 Mike Carter August 22, 2015
Mwapo started whistling: a sweet, piercing melody that rose and fell. From somewhere in the distance came a second whistler, the tune the same. Mwapo touched his ear with his finger, pointed towards a line of trees.
Nearby, on a dead tree stump, sat an angry-looking little bird. As we approached, it started whistling. Here was our duettist. “Tik’iliko,” said Mwapo. The bird took flight. We followed, the bird and Mwapo whistling constantly to each other.
Eventually we came to an enormous baobab tree. Mwapo pointed up. There, on a branch, sat the tik’iliko, or honeyguide bird. Next to it, barely visible to the human eye, was the entrance to an African honeybee nest. Mwapo looked happy. Like all Hadza people, he loves honey, and honeyguides love the wax and larvae. Without the bird, man can’t find the nests; without man, the bird can’t get into them. A few days earlier, I could barely have conceived of this symbiotic miracle. But even a short time spent with the remarkable Hadza, Africa’s last true hunter-gatherers, had taught me that their life is one long miracle.
My guide on this journey was Daudi Peterson, 64, US-born but raised in Tanzania. Daudi first met the Hadza when he was 10 years old and a life-long love affair was born. Since 1994, he has been taking anthropologists and tourists to meet them, keeping numbers to between 200-300 a year, split between the Hadza’s various camps. “It is structured tourism, but not staged,” he said. “We simply follow them around in their daily lives and observe. Cultural dignity is key.”
The nomadic Hadza now number around 1,300 people, although of these only 200-300 still live exclusively as hunter-gatherers. Their group structures are egalitarian, without hierarchies. Their “crops” are earth’s natural offerings, foraged; their “livestock” wild animals. “At a time when developed nations are consuming ever more resources,” Daudi said, “what can we relearn about sustainability from the past? These people live within the limits of the earth, and they take care of the less fortunate.”
Daudi explained that because the earth has always provided the Hadza with abundant food found naturally, they’ve never known the starvation that comes with crop and cattle failure. It was arguably the development of agriculture, he continued, with its fragility; surplus mentality that created settled towns and cities and the inevitable hierarchies and conflicts over resources. “The Hadza share absolutely everything. The concept of ownership is unknown. That is a huge part of their culture,” he said. “Because there is always enough, there is no need to worry about tomorrow. This is a community where everybody’s opinion is equal.”
A group of women were walking out of camp and beckoned us to join them. After a while, some started gathering berries, others the fallen fruit of the baobab (containing six times as much vitamin C as oranges), which they pound with rocks to make flour for porridge. Some stopped by a tree and pointed to a vine going into the ground, the sign of the tubers growing underground that are a staple of the Hadza diet. With sharpened sticks called ts’apale they tapped the earth to locate the tubers and then dug deep until they had amassed a pile. Most animals can’t get to these tubers so they’re always available, and the Hadza only ever take the top 10 per cent so they can grow back. Once an area is exhausted, it is left to regenerate as the camp moves on.
But for a people whose very survival has always relied on symbiosis, it is a relatively new and mutually beneficial relationship — with tourism — that just might prove wrong the pessimistic commentators who predict that the Hadza are ultimately doomed. The fees from visitors ($51 per person per night as a bed tax, $10 a day for each Hadza guide) go into a Hadza bank account. This fund, managed collectively, helps pay for healthcare and for some children to go to boarding schools. A few of these kids have gone on to university, after which they have returned better equipped to fight for Hadza rights. In 2011, perhaps partly in recognition of the Hadza’s value to tourism and their newfound campaigning strengths, the Tanzanian government granted them three strips of protected land, amounting to 23,305 hectares. It is a mere 10 per cent of their original homeland, and neighbouring tribes still encroach, but in a situation that remains on a knife-edge, it is a glimmer of hope.
“It was the Hadza who suggested tourism,” Daudi says. “We said no, it would be too messy, that people would want to change them. But they are too strong to be changed.” High above were the straight vapour trails of an aircraft and, at the tip, the tiny shape of a plane, like an arrowhead on a shaft. I thought of those people up there, thrusting through space, impatient to arrive somewhere else. I looked at Mwapo and, suddenly fearful for the future of the Hadza and the joyful way of life I had glimpsed, I started to cry.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/
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In this next lesson is Tanzania: hunter gatherers.
Let’s think about what society actually means.
Society has also to do with thinking about your own beliefs and values about possession and ownership.
You are going to read a text about people whose society is different to yours.
Read and answer these questions with your partner.
In step 5 you have spoken about how can you protect the Hadza, and yet still give the tourists (wealthy Americans) an insight into their lives.
Fill in the schedule and answer the questions below.
