From September 16-23 we lived and learned about the Hadzabe of Tanzania, some of the last remaining hunter/gatherers in the world.
9/18-----12:09 p.m.
“The bugs here are nuts. I’ve been bitten by at least one hundred tsetse flies and swarmed by gnats. There’s virtually no way to escape.
Today (this morning) we foraged with the Hadzabe. We dug for roots with sharpened sticks, picked and ate berries, harvested and ate honey, learned how to start a fire with sticks, then roasted and ate the roots. This morning, I woke up on the top of a giant boulder heap as the sun was just beginning to rise in the direction I was facing. It was literally the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. I pulled the drawstring tight on my sleeping bag and sat in my cocoon for half an hour as the sun came up behind an acacia tree. Great plains of baobab trees stretch as far as the eye can see.
Some fascinating things about the Hadzabe: the government comes and takes their children to put them in schools. They live in groups of three to five families and move when there’s no more food in the area. From the readings, we know there is no system of governance or power structures. They just respect older people more. If someone tries to take a position of authority, they are discouraged by the rest of the group. Their social organization is very fluid because one family just decides to move and others (whoever feels like it) join them. It’s unbelievable that they’ve been living this way for hundreds of thousands of years. They buy/trade for tobacco, tools, and metals. This creates a partnership between themselves and the pastoralists who have been forced to share the lands.
I saw some interesting “nature” things today. There’s a type of acacia tree that has little red nut-type things on it. Inside the nuts are a bunch of little ants. When the nut is disturbed, the ants swarm out on the trespasser. This keeps giraffes and other animals from eating the acacia.
The Hadzabe live in a symbiotic relationship with a honey bird that eats bees. Unfortunately, the bird can’t get into the hive by itself. So when it finds a beehive, it cries out and the Hadzabe follow the sound of the bird. When they arrive, they open the beehive and let the bird eat the bees. Then they eat the honey and some of the eggs, leaving just enough for the hive to regenerate so they don’t deplete the resources. I love how these people don’t try to separate themselves from other creatures, but rely on them and co-exist naturally with them.”
9/19----1:44 p.m.
“This morning, we split into five groups and went hunting with the Hadza security guys from our camp. Our dude killed a guinea fowl in the first twenty minutes, which was the only kill of the day for all the groups. We tracked animals for four hours and saw dik-dik (mini deer), kudu, guinea fowl, impala, and bush babies. After he shot the guinea fowl, our hunter beat its head against a rock to kill it then strapped it to his waist by its head with a strip off a nearby branch. It was strange to realize that the bow, arrows, and axe he carried were very possibly his only possessions. It is too ridiculously hot up on this rock to write more now, so I have to stop.”
So, a brief reflection on events I didn’t mention here...
The Hadzabe use poisoned arrows for bigger game. To test the poison, they cut their legs and let the blood run down a few inches. When they touch the poison to the blood, it turns black and starts heading back into the wound. If they don’t wipe it off quick enough, they die. Pretty intense, huh?
Everywhere we went in Tanzania, we rode in huge lorry trucks that were open air. It was really cool for seeing everything, but also exposed us to the infestation of tsetse flies. After the last journal entry above, we climbed a huge baobab tree using sharpened sticks as footholds on the way up. We also made arrows and shot them with the Hadzabe.
The activities on the trip were incredible, but I also learned a TON. The government is attempting to change the way the Hadzabe live by encroaching on their lands and encouraging agriculture. This has caused an interesting change in culture and the beginnings of a transition to "modernism." This raises all sorts of fascinating questions and issues that I simply can’t write about here because of the magnitude and complexity of the problems. I think the best way for me to portray these things is by answering questions, so bring it on!
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After you mentioned your time with the Hadzabe to me in your email a few weeks ago, I wanted to learn more about them (so that we could have more interesting conversations, naturally), so I checked out a book written by a man named James Stephenson who lived with them off and on for several years up to the writing (in 1999, I believe). He writes about several of the hunters he particularly befriended, some trips into the bush they took him on, the songs and dances the Hadzabe did around their fires at night, their times in town, their run-ins with the Mang'ati and other pastoralist groups, their (magical) medicine, their trysts and family life, and their (and increasingly, his) metaphysical communication with their ancestors. As you did, he mentioned the constant plague of biting insects, the Hadzabe's relationship with the Honeybird, and their poison arrows (though he didn't mention how they test the poison's efficacy -- that's even more hard-core than he let on).
