The original note, as written at the time
An advanced alien race visits earth but will only talk to the Masai people and other such communities that live in harmony with nature.
Ongoing development
The ship did not land. That was the first insult. It came down slowly and stayed above the basin for six days and did not answer Geneva, did not answer New York, did not answer the four states that fired at it and then spent a year explaining that they had not.
It answered a herder.
We know this because the herder told us, and because the recording is on the ministry’s own tape, and because the ship shifted its position by nine hundred metres when he moved his cattle, three days later, to avoid a watering point that was drying.
They would speak to communities that live in harmony with nature. That is the wording that went out, and it took the world four months to accept that it was not a metaphor and not a negotiating position. It was a criterion, and it excluded almost everyone.
I was part of the delegation that flew to Arusha to interview the herders about what had been said. We arrived with a list of questions designed to extract strategic information and we were offered tea and then silence, and after two days an old man told us that we were asking the wrong thing. The wrong thing was what the visitors wanted. The right thing was what they had asked us, and nobody had written it down.
So we went back and asked what they had asked, and the answer took a further week to obtain because it had been treated by everyone as small talk. They had asked the herders how long the grass took to come back after the cattle passed. That was all. They had asked that, and then waited for an answer, and when the answer came they asked a better version of the same question.
Eleven years and the ministry still has no policy. The pattern is clear to anyone who has sat in the dust: the visitors are not looking for allies or resources or a legal framework. They are auditing. They are working out whether there is a way of being on a planet that does not end the planet, and they have concluded that it is not being taught in the places where we keep the knowledge.