Benenson Productions
"The HaDZa"
WITH VARIOUS
FILE: HLOF 54 fortrns-SHORT VERSION
AUGUST 23, 2015
TRANSCRIBED BY TRANSCRIPTION HOUSE (BJS)
[01:00:24]
ALFRE: No matter where you live on Earth, this is where you came from. And of all of the people living today, the ones whose lives most resemble the way we all once lived are the Hadza.
[01:00:40]
WRANGHAM: The Hadza are the only people now living in Africa, who, just a few hundred of them, are actually practicing a hunting-and-gathering way of life, full time, relying on no agricultural resources at all.
[01:00:57]
MBUGOSHI: I live up here in the Highlands. I have lived here all my life.
[01:01:07]
SPENCER: In our search for origins, we start with people alive today and trace back in time and, taking this genealogical approach, constructing a family tree. Genetically speaking, I think the Hadza trace back to the first people to live in East Africa. They have been living continuously in the same place for tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years.
[01:01:31]
BANKS: There's far fewer people connected to nature now. And certainly, no one connected the way that the Hadza are.
[01:01:35]
ALYSSA: To them, the lands belongs to the animals, and they're just borrowing it for the time being.
[01:01:42]
DAUDI: At the core, they're real activists. Environmental activists.
[01:01:53]
KAUNDA: But things now are changing. We are truly unable to maintain our old way of life.
[01:02:00]
MBUGOSHI: Now we worry about losing all of our land.
[01:02:07]
ZELEZA: It's an agrarian crisis. It's a political crisis. It's a development crisis.
[01:02:13]
KAUNDA: If things keep going the way they are, and people continue to come here, we will be finished. Gone forever.
[01:02:22] [OPENING TITLES]
[01:02:37]
ALFRE: The Hadza have lived here longer than any group of people have lived in any one place on Earth. When the Egyptian pyramids were completed, the Hadza had already been on their lands for over 50,000 years.
[01:02:58]
MBUGOSHI: When we hunt, the animals we value the most are giraffe, land, zebra and other small animals like baboons.
[01:03:11]
ALYSSA: I have never known of a Hadza losing an animal. Because even if you are a -- a poor tracker, your brother or your best friend or your cousin or your uncle, one of those guys is going to be a really decent tracker, and he'll help you out. They will see the tip of one leaf that has been bent, and they will say, "Okay. The kudu went that way."
[01:03:34]
ALFRE: The Hadza continue to practice a way of life that has sustained our species for most of human history, leaving virtually no mark on the land.
[01:03:51]
WRANGHAM: They are the strongest link we have to a past that, for almost two million years, was the way in which we lived.
[01:04:07]
DAUDI: The Hadza have this amazing knowledge about the land they live on. It's very functional. It's very practical. When a Hadza walk in, on the bush, he's picking up on all of this stuff that most of us are not. The bird calls, and then suddenly they'll just start running. What it is, it's -- it's an eagle that took a -- a [UNINTELLIGIBLE], and they just picked it up on a slight call somewhere.
[01:04:37]
MWAPO: I found it grazing. I approached slowly. I snuck up on it from about here to that point over there and then stopped. I waited for him to come out. He came out from that tree over there. And I hit him at about the distance of those trees.
[01:05:03]
SPENCER: It's knowledge that presumably everybody in the past would have had. And you would have passed it on through storytelling. Nothing was written down. Most of us if we were dumped down there without anything else to survive, other than our wits, we wouldn't be able to do it, 'cause we've lost all of that. They retain it, and that's an important insight into the way we lived for most of our evolutionary history.
[01:05:40]
MWAPO: There is a specific bird we call tikiriko. It's the Honeyguide. In the evening, there aren't too many Honeyguide birds. But in the morning, there are so many singing. Everywhere acheacheache.
