The Hadza, or Hadzabe (Swahili: Wahadzabe ), is one of the last true nomadic hunter-gatherer societies on earth, a protected hunter-gatherer Tanzanian indigenous ethnic group, primarily based in Baray, an administrative ward within Karatu District in southwest Arusha Region. They live around the Lake Eyasi basin in the central Rift Valley and in the neighboring Serengeti Plateau. As descendants of Tanzania's aboriginal, pre-Bantu expansion hunter-gatherer population, they have probably occupied their current territory for thousands of years with relatively little modification to their basic way of life until the last century. They have no known close genetic relatives and their language is considered an isolate despite containing Swahili loanwords.
When the Hadza first came into contact with European settlers in the late 19th century, governments and missionaries made many attempts to settle them by integrating farming and Christianity. These efforts have largely failed, and many Hadza still pursue a life similar to that of their ancestors. In the 18th century, the Hadza also came into contact with pastoralist peoples entering Hadzaland, sometimes declining in population. Non-Hadza visitors and safari hunting have also affected them in recent years. This book includes descriptions of Hadza myths, culture, and modern struggles.
Hadza people traditionally live in bands or 'camps' of around 20-30 people, and their social structures are egalitarian and non-hierarchical. Traditionally, they primarily forage for food, eating mostly honey, tubers, fruit, and, especially in the dry season, meat. In 2015, there were between 1,200 and 1,300 Hadza people living in Tanzania. Only around a third of the remaining Hadza still survive exclusively by traditional foraging.
The term "Hadza" is the feminine plural form of haza 'human being'. The Hadza call themselves the hazabee 'people' and their language hazane 'as the people'. Other spellings in English are Hadzapi (from hazaphii 'they (male) are people') and Hatsa; other ethnonyms applied to the Hadza include Tindiga (from Swahili; human plural Watindiga), Kindiga, Kangeju (with a German j) and Wahi (with a German w). In current English usage, Hadza is the most commonly used term.
Language Once classified among the Khoisan languages primarily because it has clicks, the Hadza language (Hadzane) is now thought to be an isolated language, unrelated to any other language.Sands, Bonny E. (1998) 'The Linguistic Relationship between Hadza and Khoisan' In Schladt, Matthias (ed.) Language, Identity, and Conceptualization among the Khoisan (Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung Vol. 15), Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 265–283. Hadzane is an entirely oral language. UNESCO states that the language is vulnerable because most children learn it, but the use is restricted to certain areas of life, such as in their homes. Still, it is not predicted to be in danger of extinction. Hadzane fluency is also considered the most important factor in distinguishing whether someone is Hadza. In more recent years, many of the Hadza have learned Swahili, the national language of Tanzania, as a second language.
History
Oral tradition One telling of Hadza's oral history divides their past into four epochs, each inhabited by a different culture. According to this tradition, at the beginning of time, the world was inhabited by hairy giants called the akakaanebee (first ones) or geranebee (ancient ones). The akakaanebee did not possess tools or fire; they hunted game by running it down until it fell dead; they ate meat raw. They did not build houses but slept under trees, as the Hadza do today in the dry season. In older versions of this story, they did not use fire because it was physically impossible in the earth's primeval state. Younger Hadza, who have been to school, say that the akakaanebee did not know how to use fire.
In the second epoch, the akakaanebee were succeeded by the xhaaxhaanebee (in-between ones), who were equally gigantic but without hair. Fire could be made and used to cook meat, but animals had grown more wary of humans and had to be chased and hunted by dogs. The xhaaxhaanebee were the first people to use medicines and charms to protect themselves from enemies and initiated the rite. They lived in caves.
The third epoch was inhabited by the people of hamakwanebee (recent days), who were smaller than their predecessors. They invented bows and arrows, cooked with containers, 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. They also invented the gambling game lukuchuko.
The fourth epoch continues today and is inhabited by the hamayishonebee (those of today). When discussing the hamayishonebee epoch, people often mention specific names and places and can say approximately how many generations ago events occurred.
Archaeology and genetic history The Hadza are not closely related to any other people. The Hadza language was once classified with the Khoisan languages because it has click consonants; however, there is no further evidence they are related. Genetically, the Hadza do not appear to be closely related to Khoisan speakers; even the Sandawe, who live around away, diverged from the Hadza more than 15,000 years ago. Genetic testing also suggests significant admixture has occurred between the Hadza and Bantu. Minor admixture with Nilotic and Cushitic-speaking populations may have occurred in the last few thousand years. Today, a few Hadza women marry into neighbouring groups such as the Bantu Isanzu and the Nilotic Datooga, but these marriages often fail, and the women and their children return to the Hadza. In previous decades, rape and capture of Hadza women by outsiders seems to have been common. During a famine in 1918–20, some Hadza men were reported as taking Isanzu wives.
