By Jim Selman | Bio
I’m on a two-week adventure to Africa, spending time with Elders from the Hadza tribe, one of the oldest hunter-gatherer clans on the planet. The trip is billed as an "inventure" led by Richard Leider to shine a light on the opportunity and intentions of this trip to touch us personally and focus on our development as Elders in the context of our society and our times. More about that later….
We’re about half-way through the trip, most of which has been living with the Hadze on their lands, in their context and in their time—sort of what the Europeans might have experienced when they landed in North America.
The Hadze have changed very little in thousands of years, although they wear Western clothes given away second-hand by church missions. They also smoke constantly and some are of the ‘outside’ through transistor radios. The government has given a few hard-won concessions in the form of ‘protected lands’ which comprise about 10% of their ancestral home lands. Even so, neighboring Barbites (pastoralists) encroach constantly. With some perseverance, the Hadze might, through the support of a sole activist, get the government to intervene and remove the squatters.
Last night we spent time with Gouda, the oldest living Hadze (at roughly 100, no one knows anyone’s real age), who told stories of times in his youth when men and women wore beautiful robes made of skins, game was plentiful and people lived joyously. He laments that today the young have "lost their way" and there aren’t enough elders working together to bring them back. It is clear in these last years of his life that the old ways are gone forever.
Our guides, Doudi and Richard, agree and their work to empower the Hadze is about simply allowing them dignity and choice as they travel this ever-accelerating transition. The fact that the Hadze are at the ‘bottom’ of the social pecking order makes this a challenge.
These people are part of nature—they live off the land, have virtually no possessions and what possessions they do have are constantly circulating through their communities. They have no reading or writing, although a dictionary of their language does exist. They move their camps and live in loosely constructed thatch huts perhaps three or four feet in diameter. Women hunt for edible tubers in the hard soil, men hunt for game with poison arrows. Yet they have a totally egalitarian society where men, women and even children have an equal voice, where decision-making happens as a result of consensus and a kind of "group consciousness, and where children learn by example and are raised by the community and appear to be loved by their parents. And people listen to each other—especially to elders who are full participants in all aspects of life until they near the very end. When necessary, they are cared for. And at the end, they are left to nature and the tribe moves on—their spirit in service to the community.
© 2009 Jim Selman. All rights reserved.