Tanzania: Hadzabe face new challenges

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"After our victory over UAE Safaris Ltd with the powerfull campaign of fPcN interCultural and fPcN Germany, we are now very concerned that Tanzanian investors are moving into the Hadzabe lands and suspect that the Arab safari company might be trying to come in again through the back door. We urgently need help to publicise the plight of the Hadzabe people and our fight to gain legal title to our lands, so that in the future they are respected as traditional Hadza hunting reserves." (Naftali Kitandu, April 2009)

The Hadzabe community members of Yaeda China valley have called on the government to put more efforts in controlling poaching in their traditional hunting homelands. Their speakers, Mahiya Makala, Reuben Matayo and Sati Salibogo who were speaking at a public meeting at Domanga and Ashkesh at Mongo wa Mono village said the poachers have been invading the valley with modern firearms especially at night. They said their only hope was in the government to fight poachers in the area as their activities are dangerous to the eco-system that supports communities which depend on the wild for their survival.

Allan Shani, the Mbulu District Natural Resources Officer told the traditional hunters and gatherers that the government alone cannot stop poaching adding that what is needed to stop the rampart practice is the local people's support and cooperation. He said the government has also decided to let investors get to the area so as to subsidize the government and the people's efforts in sustainable conservation. The officer went to Mongo wa Mono to introduce to the villagers the representative of FAMS investors whose activities would include hunting tourism.

The FAMS Investment Ltd of Dar es Salaam, General Manager Mr. Ally Seif asked the villagers to welcome his company in their locality for the benefit of both sides. FAMS investors are coming to Yaeda Chini hardly two years after one of Africa's last hunter-gatherer tribes had scored victory over a foreign tourist hunting company. After a wrangle, an Arab royal family dropped plans to use the people's ancestral land for commercial hunting.

A company from the United Arab Emirates in 2007 pulled out of a deal with the Tanzania government to hunt wildlife in 2,267 square kms of remote bush in the Yaeda Chini region. fPcN Campaigners feared if a hunting concession was granted to the company then the Hadzabe hunter-gatherers of Yaeda Chini would have been criminalised as poachers and driven off land their ancestors have lived on for 10,000 years.

The Hadzabe, who live in small groups and are believed to number less than 3,000 in total in Tanzania, are the closest cultural relatives to the San bushmen of the Kalahari in Botswana. The hunting company complained that it had been "misrepresented" by unspecified Hadzabe interest groups, writes Journalist Adam James.

Social scientists recently expressed fears that the Hadzabe ethnic group could become extinct in a few years as a result of pressure on their natural habitat. The Hadzabe have inhabited the acacia forests and scrubland around Lake Eyasi in Arusha and Meatu in Shinyanga for over 10,000 years.

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