The Hadza's ancestors have probably lived in their current territory for tens of thousands of years. Hadzaland is about from Olduvai Gorge, an area sometimes called the "Cradle of Mankind" because of the number of hominin fossils found there, and from the prehistoric site of Laetoli. Archaeological evidence suggests that the area 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. Although the Hadza do not make rock art today, they consider several rock art sites within their territory, probably at least 2,000 years old, to have been created by their ancestors, and their oral history does not suggest they moved to Hadzaland from elsewhere.
The Hadza population is dominated by haplogroup B2-M112 (Y-DNA). There are also Y-haplogroups haplogroup E-V38(Y-DNA) and haplogroup E-M215(Y-DNA).Daniel Shriner et al. Genetic Ancestry of Hadza and Sandawe Peoples Reveals Ancient Population Structure in Africa, Genome Biology and Evolution, Volume 10, Issue 3, 1 March 2018, Pages 875–882, 14 March 2018
Precolonial period Until about 500 BCE, Tanzania was exclusively occupied by hunter-gatherers akin to the Hadza. The first agriculturalists to enter the region were Cushitic-speaking cattle herders from the Horn of Africa. Around 500 CE, the Bantu expansion reached Tanzania, bringing populations of farmers with iron tools and weapons. The last major ethnic group to enter the region were Nilotic pastoralists who migrated south from Sudan in the 18th century.
Each of these expansions of farming and herding peoples displaced earlier populations of hunter-gatherers, who were at a demographic and technological disadvantage and vulnerable to the loss of environmental resources (i.e., foraging areas and habitats for game) to farmland and pastures.* Groups such as the Hadza and the Sandawe are remnants of indigenous hunter-gatherer populations that were once much more widespread, and they are under continued pressure from the expansion of agriculture into their traditional lands.
Farmers and herders appeared in the vicinity of Hadzaland relatively recently. The Isanzu, a Bantu farming people, began living south of Hadzaland around 1850. The pastoralist Iraqw and Datooga were both forced to migrate into the area by the expansion of the Maasai, the former in the 19th century and the latter in the 1910s. The Hadza also have direct contact with the Maasai and with the Sukuma west of Lake Eyasi. The upheavals caused by the Maasai expansion in the late 19th century caused a decline in the Hadza population.
The Hadza's interaction with many of these peoples has been hostile. Pastoralists often killed Hadza as reprisals for the "theft" of livestock since the Hadza did not have the notion of animal ownership and would hunt them as they would wild game. The general attitude of neighboring agro-pastoralists towards the Hadza was prejudicial. They viewed them as backward, lacking a "real language," and made up of the dispossessed of neighboring tribes that had fled into the forest out of poverty or because they committed a crime. Many of these misconceptions were transmitted to early colonial visitors to the region who wrote about the Hadza.
The Isanzu were hostile to the Hadza at times. Isanzu people may have captured them as part of the slave trade until as late as the 1870s when it was halted by the German colonial government. Later interactions were more peaceful, with the two peoples sometimes intermarrying and residing together, though as late as 1912, the Hadza were reported as being "ready for war" with the Isanzu. Still, folk tales depict the Isanzu as favorable and, at times, heroic, unlike the Iraqw and the cattle-raiding Maasai. Moreover, many goods and customs come from them, and the Hadza myths mention and depict a benevolent influence of the Isanzu in their mythology.
The Sukuma and the Hadza had a more amicable relationship. The Sukuma drove their herds and salt caravans through Hadza lands and exchanged old metal tools, which the Hadza made into arrowheads, for the right to hunt elephants in Hadzaland.
20th century
In the late 19th century, European powers claimed much of the African continent as colonies in a period known as the Scramble for Africa. The Hadza became part of German East Africa, though there is no evidence that Europeans had ever visited Hadzaland before the colony was proclaimed. The earliest mention of the Hadza in a written account is in German explorer Oscar Baumann's Durch Massailand zur Nilquelle (1894). The Hadza hid from Baumann and other early explorers, and their descriptions are based on second-hand accounts.
The first Europeans to report meeting the Hadza are Otto Dempwolff and Erich Obst. The latter lived with them for eight weeks in 1911. German Tanganyika came under British control at the end of the First World War (1917), and soon after, British colonial officer F. J. Bagshawe wrote about the Hadza. The accounts of these early European visitors portray the Hadza at the beginning of the 20th century as living in the same way as they do today. Early on, Obst noted a distinction between what he considered the 'pure' Hadza (those subsisting purely by hunting and gathering) and those that lived with the Isanzu and practiced some cultivation.
The foraging Hadza foraged and hunted using many of the same techniques they do today. Game was more plentiful in the early 20th century because farmers had not yet begun directly encroaching on their lands. Some early reports describe the Hadza as having chiefs or big men, but those reports were probably mistaken; more reliable accounts portray the early 20th century Hadza as egalitarian, as they are today. They also lived in similarly sized camps, used the same tools, built houses in the same style, and had similar religious beliefs.