The Bantu migration
In part 1 we saw how the discovery of iron facilitated more efficient agriculture production in Bantu tribes, driving population growth and cultural expansion across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa between circa 2500BC to 1000AD. Next we'll look at the how the story developed in East Africa, when the Bantu arrived around 500BC.
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| Credit: Woodlouse, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons |
Before the Bautu, northern Uganda, Kenya and north central Tanzania had long been occupied by a range of distinct populations with Kushtic and Nilotic origins in their language. These were typically nomadic pastoralists from the north and Horn of Africa. They continued to establish themselves in areas unsuited to agriculture during the African iron age.
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| Bantu and Nilotic migrations into Uganda |
Hadza hunter gatherers
But before the pastoralists, groups of hunter gatherers had lived in the region since ancient times. Among these were the Hadza, who still live on the shores of Lake Eyasi in northern Tanzania. As descendants of Tanzania's aboriginal, pre-Bantu expansion hunter-gatherer population, the Hadza have probably occupied their current territory for many thousands of years, with relatively little modification to their basic way of life until the past hundred years.
The Hazda people are the last full-time hunter-gatherers in Africa, they number around 1000 tribe members. Their language is one of only three East African languages with clicks. On first impression, the language sounds like the southern African Khosian click languages, spoken by the San for example. But links are tenuous at best and any commonalities in solitary consonant-vowel syllables are probably coincidental. The Hadza have has acquired some regional vocabularies in their language, particularly Bantu loan words.
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| Credit: The Dorobo Fund |
There are physical similarities to the San and Khoi Khoi inhabiting the Kalahari. But genetic studies show that the Hadza are not closely related to any other people. Archaeological evidence suggests the Lake Eyasi region has been continuously occupied by hunter gatherers much like the Hadza since at least the beginning of the Later Stone Age, 50,000 years ago. This is supported by their oral history in which there is no suggestion they moved to Hadzaland from elsewhere.
Perhaps the environmental factors that select for successful plains-savanna hunter-gatherers gave rise to a common physical appearance that can now only be seen in remote groups like the Hazda and San. Now separated by the successful expansion of other peoples.
The Hadza's own oral history gives us a clue as to early interactions with the incoming Bantu tribes.
The third epoch was inhabited by the people of hamakwanebee "recent days", who were smaller than their predecessors. They invented bows and arrows, and containers for cooking, and mastered the use of fire. They also built huts like those of Hadza today. The people of hamakwanebee were the first of the Hadza ancestors to have contact with non-foraging people, with whom they traded for iron to make knives and arrowheads.
The expansions of farming and herding peoples displaced earlier populations of hunter-gatherers, who would have generally been at a demographic and technological disadvantage, and vulnerable to the loss of environment resources (i.e., foraging areas and habitats for game) as a result of the spread of farmland and pastures.
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| Credit: BrixL, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons |
The Hadza under pressure
So how did the Hadza survive, while many other indigenous tribes did not? Essentially their territory was among the least desirable to either the agriculturalists or the pastoralists, especially due to the presence of tsetse fly. However, Africa's population had grown enormously in the past fifty years, putting renewed pressure on the remaining wild and unexploited lands.
The following map of Northern Tanzania illustrates the marginal nature of the remaining Hadza lands.
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| Remaining Hadza territory (detail, shown in yellow, area number 3) Credit: Communal CCRO's in Northern Tanzania - Ujamaa Community Resource Team |
'Within the last fifty years the Hadza have lost as much as 90 percent of their ancestral lands due to encroachment by neighboring peoples who themselves are caught in a cycle of population growth, poverty, and land pressure.' - culturalsurvival.org June 2018
The western Hadza lands are now a private hunting reserve and the Hadza are officially restricted to a reservation within the reserve and prohibited from hunting there. The Yaeda Valley, long uninhabited due to the tsetse fly, is now occupied by Datooga herders, who are clearing the Hadza lands on either side of the now fully settled valley for pasture for their goats and cattle. The Datooga hunt out the game. Their land clearing destroys the berries, tubers and honey that the Hadza rely on. Along with watering holes for their cattle causing the shallow watering holes the Hadza use to dry up. Most Hadzabe are no longer able to sustain themselves in the bush without supplementary food such as ugali.
