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In
a world that is changing as rapidly as ours, it is painful to think of the
massive numbers of people left impoverished by such changes. How much
harder then to imagine those people across the globe who not only do not have
access to the financial and technological prizes of modern living, but who do
not actually want them, preferring instead to maintain their traditional
practices of subsistence and land use, medicine, myth and ritual.
Yet,
there are hundreds and thousands of people in the world, who, against the odds,
are making such choices. Once dubbed ‘tribal’, but now termed
‘indigenous’ peoples, groups across the planet are struggling to maintain
ancient ways of life in the face of the relentless encroachment of modern ways
of living.
Sticking
to Tradition
One
such group are the Hadzabe of Tanzania. Like the Bushmen of southern Africa, the
Hadzabe are hunter-gatherers. Their ancestral homelands originally covered large
parts of northern Tanzania and included the world famous Ngorongoro Crater and
the Serengeti Plain. Now, the Hadzabe exploit a far smaller territory to the
south of Ngorongoro, in the escarpments of the Rift Valley and the valleys
around Lake Eyasi. The area is home to a wide array of wildlife, and to a range
of flora that includes the magnificent baobab trees of Africa – home in turn
to the bees from which the Hadzabe collect wild honey. But despite this
environmental diversity with its rich resources, the Hadzabe are facing severe
pressures on their traditional way of life.
The
Hadzabe survive using the most ancient subsistence practice and technology known
to human beings. They hunt animals with bows and arrows and gather wild fruit
and plants. The Hadzabe hunt all manner of game from small animals such as dik
dik, bush pig and antelope, to large creatures such as wildebeest and giraffe,
using arrows with poisoned tips. The Hadzabe women and children gather fruits,
honey and tuber roots that make up a large and important part of their diet,
while hunting is traditionally the preserve of men, who often hunt alone. But
women will also catch animals, and a collective foray into the bush is necessary
to bring the meat home when a particularly large animal has been brought down.
Hunted meat usually goes to feed the hunter or his immediate family, but the
ethic of sharing is so deeply entrenched in Hadzabe society that anything that
can be shared within the wider group will be. Some meat is also hunted
especially for their sacred ceremonies and consumed according to strict ritual
rules.
This
hunting and gathering lifestyle is governed almost completely by the seasons. In
the wet season, the dry lakes and valley floors become flooded, and the area
teems with game as the animals seek the water and vegetation of the plains. At
these times, food is relatively plentiful. In the far longer dry season,
however, both game and wild plant resources are harder to come by, leaving the
Hadzabe to struggle with hunger – a problem in turn exacerbated by other
environmental issues they have to face.
Threats
to Hadzabe Existence
These
include the encroachment of both livestock and agriculture into their
traditional hunting grounds. As the local area becomes increasingly taken over
by neighbouring pastoralist tribes such as the Barabaig and the Maasai – who
themselves have problems in securing land for their herds - water supplies
traditionally used by the Hadzabe become contaminated by livestock, while at the
same time wild game is driven away by the overweening presence of cattle.
Moreover, the vital land corridor that links the Eyasi region to Ngorongoro and
the Serengeti is being eaten into by small-scale agriculture, which acts to cut
off Hadzabe territories from the annual migration routes of the massive herds of
wild animals such as wildebeest and water buffalo that range across the
Serengeti.
These
problems in turn are made worse by tourism. Because the Ngorongoro Crater and
the Serengeti are now wildlife parks – the jewels in the crown of Tanzania’s
burgeoning tourist industry and a source of much needed foreign cash for the
country’s fragile economy – the Hadzabe are effectively excluded from
hunting in these areas. As a result, many Hadzabe face the problem of devising
new and innovative ways to survive as their ancient hunting and gathering
territories become ever more denuded.
Included
among such strategies are attempts at building small-scale economies. The
Tanzanian government attempted – and failed - to resettle the Hadzabe on
permanent small-scale agricultural settlements in the 1960s and 70s. For, as
long as the government supplied free food, the Hadzabe stayed, but as soon as
the food supply dried up, the Hadzabe moved back into the bush. However, given
the harsh environmental conditions they now find themselves in, some experiments
have been made growing maize to supplement their hunting and gathering
practices.
The
Hadzabe’s relationship with tourism in the region is also an active – if
complex - one. Some tour companies offer the option of visiting a Hadzabe
village and experiencing the unique lifestyle of an African hunter-gatherer
community. When these schemes directly employ and pay Hadzabe to act as tour
guides, they can have benefits for the community. However, some companies are
less than scrupulous in their treatment of the Hadzabe, and some are even known
to bring commercial hunting trips into their territory, directly threatening
Hadzabe security and livelihood in the process.
The
larger and more long term strategy the Hadzabe are engaged in is to win back
rights to hunt and gather in a far bigger territory than is currently available
to them. Such demands involve complex negotiations with their pastoralist and
agricultural neighbours, and with local and national government officials. While
the Tanzanian government is not overtly hostile to the Hadzabe way of life –
unlike the Botswana government who are currently evicting Bushmen off their
ancestral lands en masse - the politics of land in Africa are often fraught, and
with many competing claims, full restoration in the region of Hadzabe hunting
rights looks a long way off.
At
Peace with their Surroundings
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In
many ways, the Hadzabe are at the edge of survival, suffering difficult
environmental conditions, an indifferent political climate and a way of life at
odds with the assumptions and expectations of modern values. Under these kinds
of pressures, it is not surprising that many hunter-gatherer groups who survived
the invasions and genocides of European colonialism buckle under the insidious
pressures of modern capitalist forces. But the Hadzabe are not a group in social
or cultural decline. Their way of life in fact has tremendous resilience and
adaptability, staying more or less unchanged for thousands of years while the
rest of us have had to yield to the winds of change. Hadzabe children learn the
arts of hunting as young as three: by the age of five, a Hadzabe boy can catch
small animals himself, and is thus well on his way to contributing to the
self-sufficiency of the community at a very young age. Hadzabe people have no
fear of their environment and the inherent dangers within it; nor do they seek
to dominate and ‘tame’ it. Instead, they have evolved and preserved a human
way of life that respects and is in tune with the natural world. Such reverence
for nature is evident in their myths and rituals, which not only teach the
complex rules through which the cycles of nature should be respected - and
hunting and gathering sustained - but also gloriously and unconditionally
celebrate such cycles.
While
the dominant modern culture of acquisition and ‘progress’ may find the
Hadzabe way of life threatening – eschewing as it does ‘development’ for
its own sake – the Hadzabe do not appear to see the modern world in the same
way. Most want access to their basic rights: to clean water, adequate land
resources and education, and are prepared to use modern instruments of advocacy
and human rights law in order to secure them. Although there are inevitable
differences between members of the community about the direction Hadzabe society
should take, most seem very clear about why they want their rights respected: in
order to allow them to continue a way of life they have been practising
successfully for thousands of years. We in turn owe groups like the Hadzabe the
chance to perpetuate their way of life; not simply because they add to the
cultural and technological diversity of the planet, but because their lifestyle,
in its ancient simplicity, has a huge amount to teach us about the
technological, environmental and spiritual arts of sustainability in our
all-consuming age.
For
more information on the Hadzabe, on indigenous groups in Tanzania and across the
world visit the following websites:
Aang
Serian
http://www.aangserian.org.uk/
Survival International
http://www.survival-international.org/
Kate
Prendergast is a British freelance writer with a PhD in archaeology.
Your emails will be forwarded to her by contacting the editor at: ScienceTech@islam-online.net
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