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Hadza: Lake Eyasi, Tanzania (anthropologist Brian Wood) |
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In late 2017, I followed along with anthropologist Brian Wood (US) and nurse Ruth Matiyas (Tanzania) in a visit to the Hadza, an “immediate return” hunter-gatherer community in east Africa which has in the last decades been receiving a lot of international attention. A friendly and easy-going people, they keep minimal personal possessions and get most of what they need to survive day by day off the land as they need it. (Much of the following is taken from Brian’s descriptions of Hadza life.)
The Hadza (1000 – 1500 individuals) live in the Lake Eyasi region of northern Tanzania. Culturally, they are distinguished by being the only population in east Africa that continues to rely extensively on hunting and gathering for their subsistence. Their way of life dates back millennia, living off of the land by hunting wild game, collecting wild plants and honey, and sleeping in simple grass huts in the dry African savannah. In pursuing this lifestyle, they accumulate very little, focusing instead on their moment-to-moment needs. They speak Hadzane, a click-language that has similarities to other Khoisan click-languages.
In the last decade, they have received a lot of media coverage and have come into the popular imagination, represented (in an oversimplified way) as living a version of our ancestral state. Recently, they have been studied for their food culture and their remarkable nutritional health. They are not, however, an isolated, relic society, but a contemporary people choosing to engage in an immediate-return lifestyle. They engage in occasional exchange with local farmers, trading bush-meat for farm products like corn and sometimes working with farmers for seasonal employment. Traditionally, they create the tools that they need out of the materials they have at hand, trading for some things that they can’t make themselves… iron axes to break into trees to access honey, nails that they hammer out to make arrow heads. They use hand made bows and arrows for hunting, but also have the occasional cell phone and solar panel.
The Hadza’s subsistence strategies are closely coupled to their woodland-savannah ecology, guided by a distinctive cultural ethos characterized by sharing, minimal politics, and egalitarianism. Hadza typically live in camps with 20-40 residents. On any given day, camp members decide where and how to forage by closely observing the land, discussing their observations with other camp members, and by drawing upon their expert ecological knowledge. They have extensive traditional, practical knowledge of an exceptional variety of plants and animals and are masters at finding what they need. Social tensions are often resolved through people separating to do as they like, rather than imposing rules on each other. Being mobile is an essential part of Hadza culture: both as a way to find food and as a way to peaceably regulate social interactions.
The woodlands of Hadza country are typically hilly and rocky. Natural springs and seasonal rivers intersperse their range. On the edges of Lake Eyasi and the Yaeda Valley, rocky hills give way to sandy alluvial plains. The area can be quite hot, dry, and windy during the dry season (June-Oct) but is lush and green during the rainy periods. The Hadza are masters at finding widely dispersed sources of food, medicine, and water, which they have sustainably harvested for countless generations. The most important wild foods in the Hadza diet are large and small game, baobab, berries, wild honey, and tubers.
The African honey bee, Apis melliferra, produces large stores of wild honey, a crucial food in the Hadza diet. Baobab trees contain the largest hives, some of which have been harvested repeatedly by the Hadza for hundreds of years. The Hadza have an interesting relationship with Honey Guides, birds who live in a symbiotic relationship with the Hadza, guiding them to hives and being rewarded by access to the honey remnants left by the Hadza. In addition to containing hives of wild honey, baobab trees produce a fruit rich in nutrients, green leaves that are eaten in times of hunger, and several tree parts used as medicine. They will grind the meat and seeds of the baobab fruit into a powder, which they mix with water for a tangy drink, high in both vitamin C and protein.
About 500 Hadza continue to rely on hunting and gathering for the majority of their diet. Many Hadza believe foraging for wild foods provides a better diet than either farming or cattle-raising would enable and leads to a more fulfilling lifestyle. The Hadza cherish the personal freedom afforded by living in small, mobile, and intimate camps, rejecting the noise, crowds, dangers, and discrimination that life in neighboring villages would entail.
The increased international recognition of the Hadza has resulted in new economic and cultural dynamics for the Hadza. They are regularly visited by anthropologists and other scientists, some with long standing relationships to the Hadza and some “parachuting in” for brief studies. Film crews and journalists have been increasingly regular visitors. Along with global media attention has come tourism. Day-visits to the Hadza have now become regular optional items on safari tours of the Lake Eyasi area. In all of this, there is a mix of Hadza welcoming in outsiders into their world, moving on to find peace and quiet, or adapting to these new forms of ethnic tourism by performing projected images of “the primitive hunter gatherer” for quick tourist money. One can find examples of all of this with a quick youtube search for “Hadza”.
Increasing immigration into the Hadza region, as well as rapid population growth of neighboring groups has meant that the Hadza have lost access to many of their most important foraging lands. Over the last several centuries, they have been pushed further and further out of their traditional territories by encroaching Datooga pastoralists. While the Hadza have gained very limited territorial protection and rights with Tanzanian nationhood, this process of displacement continues, forcing the Hadza onto more marginal lands, which in turn forces them to spend more and more of their time and energy to get the basics of food and water.
The Hadza have little voice in the planning or regulation of regional land use, and their needs are often overshadowed by the masses that follow a more typical farming or cattle-raising way of life. Despite this, the hunter gatherer existence of the Hadza still supplies what they need. While many of the Hadza have now settled and moved on into agriculture, working for Iraqw farmers, about a third of the Hadza still choose to live an immediate return lifestyle with negligible property accumulation.
Unfortunately, while the Hadza have adapted to their ever changing environmental and social landscape in the past, these newer challenges threaten their health and way of life. This increase in contact and increase connection with neighboring ethnic groups has brought many problems to the Hadza, particularly problems with communicable diseases which the Hadza have historically had less exposure to. Diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV are common in nearby villages, and increased interaction with growing villages near Hadza lands threatens to spread these and other illnesses. This process is made worse by increasingly frequent visits from unregulated tourism operations offering “day trips to the Hadza”. Climate change and population growth also threaten Hadza access to the wild game, wild plants, and water on which they depend.
Postscript – Territory: The Hadza, up to a few centuries ago, lived in lush territory, rich in game and plant foods. Since then, they have continuously been pushed off of their traditional lands by the encroachment of Datooga cattle herders, whose cattle drive away game and spoil the water sources. As the Hadza do not traditionally have a unified political voice, they have been marginalized politically. The introduction of new legal order through colonialism and later the creation of a Tanzanian state has slowed down the progress of displacement and they have recently won some limited territorial rights, but it is ongoing. This is another big challenge that the Hadza are facing and another important reason for their lifeways and continued existence to be documented. With potentials for the development of hydraulic fracking operations in the Lake Eyasi area, this has the potential to get much worse. Ujamaa is one organization currently fighting for Hadza land rights
Postscript – Tourism: If someone is interested in visiting the Hadza, this is not necessarily a negative for the Hadza, but it is worth seriously considering first how and with whom. While many safari companies fail to consider the full range of impacts of their operations on the Hadza, there are a few more responsible tour guides who operate in long-standing collaboration with the Hadza community, facilitating collective use of tourism income to bring much needed resources to the community. Two examples of such companies are Dorobo Safaris and Kisima Ngeda Lodge.