[01:05:57]
JOHANA: The honeyguide bird leads us to the trees. Its reward is food -- the honeycomb. When you take it from the bees, you eat it and throw away the honeycomb. When the bird leaves, he takes a bit of wax with him. You can pass right by a beehive and not see it. And you can even go all the way to Ndobojo...and it will bring you right back to where you started.
[01:07:03]
ALYSSA: Honey is actually the number-one ranked food among men, women and children. The most common honey that they consume is bee honey from the African killer bees.
[01:07:18]
WRANGHAM: Smoke enables us to quell the bees and spend 15, 20 minutes getting the honey out. It's the most developed, co-evolved, mutually helpful relationship between any mammal and any bird.
[01:07:37]
BANKS: In a conservation group, we talk about that all of the time. That nature and people are -- are integrally connected. It's hard to imagine a better connection than that.
[01:07:52]
KAUNDA: When we need to go to the market we bring honey. At the market we meet Swahili and Datoga people. We trade, they need our honey and they have what we need.
[01:08:13]
WANDE: It's only recently that we started eating cornmeal. The Miramba farmers come and trade cornmeal for our honey. They get the better deal.
[01:08:29]
KAUNDA: The only animal we're afraid of is the elephant. It's dangerous because of its trunk. But lions are no problem. We can kill lions.
[01:08:45]
ALFRE: As guardians of this land going back countless generations, the Hadza take only what they need and use all that they take.
[01:09:03]
WRANGHAM: It's been cut up in about 17 minutes, something like that, and people start eating within 10 minutes of it being cut, I think.
[01:09:12]
BANKS: Zagim, do you prefer to eat the meat cooked on an open fire like this, or would you rather take it back to the village and boil it?
ZAGIM: Roasted. I prefer them roasted. These ribs...
BANKS: Really tasty, huh?
ZAGIM: The ribs are roasted by the men. And then the rest of the meat is taken back to the women to boil.
[SINGING]
[01:09:44]
WRANGHAM: Really, you know, if we were going to have a sensible use of the words, we would call it gatherer-hunter, because there are many days in which no meat comes in. All of the hunters in the camp fail to get any meat. But there is no day in which the women fail to gather. This sort of environment, particularly in the dry season, has very little plant food to offer. But there's one kind of food that very few animals exploit, that humans have a tremendous opportunity to get.
[01:10:21]
And that's what we're looking at here. Digging for roots. Roots are a wonderful source of food, because they are a store for the nutrients and of water. There is a nice, big tuber. Mama, may I see the root?
MAMA: The root, here.
[01:10:41]
WRANGHAM: Thank you. Uh-huh. We're all happy now, because this is the kind of big root that is the pay dirt. This is the food that enabled our ancestors to colonize the savannas. It gave them a secure food base, even when there was nothing else to eat. No meat. No honey. No fruit. No seeds. This is what kept us going.
[01:11:13]
SPENCER: We all share much more DNA in common with each other than we really should, given the size of our population. There're seven billion people alive today. And it's a sign that we actually went through a near-extinction event ourselves. I think it h happened about 70,000 years ago, um, the human population dropped to fewer than 10,000 people, perhaps as few as, you know, a couple of thousand, everybody living in Africa.
[01:11:36]
ALYSSA: Many anthropologists now say that the Hadza have lived in this area for thousands and thousands of years. And yet it's only been in the written history books that the Hadza are living in this area, and that they even exist, for approximately a hundred years. If you talk to the Hadza about this, they say that the reason that it took so long for people to realize that they were there, is that when they saw outsiders, they were fearful, initially. And so, they would run into the bush, and hide. The Hadza, based on language, and based on their genetic diversity, were most likely there before all of the neighboring tribes.
[01:12:19]
ALFRE: The Hadza's first documented contact with outsiders was in 1915. In the years since, colonialists, missionaries, and governments have made many unsuccessful attempts to modernize them.
[01:12:48]
VENEY: We're talking about a country that had been under German rule, when Germany lost its colonies in World War I, it became a part of the British colonialism.
