Stone Age Man: The Hadzabe

Ever watched Gods Must be Crazy and loved the Bushmen who live in the Kalahari? Well I did! What I did not know is that we had our own Bushmen in Tanzania.

Near Lake Eyasi in the great rift valley of Tanzania, lives a tribe of people known as the Hadzabe. This nomadic hunter-gather society has remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years, relying on their hunting skill and collective knowledge of the area’s vegetation for survival. In modern times, the number of Hadzabe people has fallen drastically due to the intrusion of agriculture and safari-tourism, forcing them to the outer edge of more plentiful land. Nevertheless, they somehow manage to eke out a living.

In Tanzania, the Hadzabe have inhabited the acacia forests and scrubland around Lake Eyasi in Arusha and Meatu in Shinyanga for over 10,000 years. It is said that they are related to the Khoisan and pygmies.

They are the last remaining ancestors of the original hunter-gatherer tribes who first inhabited Tanzania, and their lifestyle has barely changed for millennia. They are skilled hunters, and use a number of methods to attract game within range of their arrows, including the use of the horns of an antelope, attaching them to their heads while mimicking the animal’s characteristic bobbing walk, which draws other curious animals closer. Another method they use is to hide under an animal skin, and wait for vultures to land, so they can easily be caught. The Hadzabe supplement their diet with roots and plants, and they have a particular liking for honey, which they trade with other tribes in exchange for arrowheads or tobacco.

The Hadzabe are not a Bantu race like the other peoples of Tanzania, but have more in common with the San Bushmen found in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, nearly 2000 miles away. They tend to be small in stature, physically slight, and have lighter coloured skin than most Africans. Their language too contains many of the same click sounds as that of the Bushmen, although the two are not mutually understandable. Although a number of researchers have concluded that their DNA is totally unrelated to that of the Bushmen, the surface similarities of both languages would imply an ancient root.

Hunting and honey gathering are predominantly male activities, while the women and children forage for roots or fruit. The Hadzabe people hunt anything and everything. In fact, they are the only people in Tanzania permitted to hunt giraffe, the national animal of Tanzania. Hunting such a large animal is rare however, and requires the aid of a special poison made from the bark found on the far side of Lake Eyasi. More typically, they hunt smaller quarry like dik diks (small dog-sized antelopes), birds, rabbits, and even reptiles. Although they tend to avoid eating reptiles and the greatest delicacy is baboon. The men also wear baboon fur, while the women usually wear impala skins.

The huts are made of grass, woven by the women, and can be constructed in a matter of hours. It is thought that there are somewhere between 500 and 2500 Hadzabe, and their lifestyle is increasingly threatened as their traditional lands have been taken by commercial plantations and farms. This has had the effect of creating barriers along the seasonal migration routes of the animals, upon which the Hadzabe depend for hunting.

In the 1970s, the then socialist government of Tanzania attempted to resettle them in a newly constructed settlement with schools, a clinic and brick houses, but within ten years, the Hadzabe had abandoned the settlement, going back to their traditional way of life in the bush. The pressures on them are immense, however, as the area of land they inhabit becomes increasingly constrained, and despite their resistance to formal education, a monetary economy and religious indoctrination by missionaries, they have increasingly come into contact with foreign tourists, which has brought problems of its own.

There used to be more than 10,000 of them at one time but now the Hadzabe are the last hunter-gatherers on the African continent, where 'homo habilis' (the forerunner of modern man) first emerged more than two million years ago.

It is only in the past 12,000 years that man has managed to domesticate animals and grow crops. Before that, we all lived like the Hadza.

The last few years has seen the Hadzabe in a precarious position, mainly due to the tourist industry, which has had such a devastating effect on their culture in recent years, the best thing that can happen to the Hadzabe is that they are left in peace and prevent further damage to their culture and way of life.

I can only wish that there were some 'hope' for tribes like the Hadzabe to survive in modern day Tanzania.

Mungu Ibariki Tanzania, watu na watoto wake, always.