Hadza Hunter-Gatherers

The Hadza are one of only three hunter-gatherer groups left in Africa. For more than one thousand years, they have inhabited the broad plains encompassing the shallow, salty basin of Lake Eyasi in the shadow of the Great Rift Valley escarpment, believing that they are its original inhabitants. Today, numbering fewer than eight hundred, the Hadza have survived using the same methods employed by the earliest human societies. Genetic testing indicates that they may represent one of the oldest roots of the human family tree.

In a communal style, the Hadza live together in small camps of ten to thirty people. While the women collect tubers and baobab fruit, the men enter into the forest to hunt small animals for their daily meal. The Hadza explained that they would only hunt large game after a hunter received a dream about the animal from an ancestor. The largest antelope, the eland, is their most revered animal, valued for its high fat content and its spirit connection to the ancestral world. If they were lucky enough to catch a creature too large to carry, they would move their camp to where the animal had fallen and stay there until it had been consumed.

The Hadza are renowned for their ability to gather honey from nests high in baobab trees. One of the hunters engaged in a whistled conversation with a bird called a honeyguide which led the man to the exact spot where he could find a beehive. On that afternoon, the Hadza climbed twenty-five feet up into the branches and with a flaming torch smoked the bees out. He plunged his arm into the hive and brought out a huge clump of honeycomb, which he threw down to the eager children waiting on the ground below. The Hadza consumed part of the honey and the larvae, packing the rest to bring back to the village, while the bird gorged itself on wax and bees.

The Hadza expressed their concern about the protection of their land and their future survival. They continue to fear outsiders, due to their people’s history, fraught with exploitation, and the tragic escalating loss of their hunting land.

Hadza Hunter-Gatherers

FOLLOWING THE HONEYBIRD

Hadza Hunter-Gatherers

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