[01:13:01]
ZELEZA: One of the things colonialism did was to turn these economies into cash crop producing economies. The best land, water, has been given over to those things. There are structural conditions that make these already vulnerable regions become even more vulnerable.
[01:13:21]
VENEY: Tanzania gained its independence in 1961 and the government adopted a socialist policy.
[01:13:28]
ZELEZA: The project of nation building in Tanzania took a particular form in which there was a deliberate effort to create national culture, through national language, and national this, and national that, and that had implications for the maintenance and production and sustenance of the different ethnic communities.
[01:13:50]
ALFRE: Pressured by the Tanzanian government to stop wearing animal skins, they adopted Western clothing, mostly donated by foreign visitors.
[01:14:01]
VENEY: In the 1970s the Hadza people were removed and put into villages, village-ization as a part of a development strategy. On paper, it did look like a good policy where you could bring people together, and everybody would have an elementary school, medical facilities, a water pump, you know, really basic things. That looked fine. But, at the same time, you're forcing people to move. So, in the long run, the Hadza ended up going back to their ancestral homes.
[01:14:34]
PETER: I first heard about the Hadza from [SOUNDS LIKE: a warden] out of the Serengeti. [SOUNDS LIKE: That was] '68, '69. And he pointed down toward the [SOUNDS LIKE: Aida] Valley there, and said, "You know, there's an indigenous people down there, they still have bushman-like habits, and stuff, and they're very hard to reach." We were extremely lucky we found the Hadza the first day out, which apparently in those days was kinda hard to do. What struck me very much was how little time they had to spent hunting and digging. I mean, they really had a lot of leisure.
[SINGING]
[01:15:21]
PETER: They are very dignified. They have a beautiful life and they know it, but as soon as you bring them into civilization they are the bottom of the pile, and everybody preys on them.
[01:15:30]
DAUDI: It comes down to wealth. It comes down to goods. Governments don't like it. They don't get any tax revenue out of them. And how do you measure success? In the whole world, you measure success by accumulation of wealth. This is a different way. It's the way we all were for most of our evolutionary history, and many people consider it backwards. Primitive. Something that should change. You [SOUNDS LIKE: may be aware] of the government giving the whole [SOUNDS LIKE: Eyasi] Basin to a royal family from Abu Dhabi as their hunting grounds.
[01:16:04]
This was back a few years ago. Stephanie McCrom from the Washington Post came out. Went with a local journalist down there in the Valley, threatened by politicians en route and wrote that story. Front page. Washington Post. And that turned the tide. The Abu Dhabi sent a delegation to the UN. Indigenous Rights Department. And said, "Look, you know, is this going to hurt our public relations?" And they said, "By all means, but you can do it right," and I think in the end they just realized it was too difficult, too messy, and they pulled out.
[01:16:52]
ALFRE: Confident that each day will provide sustenance, the Hadza never store food for the future. In fact, they horde nothing.
[SINGING]
[01:17:13]
WANDE: We do a lot of sharing. Especially with women who have no husband. If meat came to my neighbor, she'd remember that I'm alone, and bring some meat to me.
[SINGING]
[01:17:28]
SPENCER: The Hadza give us some insights into what it means to be human, psychologically with their social interactions, the group size. Certainly, the ability to interact with other people was critical in our early evolution in developing our -- our mental abilities, coupled with competition, of course. There is a competition within the group. Competition for mates. Who is going to be the lucky one who gets to pass on their genes?
[01:17:55]
GOODALL: For me, language, our kind of language, has been something which I think promoted the development of the intellect, and once we have that ability, that enables you teach about things that aren't present, for the first time. It enables you to talk about the distant past, and most important of all, we can discuss. And when you bring different people to the table who have different experiences, and they start discussing some problem, or some idea, you know it develops in -- in a very, um, unpredictable way.