I had some issues with the book, and I'm still trying to process a great deal of it, but one of its recurring themes was the author's sadness at the prospect that the Hadzabe and their ways -- at least as he saw them -- were disappearing for the reasons you mentioned: outside pressure to "settle down", destruction of the forests and of the animals, and also the corrupting influences of tobacco, marijuana, and alcohol. (The Hadza take on this impending change in their world seemed a bit more nuanced, but that's probably a discussion for another time.)
In any event, Stephenson's frustration at the change he saw coming for the Hadzabe was evident. As an American (and a closet libertarian, though the two groups are perhaps not so far apart in the abstract), I place an incredibly high value on peoples' ability to live their lives in the way that they choose (so long as they respect others' right to do the same). The idea that the Hadzabe were being forced into a political and economic system that they did not want caused me a great deal of moral distress, in addition to aesthetic sadness at the potential loss of one of the Old Ways of the World. So the great question in my mind, of course, was "what is to be done?" It was unclear what action Stephenson was advocating, and to his credit, he ended by saying he didn't know what should be done. My first reaction -- "there oughta be a law(1)!" -- hearkened back to a differently idealistic time in my life, but I tried to disabuse myself of it, especially since Stephenson noted, as do you, that the Tanzanian government is one of the major forces working against the Hadzabe's current lifestyle(2), and I find it beyond doubtful that the UN could have any effect on the situation (any positive effect, anyway). And what about the agriculturalists and pastoralists? Who are we to stop them cutting down forests to make way for their fields, or hunting the animals that compete with or prey on their livestock and trample their crops? How can we prevent the encroachment of This Modern World on the Hadzabe and their old ways(3)?
As you can probably guess, I tried to think of a possible free-market solution. I'll elaborate on my thoughts shortly, once I'm confident they'll pass the laugh-test. Free-market ideas that libertarians (or wannabes like me) suggest usually seem absurd on first reading, and the one I'm thinking of is no exception. I'll give you a little while to steel yourself. Figure that it will be qualitatively similar to my suggestion about selling elephant herds.
I think it is both a strange kind of critique and a strange kind of recommendation of the market system that its trappings (beer, cigarettes, mass-produced clothing) creep even into the depths of the African bush. And it's sad to think that the Hadzabe and similar peoples might have to change their ways to work around the changes going on in the world around them -- worse yet, to think that there might be no place in the world today for people like them. But I don't think that (the second part) is the case. I confess that the extremely immodest proposal I'm gearing up to make feels somehow lacking to me, since there are still aspects of it that infringe on the old Hadzabe ways. But while the fact that the wild places of the earth and the eldest ways of its people cannot evade its influence if they so choose is one of the great shames of the market system(4), the fact that, within it, these things can survive -- and flourish -- is one of the system's great glories.
1. Against what, it was hard to say. It was probably "against anybody messing with the Hadzabe", but that would have made the writing of Stephenson's book -- not to mention your trip this September -- a little more difficult.
2. I read recently that the Eskimo tribes living in the farthest North followed their old ways fairly unchanged well into the fifties or sixties until, in the grip of the Cold War, Canada felt it needed them to live in more settled, permanent villages. The idea was that, if ownership of the area was ever in question, they could point to a settled population of "Canadians", paying taxes and receiving social services. Perhaps something not too different is going on in Tanzania? Also, as a snarky aside (I just can't help it), if you're upset about Hadzabe children being put in schools by the government, you might want to avoid reading some of Mike's more recent blogging.
3. Ignoring for now the presumptuous and over-protective tone of this idea, and assuming that the Hadzabe really do want to avoid modernity's influences, but just can't help themselves absent our assistance, which we'll assume for the sake of argument they also want.
4. Indeed, of all existence -- but again, I've juxtaposed two ideas that I think follow one from the other: if you exist, then the ideas underpinning the spontaneous workings of a market govern the way you act in many situations.
Wow, man. I honestly don't have time to answer this in full with all the stuff going on here, but I look forward to discussing it in January when I'm in D.C.
