aswan.

As we travel along this strip of no man’s land, basically neither truly Egyptian nor truly Sudanese, we find ourselves in an immense white and dusty street, with sporadic poor buildings and tents made of poles covered with fabric to protect them from the sun.

Exchanging glances with the men, women and children who live, as best they can, in this place enclosed by disputed borders, I feel that Constantine’s statement becomes more meaningful.

Not because they risk their lives crossing the borders of Halaib, but because you are moved to wonder what difference it would make to them if they were Egyptian or Sudanese. You also wonder what these children of clear Sudanese origin scrambling among the white rocks will do one day when they are told by an armed Egyptian soldier that they cannot live where they have always lived. These are also naïve questions, I daresay.

But impossible not to ask yourself when you look at the history of a strip of land that inevitably mirrors what is happening worldwide in larger countries and regions and therefore with more complex problems, including religious ones that often result in bloodshed or even war.

Perhaps the name of no African tribal people is better known in the West than that of the Maasai. But knowledge rarely goes beyond the name. There is generally little understanding of their customs and traditions, where they currently live or what distinguishes them from other peoples.

Public opinion is only familiar with the empty name, reduced to pure folklore as a symbol of what is imagined to be the “most authentic” Africa, together with lions, zebras, coloured masks and little else.

The Maasai are an extraordinarily ancient Nilotic people. To this day they live in the highlands on the border between Kenya and Tanzania, where they apparently arrived from the Nile valley some 500 years ago. A people of transhumant livestock breeders, today they are often sedentary. Cattle are at the centre of their way of life, and they once sufficed to maintain it, both as food and as a medium of exchange. (Milk and meat are the Maasai’s favourite foods, as shown by their drink, saroi, made of milk and blood mixed.)

In ancient times the Maasai land was divided into a series of areas of collective ownership, so that they all had access to the main sources of livelihood, starting from water. Some Maasai clans, as we mentioned, have now become sedentary (especially in Kenya; the Maasai are divided into twelve major clans). They now combine raising cattle with farming.

Maasai society is organized into male age-groups. It should be emphasised that every change of age, from initiate to warrior (the morani, whom Walter Bonatti described in a report in the 1960s), from maturity to old age (as well as the moments of birth and death), is celebrated with collective religious rituals. The Maasai do not have leaders, but each group refers to an oloibon (or laibon), a spiritual guide. They are monotheists, trusting in the only god Enkai, as well as in guardian spirits who are rather like Christian guardian angels.

Though it is not evident at first glance, the Maasai have several enemies. Among the most threatening are hunters from the Loliondo region, in the far north of Tanzania, a strategic point for intercepting the great migrations of animals. Maasai villages have been gradually expropriated and razed to the ground by the local authorities, the men and women evicted by force to encourage the establishment of large hunting companies, such as the Otterlo Business Corporation (owned by the royal house of the United Arab Emirates), or luxurious safari agencies, such as Thomson Safaris. In almost all cases, these immense companies act with the more or less overt complicity of the local government, in both rich countries and poor, even though they are more conspicuous in the latter.

In 2006 Thomson Safaris absorbed the parastatal Tanzania Conservation Limited, which in the 1980s acquired some 10,000 acres in today’s Ngorongoro district. (The purchase was contested by the Maasai.) This is the location of the famous nature reserve and here the Maasai should, according to Tanzanian law, be able to live and move freely.

This has not always happened – quite the contrary. Both Otterlo and Thomson have been involved in numerous legal disputes over the years, all concerning the lawfulness of their possession of the Maasai territories, as well as the methods by which these spaces are governed. Otterlo, for instance, has been accused of destroying hundreds of villages and repeatedly inflicting violence on their inhabitants. The European Parliament protested and the Tanzanian government intervened, recently announcing the eviction of Otterlo and in early 2019 arresting its CEO Isaack Lesion Molle.

Many of the ancient tribal territories have now been replaced by farms and cattle breeding. The Maasai are increasingly confined to the most arid and sterile areas of the country, with great suffering for their livestock. The livelihood of the population has become increasingly precarious over the years.

In 2010, some Maasai communities, supported by the organisation EarthRights International, sued Thomson Safaris, accusing it of fraudulently occupying several thousand acres of their land, as well as committing various abuses against the indigenous peoples, who have been barred from access to water with the complicity of the local police.

But perhaps the most painful factor is the Maasai people’s progressive loss of identity. Many have ended up wearing what was once their authentic face as a sort of mask. Some have found work on the coast, in the tourist areas, on the nearby island of Zanzibar. Here they play the Maasai character, entertaining guests in the resorts, performing their dances, allowing themselves to be photographed in traditional costumes. Some have rented (at very high prices for them) small shops on the beach, where they sell small handcrafted items, souvenirs, fabrics, bracelets and necklaces to foreign tourists. Still others take seasonal jobs as caretakers, delivery workers and waiters in the various hotels.

The wonderful landscape of the Serengeti is a popular destination for tourists from around the world. It is the ancestral home of the Maasai people. The home from which efforts are being made to evict them, despite the many proclamations of a commitment to the contrary by the government in Dodoma. Tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors in the Tanzanian economy, but the system of safaris, big game hunting (some Hemingway novels and stories come to mind), and amusement parks are destroying the life and culture of one of the oldest and most fascinating tribal peoples in Africa.

In short, this is nothing more than the usual, daily struggle between the old and the new world. The old is being crushed, humiliated, forced into a grotesque caricature of itself, forced to occupy arid and sterile lands and denied the means of sustenance. The second hounds it tenaciously following the perfect holy laws of the market.

What is striking about this people is their sad and penetrating gaze. But not defeated. Those eyes are proud, proud to belong to the Maasai people.