[SINGING]
[01:19:15]
ALYSSA: Hazane is a click-based language. It's distinct from every other language on the planet. It may perhaps be the oldest language on the planet because it is so very, very different, and the clicks are very unique. And you can tell even with an untrained ear how special this language is.
[SINGING]
[01:19:49]
It's not a written language. It's an oral language, which makes it even more difficult to learn, because you can't take a class in Hazane. There is only a total of one-thousand people on earth who speak this language. When the Hadza try to identify in terms of in group, out group, who is Hadza and who is not, the number-one go-to characteristic is who speaks Hazane.
[01:20:08]
ALFRE: Increasing contact with outsiders, from tour companies to other tribes, has made it necessary for all but the eldest Hadza to learn Swahili, the language of East Africa.
[01:20:21]
KAUDA: I learned to speak the Swahili that I am speaking right here. We use it when we are trading h money with the Datoga.
[01:20:34]
SINGING: Now we are going to get grass to thatch our houses.
[01:22:12]
ALFRE: The Hadza are nomadic. Changing camps with the seasons. When they move on, their grass dwellings melt back into the landscape.
[01:22:31]
ALYSSA: A big chunk of the day, six hours, maybe -- give or take -- is spent in just food collection alone. Most of the berry bushes around here have been picked out. The boys, can, uh, [SOUNDS LIKE: bend] a little bit higher in order to get those that are on the top of the bushes. Right now, in this particular region, the only berries that they have in abundance are kongolobei.
[01:23:01]
They actually are able to bring home several kilos of berries on every foraging trip. So if they do a morning foraging excursion and an afternoon foraging excursion, they can often come home with seven or eight kilos of berries. The first toy that a young Hadza boy will get is a bow and some arrows. [SOUNDS LIKE: Neje and Shinje] have made very small bows and arrows for some of these little guys to practice with, so as you can see, the bow is very small.
[01:23:40]
Shinje made one slightly bigger, and they've tipped the ends of these very small arrows with -- is this honey or something else?
BOY: It's like wax.
ALYSSA: Ah. With the sticky gum, um, that's like wax. Uh, and in this way, it'll stick to things, and it's not dangerous. Wow. So far...
[SINGING]
[01:24:32]
We teach ourselves how to hunt, we go and kill small birds, we bring them here, and then we eat them.
[01:24:52]
ALYSSA: By the time you're five, you can hit quite a lot, and by the time they're 10, they're bringing home a lot of small game meat.
[01:25:17]
BOY : I see it, I kill it, I bring it home.
[01:25:31]
ALFRE: Among the Hadza, division of labor is organized along gender lines. The men make the weapons. The women make almost everything else, starting with their dolls.
[01:25:42]
ALYSSA: They've found an old termite mound. And the young teenage girls who have told me that it makes the best mud, to create dolls, and it's mostly the teenage girls that know how to do this. And the little ones learn how to make the dolls when they come along on these trips.
[01:26:39]
HADZA MAN: If a Hadza guy wishes to get married, first you get consent from the girl. And then you go tell your mom. Your mom and aunties go and talk to her parents. They give the news to her parents. That's the way it's done.
[01:27:05]
WANDE: Five women from the girl's side and five from the boy's side meet, go out together, gather saplings, and build a hut. Then the girl goes into the hut and puts on a beaded necklace. She starts dancing to her own singing. Then and there they are married.
[01:27:35]
HADZA MAN: I'm married and have five children. I have a son and a daughter. But three of my children passed away.
MAN : Go carefully. Slowly, slowly.
[01:27:52]
ALYSSA: The Hadza do in fact have high infant mortality. This is partially due to, diarrhea, of course, is a big one, malaria, things that anyone living in a kind of a remote area, without routine access to health care, would suffer from.
[01:28:06]
ALFRE: Although there is a high mortality rate in the first few years of life, adult Hadza typically live into their sixties, some even into their seventies and eighties.