Let me give it an initial crack without any sources. Just an initial reaction...
I will say that the general feeling among the Hadzabe we talked with was a desire to modernize and "be like everyone else." I heard that phrase more times than I care to admit.
Obviously, this made my stomach churn and did not settle well with me at all. But one can not impose his/her own ideas on how another culture lives. There is always that danger of trying to preserve cultures for our own sake...for the sake of their uniqueness and what we perceive to be a noble way of life that has remained unchanged for millions of years. In reality, no culture is stagnant. Assuming so is dangerous and slightly ethnocentric, albeit degrading (although I will say that theirs has older roots and may have changed less than many other societies around the world).
The fact is (at least among the few I talked to) they've seen a different way of life and seem to prefer it over their current one, or at least integration at some level.
But here's the catch. From my observations, the Hadzabe do not even see maintaining their current hunter/gatherer lifestyle as an option. They've basically accepted change as inevitable and so are dealing with it accordingly. This I have a problem with, as you mentioned. This, of course is the hardest issue to tackle. From readings and observations, the government of Tanzania seems to be the biggest problem. They've blatantly labeled the hunter/gatherer lifestyle as "savage" and "primitive" and have not been subtle in their attempts to dismantle it.
Numerous land policies since independence have marginalized the people, taking advantage both of their lack of education and the lack of power differentials in their society. Agriculturalists and pastoralists continue encroaching on Hadzabe lands, but only because their lands have been privatized and in some cases, given to corrupt government elites or wildlife conservation.
So basically, I don't think we should force the Hadzabe to change. I think we should create a political environment that gives them the option and makes them see that option. Then, if they still choose to change, that's none of our business.
I think the first step is a fundamental change in the government's view (and the entire world's view for that matter) of hunting/gathering as a lifestyle. Rather than see these people as an embarrasment to the nation because of "primitive" and "savage" practices, they should recognize the culture as one out of which all other cultures grew. Perhaps most importantly, they should recognize the negligible impact this lifestyle has on the environment. I would bet a lot of money that one average American affects the environment more in a week than five Hadzabe in a month. Not only is the lifestyle sustainable and based in practices millions of years old, but it is simply better for a global environment which we are destroying. Obviously I'm not proposing we all should become hunter/gatherers, but I do think there are lessons to be learned there.
Anyway, that's all I have time to say for now. I need to get started on a paper that's due soon. I look forward to talking to you more when I get back. I hope everything's well in D.C.! Take it easy.
Your friend,
Reynolds
P.S. The comment on the government snatching children for education was an initial journal entry after a conversation with one person. After more conversation and thought, I realized the issue isn't as black and white as it seems. I will say that the current education setup is unfair and culturally isolating and I feel it should be adapted to fit their culture. But more on that later...
Reynolds,
It’s like you were reading my mind! Everything you wrote there, I had wanted to say before, only I hadn’t found the words to say them well. Let me try to say those things now:
1. You’re absolutely right that the decision of whether to “change” or “not change” (quotations marks since, as you point out, it’s not such a simple binary option) belongs to the Hadzabe themselves. To try and tell them that they must stay the way they are is as paternalistic and overbearing as telling them that they must change, no matter how cool we find their lifestyle. Such decisions must be left to them.
2. On the same token, they ought not have the option of remaining the same taken away from them(1). The government of Tanzania should butt right out of their lives. But to judge from what you’ve said, the government’s machinations are at the root of many of the problems the Hadzabe face. For that reason I think that any plan for keeping options open to the Hadzabe must assume that the government will be at best unhelpful, and probably genuinely hostile to any such efforts.
For that matter, I would even hesitate to allow positive government intervention in the lives of or on the behalf of the Hadzabe. What if the president of Tanzania announced tomorrow that “the government will let the Hadzabe alone to roam the entire Ngorongoro Conservation Area”? Then, very subtly, they’ve come under the government’s power. For the government to endorse their lifestyle is to imply that they need the government’s permission to live in that way, and that their range of options is subject to the government’s dictates. I think we can agree that they do not need anyone’s permission to live as they choose.
So while it would certainly be good to try and make other Tanzanians appreciate the Hadzabe and cherish their culture’s positive attributes, any help they got from the government would, I suspect, come with onerous (though perhaps initially invisible) conditions that made it a mixed blessing.
