With Lucy safely re-homed, we pressed on toward our destination in the eastern ridges of Yaeda Valley. Our home for the next two nights would be a campsite in the wilderness near the village of Yaeda Chini. Yaeda Chini is part of the home range of the Hadzabe but now also hosts a settlement of other tribes and major conservation and cultural preservation initiatives, including a community-led REDD+ project and a UNESCO-supported program to protect the Hadzane language and traditional tracking knowledge.
As we entered the broad Yaeda Valley, we were surprised to find that heavy rains in recent years had transformed what was seasonal marshland into an extensive lake. We skirted around its southern periphery, driving past fields of bottle gourds (possibly one of the first domesticated plants), and then up along the eastern shore where the road took us past makeshift villages composed of tarpaulin-covered shelters and patchwork markets. Water provides incredible habitats for all manner of life but also represents economic opportunity and thousands from across Tanzania had come to fish and sell their catch, which is smoked on top of adobe kilns.
Such settlements also come at a cost. If the lake dries, these communities will vanish and leave behind mountains of trash and ecological damage. In the meantime, their presence places immense pressure on the Hadza, who rely on the valley’s woodlands and plains for hunting and gathering. Competition for resources, coupled with the introduction of alcohol, drugs, prostitution, and disease threatens to accelerate the erosion of Hadza life-ways already under strain.
By now, the day had slipped away and the setting sun briefly painted the sky in brilliant orange before extinguishing. Our progress was slowed by the growing dark and washed-out bridges and gullies carved by monsoonal floods that forced detours and tentative crossings. It was 8 PM when we finally spotted the faint side-track that led into the woodland and to our designated camp. We were dusty, road-weary, and grateful the long drive was over. But we were nonetheless lifted in spirit by the sight of the Hadza who were to be our guides during our stay. Names were exchanged and greetings offered in rapid fire as we stumbled in the darkness to find our tents, already pitched by the Dorobo advance team. Dinner was shared around a campfire set at the base of a massive baobab tree, where Douglas and Prisca translated between us and our Hadza companions. The firelight flickered across faces old and new, bridging two vastly different cultures divided by language but drawn together by shared humanity and curiosity.
The next morning, July 5th, revealed our first daylight view of Hadzaland. Dominating the otherwise typical but beautiful East African woods were massive baobabs, which have stood sentinel for hundreds of years. There was an approachability to this landscape but also a palpable sense of sacredness as this land had sustained and borne witness to the Hadza for at least 100,000 years. To add perspective, it is thought that the first migrations of modern humans to leave African began ~70,000 years ago. While new populations were established across Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas; while agriculture and domestication fed the first major civilizations in Mesopotamia; while the age of exploration, colonization, and slave trade forever changed the world; while countless wars were fought; while trains, cars, planes, rockets, satellites, nuclear technology, and computers brought us into the anthropocene–the Hadza were right here in this incredible land. And during this time under Hadza care, the land has remained alive, healthy, and productive–a stark contrast to the overworked agricultural lands across the world where fertilizers are required to sustain crops. Sadly, the Hadza way of life is under great pressure from numerous outside influences that erode their home range and culture.
We witnessed this erosion at the Hadza encampment we visited this day. Traditionally, the Hadza are nomadic and only stay in a location for a few months so the land isn’t over taxed and able to replenish resources. However, the encroachment of pastoralist tribes, such as the Datoga (who were displaced by their more powerful neighbors, the Maasai), has severely reduced their traditional home range, and settlements and tourists, such as ourselves, have radically altered their culture. We were dismayed by the new power line that decorated the skyline above, the trash piles of plastics dirtying the ground, and the chickens that rooted for food in the encampment. The time of the traditional Hadza way of life is fast approaching an inevitable end.
After greetings were given, a group of Hadza women led us into the woods to teach us how to forage for tubers. Where we saw only scrub and trees, they read subtle signs in the vegetation and used rhythmic taps of their digging sticks to locate buried tubers. The students joined in and helped excavate the roots until we had assembled a generous pile. The Hadza men then demonstrated how to kindle fire by spinning an arrow shaft against a wooden base until friction generated enough hot wood dust to coax an ember into life. The ember was fed into a bundle of dried grass to mature into flame and soon a simple ground fire roasted our tubers. With blackened skin and steaming hot, the tubers burst with moisture and flavor. It is a simple yet nourishing food that has sustained the Hadza for millennia.
After we returned to our camp site, we received a lesson in arrow making. Hadza men prepared branches of Grewia, a relative of the crossberry bush we can find in La Jolla, by heating them in the hot ashes of the campfire to make peeling the bark easy and to make the wood pliable. They demonstrated how to trim off knots and reduce the branch to the desired thickness using a knife. They then straightened each shaft with careful counter-bending, using fire for heat and their teeth as clamps. By sighting down the length of the shaft, they judged where adjustments were needed until each was perfectly true. Decorative etchings were cut with blades and then rubbed with ash for contrast. Finally, feathers from guinea fowl (Guttera edouardi), or other birds, including the endemic Tanzanian spur fowl (Pternistis rufopictus), were fletched onto the shafts, bound with animal tendon softened in the mouth (the tendon dries tightly around the fletching and arrow shaft, eliminating the need for knots). The result was an elegant arrow as a gift to each of us that were both functional tools and works of art.
That evening, we ate dinner under the baobab and listened to a long, spirited tale by Moshi, a respected, bombastic, and charismatic Hadza hunter and friend of Pascal. Our night concluded with a briefing meeting about our next day's mission: We would break camp and hike west across Yaeda Valley to Gideru Ridge where a second Hadza camp awaited us.