[01:28:19]
ALYSSA: In Hazane, if you say "ichina" it's kind of a -- let's dance, let's party. Always. These are wild grandmas.
[SINGING]
[01:28:44]
WOMAN: That's how we sang in the old days. [CLAPS]
[01:28:51]
It's always a -- a blessing and a curse when I'm trying to figure out how old the Hadza are for my demographic database, and one surefire way that I've found out is, although the Hadza might not keep track of the years, in terms of the ages of their children, um, you always know ranking. So, you always know you know, birth order is really important, so you always know who is younger, and who's older, and where you fall in the lineup of their siblings, and parents can always tell you when an event happened. How -- I always say, "Well, how tall was your child?"
[01:29:21]
And they can always tell you, right away, how tall they were, and an equivalent-aged child, they were immediately able to tell you. So it's not that they don't keep track of it. I think it's just a different way of doing it, and a way that makes much more sense in their community and in their population.
[01:29:43]
ALFRE: The Hadza have no words for days of the week, nor for the months of the year. They have no calendars. No stone monuments to mark the rotation of the seasons. Their sense of time depends on the wandering animals and the shifting patterns of their flowering plants.
[SINGING]
[01:30:18]
Members of a particular Hadza camp are largely unrelated, which means that they're choosing who they want to live with. They can live with the [SOUNDS LIKE: wife's] family or they can live with friends. There is a lot of fluid movement between camps, so, if you need more help, you can move to a camp in which you can get it, or if someone needs help, they can move to you.
[SINGING]
[01:30:42]
There are no chiefs. There is no hierarchical system. You have people that tend to be [SOUNDS LIKE: listed] as the better hunters or the better gatherers, but for the most part, there is no political hierarchy. They are egalitarian.
[01:30:56]
WOMAN: Take me to this auntie.
[01:31:00]
The total population of Hadza is approximately one-thousand individuals, and of those one-thousand, 300 are practicing a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. If you want to have a job, and you want to have a formalized education, that can't happen when you're in the bush.
[01:31:18]
ALFRE: Mangola, the nearest town, is a two-day walk from the Hadza highlands. It was once one of the four major Hadza regions.
[01:31:32]
YAA: What's my name?
CHILD: Santa.
YAA: Where do I work?
CHILD: At the hospital.
[01:31:42]
ALYSSA: There are Hadza that live here, in Mangola, or kids that live in the bush, that want to be in school.
[01:31:48]
MARIA: The first day the school truck came for us we were very scared. There were some older students ahead of us, also going to school and they started talking to us. They said, "At school, you'll have lots to eat." So when we heard that we got excited. They said, "The dormitory is beautiful, with lots of stairs, stairs, stairs." And we were really excited about that. But after getting here, we saw that the older students were telling us lies.
[01:32:18]
We got wise to them. We were scared to even enter the classroom. Whenever the teacher lifted a cane, we would hide.
[01:32:27]
REGINA: The first term I felt that school was bad. The second term, I felt it was OK. Now I am reading. I feel smart and I pass.
[01:32:36]
ALYSSA: This is all of the children that are boarding here, um, will eat this food. Dinner tonight is ugali, which is a Tanzanian staple, which is, um, really good. Very delicious. It's, um, corn flower that's been made into something --
WOMAN: Like a cake.
ALYSSA: Like grits, maybe. It's really delicious.
[01:32:53]
MARIA: When we're at school, we miss home, mainly the food and berries. The comfort of home makes it special. But when we are at home, we are longing for school.
ALYSSA: Barack Obama, do you know this person?
MARIA: Certainly.
MARIA (OS): After a while, we really loved school, so we stayed until we finished the seventh grade.
[01:33:24]
ANNA: I came to this school to be an example to other Hadza. I am the only educated, female Hadza teacher, who is also employed.
[01:33:46]
CHILD: We got into the car and were taken to school. Those who could already read, were taught to write. After being taught how to write, we were left to write on our own. Then the teacher came and said, "That's not how it's done. You're doing it wrong!" We were beaten. We were not used to being beaten at home.