For those reasons, I think any help the Hadzabe get in pursuing their own visions of happiness needs to come from private citizens like you and me. I’ll outline a shape that help might take. It would take stupendous financial and human resources, but I place much more faith in our personal benevolence(2) towards the Hadzabe than in our ability to get the Tanzanian government to become and stay benevolent(3)(4).
Really, I will get to telling you what my idea is soon. Sorry to string you along.
Before I go, just to let you know, I understand the difficulty you might encounter responding to me from over there. We’ll talk about all of these things and more in great detail when you’re back, but in the meantime, don’t feel like you need to cite sources or give anything more than your initial thoughts. Given your familiarity with the matters at hand, your initial thoughts are much more pertinent and insightful than my fanciful notions.
Also, the increasing hairiness of your facebook photos makes me consider sporting a beard again. I never used to have to spend so much money on razors…
Take care of yourself over there, and keep on having a great time.
Cheers,
Andrew
1. I hesitate to say “they ought to have the option of remaining the same available to them”, because I see this more as a right to be free from government interference, rather than a right to something. If there were a pestilence and all the wild animals died, I wouldn’t think it right to say “the government must step in and do something – the Hadzabe have a right to have game available to them all the time”. The government shouldn’t be in the business of helping people live the way they want to -- it should be keeping its nose out of that business altogether. As an American corollary: the government leaves us alone to worship (or not worship) as we please. They don’t build churches for us, nor should they.
2. and that of like-minded people and organizations
3. Indeed, if it were a group of private citizens behind this effort, it would be much easier to stay true to the goal, whereas the government would have to be guarded against all the time.
4. You might say, rightly, that people have effected “fundamental changes in government[s’] views” before, like with the independence movement in India, the Civil Rights movement in the US, and the world-wide effort to end apartheid in South Africa, and ask why it couldn’t be done with the Hadzabe in Tanzania as well. But those situations had things in common that this does not. To name two important ones, the oppressed groups in those situations appealed to values that were held by their oppressors’ own constituencies and/or peers and [ostensibly] by their oppressors themselves, and were led by media-savvy members of the groups like Gandhi, King, and Mandela. I’m sure many of those reading have spent at least a while in class discussing one of those movements, and I’d bet we could all agree that the success of those movements says little about the probable success of a bunch of college-aged kids (and recent graduates, mind you) writing letters to Tanzanian parliamentarians or encouraging their friends to boycott Tanzanian goods until the government there treats the Hadzabe respectfully.
Alright. My note beforehand: this is my first crazy libertarian policy suggestion, so be gentle with me. I never thought I'd be working as a Federal Employee while simultaneously channeling the spirit of Kevin Vallier, but here I am...
What the Hadzabe and Stephenson said time and again was that to live in their ways the Hadzabe needed the land, and the forests and animals on them. And the Hadzabe need a lot of it – their lifestyle requires a lot of land to support a low-density population.
So how can we successfully protect the land, forests, and animals that the Hadzabe need? Well, how do we keep poachers from killing off all the deer in the United States, or chopping down all the forests? The answer, of course, is that we don't. The owners of all the land that the deer live on and the trees grow on do that(1). So why not buy a special place in Tanzania, and give it to the Hadzabe to own, free and clear? They could disallow any meddling with the land and forests and animals there, and no one could argue against it, legally or ethically. Since we're being hypothetical, let’s disregard questions of just how much land they would need. We could give them the whole Ngorongoro Conservation Area, with Lake Eyasi and its environs thrown in, to boot! They can live on the land, let the animals roam free for the hunting, and follow the ways of their ancestors, free from outside meddling. People will stay off the land, because its owners will keep them off(2).
"But wait," cries the disembodied voice of James Stephenson in the back of my head. "The Hadzabe do not understand property! How could they ever own this land if they can't conceive of ownership? And even if they could, how could they protect such a wide swath of territory from the likes of those who would destroy its natural beauty?"