In common with other with indigenous peoples, the Hadza have not fared well in political representation of their rights and territory. Misconceptions and prejudice that the Hadza were backwards and without a real language, started by agro-pastoralists, was passed onto the colonialists and perpetuate to this day.
The British colonial government tried to make the Hadza settle down and adopt farming in 1927, the first of many government attempts to do so. The British tried again in 1939, as did the independent Tanzanian government in 1965 and 1990, and various foreign missionary groups since the 1960s. Despite numerous attempts, some forceful, all have largely failed.
Where attempts have been made to incentivise the Hadza with money, this has contributed to alcoholism and deaths from alcohol poisoning have recently become a severe problem, further contributing to the loss of cultural knowledge.
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| Members of the Hadza Tribe. Credit: Jeff Leach. Pub: BBC |
Why are the Hadza still important in a increasingly globalised world?
For thousands of years savannah hunter gatherers have maintained economic stability and cultural sophistication. Their way of life is in fact perfectly adapted and sustainable for their environment. Not a claim that can be made by the vast majority of the world's population. No amount of recycling, bamboo toothbrushes or green-wash tinkering will come close to us achieving the minimal environmental impact of the Hadza.
Am I saying that we should all go back to living a hunter-gatherers? No, of course not. Even if there was the desire to, there simply is not enough land to sustain the global population in that way. While the idea of living more connectedly with nature is a good thing and should be encouraged, I doubt many of us would go as far as eschewing the benefits of modern medicine, centrally heated homes, or other daily conveniences. Nor would many people have the will to gather plants, or the stomach to go out and kill and gut their dinner.
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| Baobob fruit. Photo: Stu Westfield |
What is remarkable, is that the Hadza do not suffer any of the chronic diseases associated with developed countries. They don't get fat, develop heart disease or diabetes. Cancer is rare.
In 2019, Professor of Epidemiology, Tim Spector and Research Fellow, Jeff Leach spent three days living with the Hadza to measure how their environment and more directly their diet, influenced diversity within the human digestive biome. The theory was that a healthy biome has far reaching benefits to physical and mental well being. The results are astonishing!
Tim Spector & Jeff Leach: Three days with the Hadza
"High gut biome diversity is associated with a low risk of obesity and many diseases. The Hadza have a diversity that is one of the richest on the planet." - Tim Spector (Professor of Genetic Epidemiology, King's College London)
If after reading this, you're interested in the potential to avoid obesity and other chronic diseases, the following Royal Institution lecture could well be a most useful 35 minutes.
A future for the Hadza?
In the times we now live, we could easily see the last of the few remaining hunter gatherer populations fade away within the next two or three generations. The factors driving the current sixth great extinction event (the Anthropocene) in the animal and plant kingdoms are also affecting the most vulnerable human tribes and cultures. To lose these people would be a unmitigated tragedy. Not only for the hunter gatherers themselves, but it reflects upon the wider global community in a deeply troubling way.
But there is hope with organisations such as the Dorobo Fund representing the Hadza and campaigning for protection of their remaining land in today's Tanzania.
We are not trying to keep the Hadza as they are, but rather give them options and dignity as they interact with and confront a changing world. And the foundation for that is and always has been land – if they have land, those who wish have the option to continue traditional foraging and all of them have land as a fallback option for survival no matter what pursuit they have followed. - dorobofund.org 2019
If commodification is all that wealthy and powerful people are capable of understanding in order to do the right thing. Then Tim Spector & Jeff Leach's study fully justifies the Hadzas' place, in the potential to save pretty much the rest of the world's people from chronic disease caused by modern foodstuffs.
What most decent people will also realise is that in 50,000 years the Hadza have done no lasting harm to their homeland. So why should anyone else have the right to dictate how they should live?
Stu Westfield
Ranger Expeditions
August 2022
Sources:
UNSECO General History Of Africa Vol 2
Ch 21: M. Posansky, historian and archaeologist
Ch 22: A.M.H. Sheriff, Lecturer, University Dar-es-Salaam
UNSECO General History Of Africa Vol 3
Ch 22: C.Ehret, linguist, University of California, Los Angeles
The Dorobo Fund: https://www.dorobofund.org/
Cultural Survival: Securing Hadza Land Titles, Securing Futures in Tanzania. Katrin Redfern. June 2018
The Conversation: I spent three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve my gut health. Jeff Leach. June 2017
The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania. F W Marlowe. 2010
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