[01:34:17]
We slept there one night, woke up very early, and escaped in the early morning. It took us two days to walk home. On the way, we dug a watering hole for ourselves. We ate baobab fruit that we gathered and spent the night at another Hadza camp.
[01:34:48]
MAN (OS): How did you find your way home?
CHILD: I'd already been on the road going there in the truck. We just walked home. It was easy. We are Hadza.
[01:35:00]
KAUNDA: I myself dropped out of school. I believed Hadza kids should not go to school, but learn the Hadza ways instead. But now, the Hadza way of life is endangered, so I think they should go to school. It's fine to learn to hunt when there are animals and birds...But the only animals around Mangola are the farm animals of other tribes.
[01:35:37]
ALFRE: Traditionally a part of Hadza land, the lush Mangola region has attracted other tribes who have turned the area into a major onion-growing center. Natural resources had been depleted, and the Hadza had been outnumbered and marginalized.
[01:35:55]
MAN: Life is totally different when I'm working in the town. You must pay rent to sleep in a house. Also you must buy all of your food. You have to use money for everything, even water.
[01:36:18]
YAA: It's Mangola, it's very difficult for the Hadza to get some food because the animals have gone away to the reserves, and also it is very difficult in Mangola to find berries. They have to beg from other types of tribes so that they can get food. And whenever they get money from the tourists, all they do is -- they just go and buy alcohol.
[01:36:45]
SHANI: They become heavy consumers of local brew because they have no place to hunt and gather. So they substitute alcohol for food. If they were given their own land, it would be easy. They would be able to live their lives like always -- very well.
[01:37:07]
ALFRE: In the past, the Hadza relied on water from springs. But the demands of local agriculture, and the sustained drought ravaging East Africa have reduced the water table. Consequently, the Hadza have been forced to dig deep wells.
[01:37:29]
ALYSSA: We were getting water when this [SOUNDS LIKE: Datoga man] came up. So, we quickly moved all of the buckets. They built this trough here, and every day he comes in and cleans it, and prepares it for the cattle to come and drink.
[01:37:51]
ALYSSA: The relationship with the Hadza and the Datoga is pretty complicated, and they navigate it on almost a daily basis. This is a traditional Hadza watering hole. It's now used for all of the Datoga cattle that come up every day.
[01:38:17]
WRANGHAM: The Hadza have a very peaceful culture. They do not try and fight back. They try and negotiate.
[01:38:25]
MAN: We asked him ten times not to bring his cattle here. But he's very disrespectful. I don't understand the Datoga tribe. They're very difficult.
[01:38:38]
ALYSSA: When you want water, can you only get it here?
MEMBE: Only here.
[01:38:46]
ALYSSA: Every time we think that all of the cows have come, more arrive. I asked Membe about how she feels about the cows coming to the watering hole, and she said that she understands that the cows need to drink, and that it's not bad that the [SOUNDS LIKE: Datoga] are here. It's just bad luck.
[01:38:59]
MEMBE: He's afraid there's not enough water for his cows.
ALYSSA: How about for the Hadzabe?
MEMBE: We have our water. Now he must understand our fear.
[01:39:12]
GEORGE: The cattle do eat anything that's green. Berries. Hadza peanuts. All that stuff ends up being eaten before there's a chance that the Hadza get to it. Wildlife becomes a -- a big issue when the impalas are no longer there, and the kudu disappear back into the hills.
[01:39:30]
MAN: Nowadays, they are really spoiling the land. Not only are the cattle grazing everywhere, but the Datoga are also cutting trees for fences. It's so sad because the cattle even come to our h comes and try to eat the roots.
[01:39:52]
ALYSSA: The Datoga themselves have been pushed out of their land, and have been pushed further and further into the bush, in order to find a place for their cattle to maintain their way of life.
