Hunting with the Hadzabe

The Hadzabe showed me the tools of their trade - hunting. It’s a wooden bow and arrow, with different endings for the arrow depending on the intended target.

To hunt a bird, a piece of corn is on the end of the arrow, intended to stun but not destroy the fragile body. For large game, the arrows are meaner looking - escalating from a sharp wooden endpoint for a deer to a very mean-looking 6 pronged spike for a baboon.

Then we head off for a bit of target practice. Turns out I’m not very good. Better stick to software I suppose.

After, we set off into the bush on foot to catch breakfast. The men break out into pairs and scatter in all directions. I’m not sure where to go, so I just follow one of them. There’s some commotion, some yelling back and forth. At last one of them sounds triumphant.

He comes back, carrying a dead dik-dik, similar to a deer.

Then the crew sets about cooking breakfast.

Fire is made the old fashioned way - by rubbing two wooden sticks together. I really wanted to ask why they wouldn’t adopt lighters from our world, but the language barrier prevented too much conversation. I gave the fire a shot…turns out I’m no good at this either.

The rest of the process was…insightful. The animal was skinned, cut, and (barely) cooked. While I completely lost any appetite I had, this remarkable video shows the whole process.

Mind. Blown.

Appetite. Lost.