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Hadzabe: Good citizens of this country
2007-04-30 09:23:06
By Editor
Recent reports indicate that the small population of the Hadzabe bushmen, who live around Lake Eyasi in Northern Tanzania, and whose population ranges between 2,500 and 10,000, are threatened with displacement through large-scale land acquisition.
A recent press report indicates that a foreign investor is trying to grab their traditional land by intending to take over the entire 3,975 square kilometers of the Yaeda Valley and the stretching Eyasi escarpments in the Eastern Division of Mbulu District in Manyara Region.
It is reported that the district authorities have already issued several ultimatums for the Hadzabe, who largely keep to themselves, to vacate the area so as to pave way for the investor, who has already set up camp, to establish a commercial hunting and sports enterprise in the area.
The investor`s move to acquire the area lies in the fact that Lake Eyasi is a nice place to camp and apart from the game, has got an incredible bird life.
The existing commercial opportunities no doubt have tempted both the local authorities and the foreign investor to go to the extent of being prepared to have the Habzabe uprooted from their ancestral lands.
The Hadzabe Bushmen, with their isolated culture, like their counterparts in the Kalahari in Southern Africa, have their way of life dating back to tens of thousands of years.
Most of them have never seen a doctor or a classroom, and are sheltered in caves and tree canopies. They hunt baboons and antelopes, and roots provide them with a wide range of medicines.
Much as the issue of having the bellicose small tribe, which has stuck to its tradition in spite of all winds of change, the latest being globalization, it goes without saying that uprooting them from their ancestral lands is unfair and cannot be justified.
We all know how the government had done its best, albeit without success, to resettle them and introduce school and health facilities.
It could be that some zealous economists have seen the monetary potential of the dry woodland in which the Hadzabe people live, and have therefore come to a conclusion that bushmen tradition has no place in the modern world and they must therefore be uprooted and forced to go I-don’t-know-where.
What people who harbour that line of thinking should know is that the Hadzabe have got as much rights as anybody else to live in their ancestral area unmolested.
Failure by the authorities to penetrate their society and introduce modern ways of life is not an excuse to displace a whole tribe.
In the year 2004, the Bushmen of Kalahari in Namibia filed a suit for being squeezed off their ancestral lands to make room for industries like diamond mining and cattle ranching.
In the same year, the Bushmen in Botswana also took legal steps to free themselves from a similar predicament.
It goes without saying that what the authorities need to do is to befriend the Hadzabe so that this generation can learn from their rich historical tradition, especially in the field of medicine, because they have succeeded to fight disease by using simple and effective ways.
These are people, they are not pebbles. If we want them to change, we should also be ready to change our attitude on the good citizens of this country known as the Hadzabe.
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