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MAASAI MARA, Kenya: At 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 neighbors 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 continuing 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?” Evelyn Aiko, Nashulai’s conservation manager, said.
Nashulai earns money through a college in the conservancy, training locals to become rangers and tour guides, and study programs with universities.
Its model has 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 programs officer at the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association.
“As we extended into more areas, with more settlements, we could not keep moving people,” he said.
This was important in Nashulai from the start.
“There was a present and clear danger of losing the cultural 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,” said Ole Reiyia. “It has really given them a lot of pride.”
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 programs like 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,” said an expert who has helped negotiate the deals, but requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.
“These negotiations go on for years and then they get renegotiated,” he said. “If people aren’t happy they’ll tell you about it.”
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.”

PARIS: The robbery at the Louvre has done what no marketing campaign ever could: It has catapulted France’s dusty Crown Jewels – long admired at home, little known abroad – to global fame.
One week on, and the country is still wounded by the breach to its national heritage.
Yet the crime is also a paradox. Some say it will make celebrities of the very jewels it sought to erase – much as the Mona Lisa’s turn-of-the-20th-century theft transformed the then little-known Renaissance portrait into the world’s most famous artwork.
In 1911, a museum handyman lifted the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece off its hook. The loss went unnoticed for more than a day; newspapers turned it into a global mystery, and crowds came to stare at the empty space. When the painting resurfaced two years later, its fame eclipsed everything else in the museum, and that remains so today.
That’s the uneasy question shadowing Sunday’s robbery: whether a crime that cut deep will glorify what’s left behind.
“Because of the drama, the scandal, the heist, the Apollo Gallery itself and the jewels that remain will likely receive a new spotlight and become celebrities, just like the Mona Lisa after 1911,” said Anya Firestone, a Paris art historian and Culture Ministry licensed heritage expert. She toured the gallery the day before the robbery and did not think it looked sufficiently guarded.
Bringing celebrity through theft
The heist has electrified global media. Nightly newscasts from the US to Europe and across Latin America and Asia have beamed the Louvre, its Apollo Gallery and the missing jewels to hundreds of millions – a surge of attention some say rivals, or even surpasses, the frenzy after Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s 2018 “Apeshit” video filmed inside the museum. The Louvre is once again a global set.
For generations, the British monarchy’s regalia has captured the popular imagination through centuries of coronations and drawing millions every year to their display in the Tower of London. Meanwhile, France’s jewels lived in the shadow. This week’s heist tilts the balance.
One early emblem of that celebrity effect could be the survivor piece itself – Empress Eugénie’s emerald-set crown, dropped in the getaway and studded with more than 1,300 diamonds – which may now become the gallery’s most talked-about relic.
“I’d never even heard of Eugénie’s crown until this,” said Mateo Ruiz, a 27-year-old visitor from Seville. “Now it’s the first thing I want to see when the gallery reopens.”
Among the treasures that escaped the thieves’ grasp are storied gems still gleaming under glass – the Regent Diamond, the Sancy and the Hortensia. Authorities say one other stolen bejeweled piece, besides Empress Eugenie’s damaged crown, has since been quietly recovered, though they have declined to identify it.
The heist has not dented the Louvre’s pull. The palace-museum reopened to maximum crowds Wednesday, even as the jewels remain missing, and the robbers at large. Long before the robbery, the museum was straining under mass tourism – roughly 33,000 visitors a day – and staff warn it cannot easily absorb another surge, especially with the Apollo Gallery sealed and security resources stretched.
Jewels represent French history itself
For France, the loss is more than precious stones and metal totaling over $100 million; it is pages torn from the national record. The Apollo Gallery reads as a timeline in gold and light, carrying the country from Bourbon ceremony to Napoleon’s self-fashioned empire and into modern France.
Firestone puts it this way: The jewels are “the Louvre’s final word in the language of monarchy – a glittering echo of kings and queens as France crossed into a new era.” They are not ornaments, she argues, but chapters of French history, marking the end of the royal order and the beginning of the country France is today.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez called the theft an “immeasurable” heritage loss, and the museum says the pieces carry “inestimable” historic weight – a reminder that what vanished is not just monetary.
Many also see a stunning security lapse.
“It’s staggering that a handful of people couldn’t be stopped in broad daylight,” said Nadia Benyamina, 52, a Paris shopkeeper who visits the gallery monthly. “There were failures – avoidable ones. That’s the wound.”
Investigators say the thieves rode a basket lift up the building’s Seine-facing façade, forced open a window, smashed two display cases and fled on motorbikes – all in minutes. Alarms sounded, drawing security to the gallery and forcing the intruders to bolt, officials say. The haul spanned royal and imperial suites in sapphire, emerald and diamond – including pieces tied to Marie-Amélie, Hortense, Marie-Louise and Empress Eugénie.
In Senate testimony, Louvre director Laurence des Cars acknowledged “a terrible failure,” citing gaps in exterior camera coverage and proposing vehicle barriers and a police post inside the museum. She offered to resign; the culture minister refused. The heist followed months of warnings about chronic understaffing and crowd pressure points.
Drawing crowds to see what isn’t there
Outside the blocked doors, visitors now come to see what cannot be seen.
“I came to see where it happened,” said Tobias Klein, 24, an architecture student. “That barricade is chilling. People are looking with shock and curiosity.”
Others feel a flicker of hope. “They’re ghosts now – but there’s still hope they’ll be found,” said Rose Nguyen, 33, an artist from Reims. “It’s the same strange magnetism the Mona Lisa had after 1911. The story becomes part of the object.”
Curators warn that recutting or melting the jewels would be a second violence. In museums, authenticity lives in the original: the mount, the design, the work of the goldsmith’s hand – and the unbroken story of who made, wore, treasured, exhibited and, yes, stole the object.
Whether loss now brings legend is the Louvre’s uneasy future.
“In the strange economy of fame, even bad news becomes attention – and attention makes icons,” Firestone said.