Last week, I had the chance to spend a morning with a group from the Hadzabe tribe in Tanzania. This is one of the few hunter-gatherer tribes left in the world.

This was a group of roughly 20 Hadza. Our guide was an ex-member of the tribe, who said he’d been taken from the tribe at a young age by a Spanish couple and attended English schools.

When we came upon the group, the men had just finished a successful hunt, having killed an impala. They were sitting in groups, harvesting the impala’s corpse. Its head had been placed in the wedge of a tree. One group was barbecuing its meat. Another group was laying out its skin to dry and be made into clothing. Yet another group was separating tendons from its bones to use as string.



I could immediately tell that this was going to be an unusual experience. Many “cultural” experiences like this feel rather staged, with the tribe members making the guests the center of attention and putting on a bit of a performance. The Hadza barely noticed we were there. It seemed like they were busy doing exactly what they’d be doing if we weren’t there. They seemed to carry themselves with a lot of poise and self-respect.

After a while, some of the men came over and greeted us. Several of them were dressed in the skins of animals they’d killed. Their leader, who we later learned was also the best hunter, was adorned the most, and radiated an aura of gentle power. Some of them were wearing pants and slippers, which we were told were a couple of the things they’d picked up from the modern world.

Some of the men were about to go on a hunting/gathering trip. One of them gave us a description of what was going to happen, in the Hadza language. He described how they used different arrows depending on who the target was. For monkeys for example, they had a special arrow head that resisted removal (since monkeys are smart enough to remove an arrow and run away).



The Hadza speak an interesting sounding language, with a lot of clicking and sucking sounds. Their language is an isolate - it is unrelated to any of the languages in the neighboring regions. They seem to have kept to themselves for a very long time, which may also explain their lack of interest in changing their lifestyles even as all the tribes around them have begun to modernize.

Three men and one boy set out on the trip, and we tried to follow. Within minutes, I had a distinct sense of feeling useless. They were moving at a ridiculous speed, listening for bird calls and weaving in and out of shrubs and trees. I was struggling to keep up, and cut myself repeatedly on various thorny bushes, despite having more protective clothing than all of them combined. Occasionally, they’d stop to break and eat a fruit, or pocket some roots or leaves.



They seemed to be trying to kill literally anything that moved. Apparently they have the most diverse diet in the world, eating songbirds, lizards, even snakes. Apparently baboons are their favorite. A man wishing to marry a woman would need to bring her father 2 dead baboons to prove his worth. After a couple failed attempts, one of the men managed to knock a bird out of a tree.



The treat they were actually after was honey. One of them knew of a tree that had a beehive, so that’s where they were headed. They lit a fire, directed the smoke at the bees, and then pulled out the hive with their bare hands (getting stung many times in the process). There was a ridiculous amount of honey, and they gave us some to try.



Once we’d all had our fill, they tossed the excess honey into a shrub and headed back to their camp. Back at the camp, they offered us some impala meat, which we politely refused. We had a brief chance to meet some of the women (who live separately from the men), and then they bid us goodbye.

I found several parts of this experience striking.

  • Since I was a kid, I didn’t have a good mental picture of how our species could’ve gotten by without all our modern comforts. How did we drink water without water purifiers? How did we clean our hands without soap? How did we keep things fresh without a fridge? How did we sleep without bedding? Now I had all the answers. On the sanitation and hygiene front in particular, it seemed like the Hadza don’t bother with any modern hygiene at all. I’d seen them cook meat, forage for roots and lick honey without washing their hands once. They stored the cooked meat in wedges on trees, and ate it at their leisure. They slept on clearings in the ground.
  • Their body language and demeanour left a lasting impact on me. They seemed genuinely light and happy - constantly cracking jokes, laughing and playing.
  • They seemed to have no curiousity about modern stuff, like our phones and car.
  • To my eyes, their lifestyle seemed like a lot of “taking” - they’d roam from place to place, kill and eat everything in the vicinity, and move on. In modern society there’s a need to “produce some value” before you consume anything.
  • They seemed to be living a life of surplus. They didn’t bother with storing excess honey, or fruits they couldn’t finish - they trusted they could get more.

I’d just done a 7 day safari before this, and yet somehow this felt like the most “natural” experience of the week. I’d highly recommend it to anyone visiting Tanzania.