[01:40:11]
BALAKI: Life for everyone will change as time goes by, especially if there are a lot of droughts. Even for the Hadza life will change, because they eat a lot of fruit. And if there is no rain, where will they find fruit? Won't it be very difficult?
[01:40:31]
DAUDI: You have these two second-class groups who are also discriminated against in the country, who lose land out to agriculturals. It's history played out.
[01:40:42]
KAUNDA: Other tribes are constantly trying to push us from our land. Why? Because the Datoga are overcrowded. Other tribes are overcrowded. From here there and everywhere, they're all mixed together on our land! So now we live like we are in a corral, surrounded by outsiders.
[01:41:01]
ALYSSA: In the very near future, there will be nowhere left to go. There's nowhere left to push any of these small scale societies.
[01:41:08]
ZELEZA: The other thing is that you have created all of these huge game reserves. So, land that they used to use, is now off bounds.
[01:41:18]
ALYSSA: Commercial hunting groups have leased land from the government for tourists that want to go on hunting safaris, and Hadza men are not allowed to hunt. They are arrested for poaching on their ancestral land. It also affects gathering, because it's not safe to go tuber digging or berry collecting when you're in an area where people could be shooting animals, or shooting at what they might think is an animal.
[01:41:46]
DAUDI: Beyond that pressure, people in -- in position of the power, look and see these resources, and say, "How can we -- how can we capitalize on them?"
[01:41:55]
WANGARI: People in power are behaving as if they own these common goods. They own forests. They own the rivers. They own the soil, they own the land, and they can dispose of it as they please.
[01:42:12]
ALYSSA: The Hadza, of course, don't really recognize land rights in any traditional way. To them, you share the earth with the animals and the plants that are on it.
[01:42:24]
MAN: Do you see yourselves as protectors of this place?
HADZA MAN: Yes that's right. That's why we stay here, to protect this place and the animals. And so we are patient. We watch the animals and their movements in the area. If we leave this place, others will come in and cultivate.
[01:42:47]
SPENCER: People assume, well, you know it doesn't really matter where they live. They're nomads. They can -- you can take 'em out of here, and move them over there. The problem is, they accumulate this knowledge of the place where they live, and they become very closely attached to it. And also, all of their dead are buried there. The whole place is one giant burial ground, and, so, you know, they are connected intimately with their ancestors, when they walk through this land. So when you take that land away from them, you are taking away a critical part of their culture. It really is what defines them.
[01:43:19]
HADZA MAN: This land is our true home. We can move a few meters, but we can't move. There is no other place we could go. My children will live in the bush like me.
[01:43:36]
DAUDI: They're now to the point where they realize that land is the most important thing, but in the meantime we have lost so much land.
[01:43:54]
WRANGHAM: There used to be something like, uh, two and a half thousand sq. kilometers. Now they are talking about more like 500 sq. kilometers.
[01:44:02]
HADZA WOMAN: The land has been spoiled by the Datoga. In the old days, we had more baobab and meat. Now the land is sick.
[01:44:15]
DAUDI: I was having tea on my veranda, and four Hadza came to the gate. I knew a couple of them, and they said, "We hear you help people with land issues. Will you help us?" And that really started us off.
[01:44:37]
GEORGE: This is where the Hadza convened in December of 2010 for a fairly large magnitude meeting for the Hadza. They don't usually convene in numbers like this. There were five to 10 representatives from every community.
[01:44:51]
BANKS: The idea was, there would be no formal agenda, but the focus would be on how they'd define their future, and have some influence over what that future is, instead of responding to the pressures from outsiders.
[01:45:07]
GEORGE: While they were here, they made plans to set up game scouts and Hadza scouts, basically, to go out and do anti-poaching and keep out, uh, elements from the neighboring communities that they didn't want in their area. This is the first time this has happened. 150 Hadza representatives from each of the communities, coming together to do this. It's unprecedented in Tanzania, at this point.
