Hadza

It is still dark when we leave the lodge. I manoeuvre the Land Rover with excitement, following the half-spoken instructions of Hassan, our guide, who is still half asleep. The road is sketchy, and fording a stream causes me some problems. We leave the vehicle under a baobab and begin walking through the savannah. There are three of us: my partner, Hassan and myself.

After a long drive we catch sight of them. Five or six men sitting around a small fire. Hanging in a tree nearby, there are baboon skins, bows, a small musical instrument made of wood, an enormous python skin. A short distance away there is the circle of women, and less than a dozen very small huts. I crouch next to the fire, joining the circle of men. Most unusually for Africa, there are no greetings, but one of them offers me a piece of tree trunk to sit on and I understand I am welcome. He’s a boy, with the darkest skin, an elongated skull, wide gentle eyes, a proud look, a baboon fur on his shoulders. Next to me a man is whittling an arrow with a blunt knife. I take out my Opinel, an outdoors sharp French penknife, and offer it to him. He tests the edge of the blade with his finger and laughs, then jokingly makes as if to cut a lock of hair from the head of the person next to him. Everyone laughs. He hands me back the knife, but I indicate with a look that he can keep it. Later on, I find out that his name is Sha-Kua. I stare into the fire along with the others and begin to feel a strange intoxication, a wild joy, an obscure feeling of having joined something primordial, a childhood game, something we have done as a species for hundreds of thousands of years, something for which we have evolved. In the company of these African men whose language I don’t even speak, and who know so little about the world that I am from, I feel strangely at home.

They are Hadza, a population of hunter-gatherers. They live in a region of northern Tanzania. There are not many of them left. The migrations of Masai cattle-herders, and then the encroachment of the modern world, has significantly diminished their territory. In the seventies, the socialist government of Tanzania attempted to improve their standard of living by providing them with housing. The Hadza tried living in it for a while, but only before returning to the nomadic way of life that they preferred. I have heard about young Hadza who have gone to school, got good jobs – something precious in Africa, where hunger and poverty are common – but have decided to give it all up in order to return to a life of hunting. Sitting with these men around the fire, it is a little easier for me to understand why.

A little easier still when, shortly afterwards, we leave for the hunt. We walk silently and warily in the savannah, hands tensed on bows. The men spread out, remaining in contact through a series of quiet whistles that I can hardly distinguish from the birdsong. Sha-Kua hits a dik-dik, a small antelope, with one of his arrows. We follow the trail of its blood and find the poor animal, pierced through by the arrow, in a bush where it has hidden itself to die. The men light a fire by rubbing wood together, as easily as I would with a box of matches. I have a go at it myself, without success; the boy laughs and begins to teach me. The little antelope is put on the fire, and we all eat together. Sha-Kua has removed one of its horns as a gift for me.

Have I succumbed to a kind of naïve romanticism? Or to that infinite capacity of ours to project our own thoughts and fantasies on to others? I don’t know, but I do know that my heart was still racing even as we returned in single file towards the village. One of the men carries on his shoulders the remaining half of the antelope, for the women who in the meantime have been searching for fruits, berries and roots. I feel like a child invited to join in playing the most wonderful game. A part of me would like to stay with these men who laugh, joke, teach me things, walk with bare feet in the savannah, calmly and proudly, with bows in their hands. Isn’t this what we were born to do? Isn’t this what we have always done, for countless millennia? A few friends around a fire, a hunting expedition, the return home to the women. Back in camp, next to the fire again, a pipe is passed round, and this time I decide to take its acrid smoke into my lungs. It is a kind of mild marijuana that grows naturally in the area.

Daudi Peterson, an American anthropologist who grew up in Tanzania and has lived extensively with these people, has collected in a beautiful book with the wonderful title Hadzabe: By the Light of a Million Fires, stories and images by Hadza speaking in the first person about their lives and their view of the world. They live in small independent groups in which decisions are taken in common, with the women having as much say as the men. When two young people fall in love, the man goes hunting for a baboon and gives it to the father of the woman as a sign of gratitude, and the two lovers start to live together. The entire group takes care of the children. Elders are respected, their stories are listened to around the fire, but they have no more influence in decision-making than anyone else. There are no social classes and there is no hierarchy. There are no leaders. Anyone who thinks themselves superior is mocked. Anyone in disagreement with the group, or unhappy in a given situation, can go their own way. There is no property; food is immediately divided up and distributed, since the meat and other components of their diet cannot be kept. Today anthropology teaches us that this is the way our species has lived for hundreds of thousands of years, an immensely long period of time. Cultivating fields, keeping cattle, building cities, reading books, erecting temples and cathedrals, surfing the internet, are all incredibly recent innovations by comparison. Perhaps we are not really used to the novelty of these things yet, to the discontents of civilization?

And the Hadza? They are convinced, like the rest of humanity – whether Chinese, British or Veronese – that their own way of life is the only reasonable one, and that all the others are strange. They observe that the tribes in the area who live from cattle-herding or agriculture suffer from hunger and even famine (a few years ago a drought decimated the cattle of the Masai, reducing the population to utter poverty). The Hadza do not know famine: there is never any lack of animals to hunt or fruits to gather in the savannah. I tried to get Hassan, our guide, to ask Sha-Kua what he thought about us. Hassan was born in a village near to Hadza territory, and has known them since he was a boy. He tells me how he used to find animals struck by Hadza arrows, and used to seek them out to return them. He is on friendly terms with the Hadza. But his answer to my question sounds nonsensical to me: ‘He thinks that you are interested in them because they are such good hunters and you want to learn from them.’ I wonder if he is pulling my leg. But then I ask myself whether, as boys in Verona in the seventies, we had the slightest interest in the American tourists we would see passing by. Perhaps Sha-Kua had a similar lack of interest in how ‘the others’ lived. Like the majority of men, he cared about his friends, his hunting, his woman. And perhaps it was this that had allowed his people to remain so uninfluenced and unchanged for centuries, and to keep living as the fathers of their fathers had lived. Perhaps Sha-Kua and his people are less gnawed by curiosity, by the desire to know more. Perhaps it was this that pushed some of us out of Africa, spread us across the planet, made us domesticate animals and plants, investigate the stars, ask a thousand questions, build villages, cities, metropolises and megalopolises. Perhaps those who let the Neolithic revolution pass them by – along with all the other, lesser ones – simply had less curiosity, less desire to look beyond the next hill. Or perhaps they were far-sighted enough to see the risks of imbalance that such changes brought with them. I don’t know.

So here we are, you and I, Sha-Kua, looking at each other across the millennia since our ancestors took such different paths, and it seems to me that I can see in your eyes both the value and the cost of the paths taken. I go around the world, read books, have health care if I fall ill; you don’t. I have an irremediable restlessness and can’t stay still. As for you, I don’t know. But the things that matter to us have remained basically the same, and in my naïve imagination you possess them all, because our biology has evolved to do what you do, and not what I do. I certainly wouldn’t know how to live like you any longer. And it makes no sense to wonder, however irresistibly, if this other path was worth taking after all. We are what we are.

I’m leaving you my French knife. It’s of much more use to you than to me. You’re giving me this small antelope horn. For me it is a reminder of a life that’s been lived for one hundred thousand years. A lost life that you, Sha-Kua, are one of the very last to suffer, or to savour.