How indeed. These are serious objections, but they are surmountable, I think(3). First, as I alluded to before, I don't think that the Hadzabe are as naive about property and the exchange of money for goods and services as Stephenson makes out in his book. In fact, he relates a lot of examples to the contrary. But let's say they are for the sake of argument. So, then, let's not give to the land to the Hadzabe. Instead, we could put the title to all the land in a trust of some kind in the whole tribe's(4) name, with the stipulations that the Hadzabe be allowed to come and go on it as they choose, and that the land could not be sold. The affairs of this land trust could controlled by a benevolent group of executors -- probably mostly African Studies majors and Anthropologists and the occasional nature-and-indigenous-peoples-loving economist. They would be responsible for the land's protection from poachers and other nasty-types, and to raise money to operate the trust they could occasionally allow for some hunters or groups of tourists to take safaris, so long as they left alone those Hadzabe who didn't want to be bothered.
The second objection -- that it would be incredibly hard to protect all that land – is a bit more problematic, if only from a logistical standpoint. The land would have to be patrolled by an army of rangers (though maybe the Hadzabe would be willing to do some of the patrolling themselves, while they’re in the bush on their hunting trips), who would have to be immune to bribes from scheming do-badders who would want to pay them to look the other way if they happened upon any poaching. Those rangers would have to be paid extremely well, and get excellent employment benefits to ensure that level of dedication. But if they could be so well compensated, then the executors of this trust could count on a steady stream of applicants for the jobs, and their pick of the bravest, most dedicated rangers they could hope for -- and of course, they'd all be under strict instructions to leave the Hadzabe to their own devices. And where will the money for all this come from? From the protected land itself. Any eco-tourism, big game hunting, or natural resource extraction on that land would command a high price. And, if the land were properly managed and the animals and plants protected and allowed to replenish themselves, it would be well worth every penny for a tourist to come and see the rhinoceri, or for a botanist to investigate the local flora, or for a hunter to shoot a few stragglers from an otherwise teeming herd of wildebeest. I think the trustees in charge of maintaining this refuge could count on it being a fairly well-funded endeavor.
And of course, in time, all the patrolling and the poacher-catching (or most of it) would become unneccesary. Some day, in a future of unknown distance, Tanzania will be a prosperous nation like the US or Japan or Sweden. Then, people will have much better (by which I mean more lucrative) things to do than risk life and limb to blast a few elephants in the jungle and saw off their tusks(5). In that day, instead of poaching elephants or cutting down the forests, local Tanzanians will have desk jobs, own houses with picket fences, send their kids off to college to stage sit-ins against this or that, or whatever the Tanzanian equivalent of the American dream is. The land that the Hadzabe cherish, its animals and forests, will be to Tanzanians of that day like our state and national parks are to us – enjoyable spots for recreation and vacation, worthy of support and safeguarding.
And where will the Hadzabe be through all of that? Wherever they want to be, of course (subject to the same laws as the rest of us). And if where they want to be is in the bush, hunting lions and communing with their ancestors? Well, then that option will be open to them.
This is a difficult and expensive idea, to be sure. But not impossible. The alternative, however – convincing a government that is hostile to the Hadzabe and too impotent to enforce its will on any but meek and egalitarian hunter-gatherers to fork over a wide expanse of territory and patrol it vigilantly to protect its sanctity – sounds much more like “impossible” to me.
1.Granted, in the US the government is sometimes the property owner of that land, those forests and wildlife, just as the Tanzanian government owns the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. But America's state and federal governments a) operate much of our public land like a private owner would, issuing hunting, logging, grazing, and mining permits in return for fees b) are much better than the relevant Tanzanian governments at keeping unwanted people out of those places, and c) have constituencies living around those public lands whose incentives to kill off the bison or chop down Yosemite are much, much lower than those of Tanzanians living around government land in Tanzania.
2. Stepping out of hypothetical-ness for a moment, how much money do you think it would take to buy 10,000-odd square kilometers of Tanzania? Do you think the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, International Elephant Foundation, and other various interest groups could be convinced to scrape it together from their membership? Maybe with a few year's savings, wise investment, and a generous donation or two from some deep-pocketed foundations? I'll bet it could do it, with a determined enough effort. I think it would be a more noble use of those groups’ donation money than hanging a stupid banner on an oil tanker under the cover of night, certainly.
