Tanzania's Hadza are the last full-time hunter-gatherers in the African Continent.
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 don't have access to the financial and technological prizes of modern living, but who don't 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 the Muslim East African country 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.
Tanzania is an ethnically diverse country of more than 120 ethnic groups inhabiting it. No single ethnic group in Tanzania form a majority, however, Sukuma, Nyamwezi, Chagga, and Haya are the largest ethnic groups.
Even though, Tanzania is a Bantu-dominated country as the predominant majority of its population are of Bantoid races. Nilotic peoples do also exist in the country, as well as a few Cushitic-speaking groups.
The East African country which lies on the western shores of the Indian Ocean has a Muslim-plurality as 17,953,569 Tanzanian Muslims make nearly 39%-plurality in its population.
Now, Hadzabe who number just below 1,000, 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.
This last full-time hunter-gatherers in Africa 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.
Women and children of this isolated ethnic group 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.
Yet 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
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These include the encroachment of both livestock and agriculture into their traditional hunting grounds.
As the local area becomes increasingly taken over by neighboring 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.
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 government of the Muslim-plurality country of Tanzania isn't 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 don't 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.
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