Sandawe

Finally there are the hunter-gatherers the Dorobo scattered throughout the Maasai area. There are about 8 different groups - some speak the Maasai language, but there are at least two other Dorobo languages one being closely allied to Nandi. Also included in this category are the Kindiga or Hezabi [Hadza] who speak a 'click' i.e. a Bushman-type lanuage which has similar sounds to, but is far removed from the neighbouring Sandawe language. Their main home is on the east side of Lake Eyasi in Mbulu district but they spread into Maasai country and into Singida.

In East Africa there are two main categories of vulnerable minority peoples who have been in consequence subjected to flagrant violations of community and individual rights. These are hunters and gatherers, namely the Hadza, Dorobo and Sandawe together with many ethnic groups who are pastoralists. The Maasai of Tanzania and Kenya are the largest and most widely known of he many pastoral peoples of East Africa. These minorities suffer from the common problems which characterize the plight of indigenous peoples throughout the world.

The red paintings can be subdivided into those found in central Tanzania, some of which may have been made by Sandawe and Hadza ancestors; and those found in a broad band stretching from Zambia to the Indian Ocean, which are thought to have been painted by Twa.

The Tanzanian paintings include early large, naturalistic images of animals (fig. 157) with occasional geometric patterns and later images of people and animals, sometimes in apparent hunting and domestic scenes. People are drawn wearing skirts, with strange hairstyles and body decoration (fig. 159), and sometimes holding bows and arrows. The Tanzanian red paintings have been quite extensively studied, first by Mary and Louis Leakey in the 1930s and 1950s and then by Fidelis Masao and Emmanuel Anati, all of whom have recorded numerous sites, divided the art chronologically into broad categories and dozens of styles, proposed dates, and made tentative interpretations about meaning.

The Sandawe and Hadza, who claim their ancestors were responsible for some of the later art, live in the general area ofTanzania's rock art concentration and speak languages employing click consonants distantly related to Khoisan.These peoples have practiced, until very recently, a hunter-gatherer econony and even today some Sandawe spend time in the forest collecting honey and wild food and hunting small animals.

Occupying a shallow trough in the shadow of Ngorongoro's Mount Oldeani is Lake Eyasi, another of the Rift Valley's soda lakes. In the dry woodland around its edges live the Hadzabe tribe. Numbering between 500 and 2500, depending on how "purely" you count, the Hadzabe are Tanzania's last hunter-gatherers, a status they shared with the Sandawe further south until the latter were forced to settle forty years ago. Sadly, the Hadzabe appear to be heading the same way: much of their land has been taken by commercial plantations and ranches, which also form effective barriers to the seasonal wildlife migrations on which the hunting part of the Hadzabe lifestyle depends, whilst the unwelcome attentions of outsiders is rapidly destroying their culture.

Being absolutely destitute in monetary terms, the Hadzabe are in no position to resist the more pernicious elements of modernity, with its trade, evangelical missionaries, enforced schooling, the cash economy, AIDS and indeed tourists, the majority of whom consider the Hadzabe to be little more than primitive curiosities. The supposedly backward and primeval form of Hadzabe society has also attracted a welter of researchers, whose dubious activities range from the "discovery" that grandmothers are useful for feeding their grandchildren, to thinly veiled attempts by multinational pharmaceutical companies to patent their DNA.

In 2000, a news report stated that the Hadzabe were preparing to leave their land and way of life for the brave new world of Arusha. Though at that time the story turned out to be a hoax, sadly, within five to ten years, it may become a reality. Short of convincing the Tanzanian government to protect Hadzabe land and its wildlife routes (most unlikely given the government's previous attempts to forcibly "civilize" the Hadzabe), the best thing that you can do to help preserve their culture is to leave them well alone.

Three tribes have a particularly ancient history:

- the Iraqw in the Mbulu region with their distinctive physical features are the only tribe of Cushitic origin in the region as they grew totally isolated from their original Cushitic cluster. They inhabited the Engaruka fields and traces of occupation around Lake Natron, Manyara and Eyasi) go back to the Upper Paleolithic Period.

- the Sandawe and the Hadzapi or Tindiga: the first group lives in central Tanzania and stems from the ancient tribes who occupied the area with the Bushmen with whom they shared the Khoisan click language; nowadays they are fairly assimilated. The second group however is still organised in the simplest form of society based on hunting and subsisting mainly on roots and fruits and animal hunting with bows and arrows during the dry season. They are thought to be the only remnants in the whole of Africa of the ancient Paleolithic Times.

Grouped in clusters or divided into clans, tribes are not always easy to identify or to locate with definite accuracy and to those who search in vain for their presence on the map, I request their indulgence.

The fourth and smallest language family of Africa is the Khoisan. Most Khoisan languages are spoken by the so-called Bushmen and Hottentots of southern Africa. These peoples include a few cattle-raising groups such as the Nama, totaling perhaps 50,000 speakers, and hunting and gathering groups in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana and Namibia. Many of these are bands of fewer than a hundred speakers of distinct languages. Also included in the Khoisan language family are two languages in northern Tanzania: Sandawe, which is spoken by perhaps 25,000 people, and Hatza, which is spoken by only a few hundred people. The study of language relationships reveals the dramatic and pathetic absorption, dispersion, and isolation of peoples such as most of the Khoisan speakers. Many of the Pygmy groups found in Zaire and Cameroon are thought to be Khoisan peoples who have adopted their neighbors' Niger-Congo languages.

Numerous archaeological finds around Tanzania prove that vast immigration movements occurred around the 1st and 2nd centuries AD with agriculturist tribes from Cameroon and Nigeria emerging into East Africa and Tanzania and absorbing or expelling the local Bushmen and Hottentots into the Kalahari desert.

More than a thousand places with Rock Paintings, especially around Kondoa at Kolo, Cheke and Kisese, testify that there was an intensely active Stone Age civilisation in the area.

The Hadzapi and Sandawe tribes who lived in that region kept their khoisan click language and, numbering only a few thousand, still live in such primitive conditions that they can rightly be considered as today's only survivors, throughout Africa, of the Stone Age civilisation.