The Tanzanian soldiers must have moved in very late at night, said Nosisim, a Masai woman, but they were there and primed when she woke. Soon after that, the bullets started to fly.
For two decades in a part of northern Tanzania rich with wildlife, a disagreement has simmered over rights to territory claimed by the Masai but which the government has earmarked for lucrative trophy hunting by Arab princes.
Those tensions exploded into violence in recent days when the security forces arrived in Loliondo under cover of darkness, without prior warning, and began evicting the Masai herders from their ancestral pastures.
Soldiers, game wardens and police officers installed posts to demarcate 540 square miles of indigenous lands near the world famous Serengeti National Park