3. Indeed, maybe the most difficult objection is that a solution like this seems really far-fetched -- imagine, buying a whole national park! Can you believe this guy? -- but most libertarian-ish ideas sound pretty far-fetched at first. However, the nice thing about these ideas is that, in other places, and on various scales, they've been shown to work at achieving some of our goals, like preserving the forest and protecting wildlife. As opposed to things we've tried and know don't work, like asking governments to make concessions to hunter-gatherers, or convincing the locals who are busily chopping down forests to live in harmony with Nature and join our drum circle (we meet on Tuesdays at 7:30 at the co-op –ed.).
4. "Tribe", or whatever word is correct for all the people who consider themselves Hadzabe.
5. Indeed, if the idea about elephant ownership I’ve mentioned before were followed, the bottom would fall out of the market for ivory -- people would find it worth their while to harvest ivory from their elephants occasionally, but to maintain healthy, happy herds to ensure their future ivory income. Ivory would still be expensive, but probably not so much as to support a raging black market. I personally hope ivory would still be rare, because I like elephants and would really hate to see them slaughtered. But whether they're privately owned and "harvested", or publicly owned and poached, they're dead in both scenarios. Only in one of those scenarios, however, is there any incentive to leave some of them alive. In the other, the incentive is to kill them all before someone else does.
Wow. I believe we've reached the point where conversation becomes necessary. Thank you so much for your carefully-considered thoughts, which obviously took a lot of time to construct and write down. I look forward to discussing all this with you, my friend.
I'm not sure I'm interpreting you correctly, but I guess you might mean that, at this point, the discussion has attained a depth such that face-to-face interaction is required to sustain it, given the limitations of blogging and the packed-ness of your schedule. If so, then that's just one more reason to look forward to your coming back. I hope the rest of your time there is as much fun as it sounds like the last weeks and months have been.
Before I finish off, though, I wanted to quickly respond to one of your comments in an older thread (the "Article in Student Life" one). Thanks to Blogger's timestamps, I'm not entirely sure when you posted it, but I'm assuming it was recent, since you refer to what sound like semester-ending workloads.
If you can suggest any books or sources to check out on the IMF/World Bank in East Africa and indigenous notions of property rights (Maasai or otherwise) I'd be interested to hear about them. Neither are subjects I know much about, and I'd like to be able to discuss them intelligently when you get back.
Also, I understand why you didn't offer some sort of "balance" about the IMF/WB in your article -- you were writing (very persuasively, at that) about an entirely different topic. I hope it didn't seem like I was taking issue with your article -- I wasn't. I was just worried because criticism (often well-deserved) of groups like the IMF, WTO, etc. often comes hand-in-hand with fallacious but emotionally appealing "critiques" that deny settled economic truths and are marketed as "new and challenging ideas". I do not mean to say that your teachers were doing that, only that it happens. I just wanted to remind you to keep a watch out for sloppy economic thinking.
As for the elephants, I'll be interested to hear about Amboseli and the wildlife situation there. It sounds like they are indeed confronted with some difficult issues, but I'd hasten to point out that crop destruction and land deterioration are pretty settled issues in both livestock and wildlife management (both public and private) in the developed world. We might not always handle them well, but there are solutions. Maybe some of those elephants could be sold to one of the many countries or game parks or wildlife reserves where elephants are not so numerous1?
In any event, I certainly understand about the mounting pressures on your time. I'm sorry if this is to be the end of our blog conversations, but I look forward to the in-person ones to come. Good luck with all your work, and have a wonderful time in Africa.
Your friend,
Andrew
1. Naturally, I would hope that, since the wellbeing of the elephants is paramount to their successful management, this kind of relocation could be done on a large scale, in order to preserve their social groups and structures. Though I think that elephant preservation would be facilitated by thinking of them in similar ways, elephants are decidedly not cattle. I would hope, for instance, that anyone charged with maintaining healthy elephant herds -- whether for exploitation for ivory, as a tourism draw, or as public wildlife managers -- would be made to understand that seperating mothers and calves, killing dominant bulls and matriarch cows and so forth is in line with neither economically useful nor aesthetically pleasing elephants herds.
Excellent point, Autum. I would personally suggest a Chateau Rothschild 1963 or maybe a simple Chardonnay :) Can't wait to see you in a few months!
fantastic! It's going to be quite a shock being able to drink freely here, then returning to the states and being under 21 for six months. Can't wait to see you!
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