[01:45:31]
DAUDI: And we're not trying to keep the Hadza as they are, or in a certain way. What we're trying to do is give them options, knowing that cultures change, they are changing, they are -- they are in transition. We're trying to get the Hadza to use the village structure to get rights. Within the Tanzanian political and legal framework.
[01:45:54]
ZELEZA: This generation has to find its own adaptations that make sense. Some of them will be borrowed from the past. Some of them will be borrowed from other societies. But the point is that they have to make sense to the contemporary conditions.
[01:46:11]
MBUGOSHI: High ranking people come and advise us on how to organize. This year we elected Mr. Naftali Zingu. He's Hadzabe and now he's our representative.
[01:46:26]
DAUDI: The really good news is that we've got a letter from the commissioner of lands that is instructing the district of Mbulu to grant title of a couple of nice pieces of land to the Hadza as a community.
[SINGING]
[01:47:16]
MAN: Do you think this business of getting a land certificate will really make a difference? And if so, how?
HADZA MAN: I see a change in cattle grazing because if we have a land certificate then we have freedom on our land.
[01:47:32]
GEORGE: It is a drop in the ocean if you look at the larger picture of what could be Hadza land, but it's a beginning.
[SINGING]
[01:47:44]
BANKS: This is a start. But it's not big enough for the Hadza culture and the way of life to be maintained over time.
[01:47:52]
ALFRE: This initial land rights recognition by the Tanzanian government has thus far proven un-enforceable. As recently as August of 2012, a Hadza scout was killed while confronting poachers. But for the first time ever, they fought back, as another Hadza fatally shot one of the intruders with his bow and arrow.
[01:48:18]
BANKS: Frankly, I worry a lot about the future of the Hadza and whether or not we can move quickly enough to really make a difference.
[SINGING]
[01:48:35]
DAUDI: There is still a long way to go in terms of the Tanzanian government's attitude towards special groups like the Hadza, but it's changing. It's a positive trend. They live in a way which represents the greater part of our human history. And in a way that both the environmental and the social side achieves goals that most societies aspire to but do not achieve. What this piece of land does is not keep them how they are, it gives them a foot, so that they can develop more on their own terms than if they did not have this land.
[01:49:14]
But what I hope is that, my grandkids still go out walking with the Hadza, gather the sting-less bee honey, and dig the roots, and just appreciate this intimate connection and deep knowledge of the land that they have.
[01:49:35]
SHANI: I'd love to see the whole Hadza community living like our ancestors. It's a great culture and identifies who we are. In my generation, I think the Hadza will continue to exist, but for my children, will they become history?
[01:49:55]
GOODALL: It would be an utter tragedy if -- if this area is completely destroyed. So many people who don't understand, who don't know these people, they feel, "Well, they can't really be happy because they don't have what we feel in the Western world is necessary to make us happy."
[01:50:14]
VENEY: They are a part of globalization, and I don't think that they should just remain as they were 10,000 years ago, or 5,000 years ago, because no one remains that way. But, in terms of what they continue to do, it ought to be recognized, and it ought to be respected.
[01:50:33]
ALYSSA: It boils down to a human rights issue. For the Hadza that want to stay in the bush, they should be able to do so. They should be able to stay in the bush and try to practice a sustainable lifestyle of hunting and gathering for as long as they can. The days are dwindling, and, I think, within our lifetime, there will be no more bush for the Hadza to live in. We're running out of time. If we don't help them make this choice now, that's it, we don't get a second chance.
[01:51:01]
WRANGHAM: We're going to lose, forever, a tie to our ancestry that is the most important tie that there has ever been in terms of making us human.
[01:51:22]
I want to live here until I'm an old man. Because in town there's no Hadza food. No kongolobei berries, noguilabei berries...No baobab fruit. Here we have them, there they don't.
[01:51:54] [CREDITS]
[01:53:25] [END OF FILE]