Behind the Cover:

In this month’s cover story, “The Great Serengeti Land Grab” (p. 20), Stephanie Mccrummen investigates how the Maasai people were evicted from their ancestral lands. To illustrate her story, we asked the Nairobi-based photographer Nichole Sobecki to travel to Arusha, Tanzania, and photograph Maasai communities.

Our cover image depicts a Maasai moran grazing his cattle and sheep, an embere spear and fimbo staff resting on his shoulder. As Mccrummen writes, the confiscation of land, ostensibly in the name of conservation, has left vanishingly few Maasai able to raise cattle, as had been their traditional way of life. Bifen Xu, Senior Photo Editor