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The majority of Tanzanian peoples are of Bantu origin, which refers to a language family and not to one particular ethnic group. Some of the notable exceptions are Lake Eyasi's Hadza and Central Tanzania's Sandawe, as well as Northern Tanzania's Maasai, Datoga, and Iraqw. The Hadza and the Sandawe, remnants perhaps of man's earliest beginnings, speak a click language similar to that of South African bush men, but their exact homeland cannot be definitively determined. The pastoralist Maasai are thought to originate in the Sudan. Their tribal tongue belongs to the Nilotic language family. The Datoga, also pastoralist, share along with the agrarian Iraqw a more obscure origin of possibly Ethiopia. Their language is classified as Nilotic; that of the Iraqw falls under the Hamitic family. In the high season, several tourist vehicles a day might stop at one of the Eyasi Datoga's loaf-shaped dwelling of mud and sticks. The women will have on their traditional goat skins - still cured with cow's urine as in the old days - and clothes typically reserved for special occasions like weddings. Entertaining tourists now qualifies. These are beaded shifts that tie at the neck and drape over one shoulder, containing an arm like a sling. Long fringes of soft beaded leather fall loosely at the rear of the hides, meant to swing over ample behinds when the women dance. Three concentric rings of cicatrices - scarified welts - encircle their eyes like bandits' masks, and on their right arms they wear layers of brass bracelets, as heavy as door knockers, which double as percussion instruments when they put on a small song and dance performance. These bracelets are more commonly worn singly and are a way to recognize the Datoga when they don Western clothes and move among the urban crowds of Arusha and Dar es Salaam. If you contain your travels to northern Tanzania, then you will certainly encounter the Maasai, Tanzania's most iconic tribe in their red plaid ethnic chic, arguably the country's most culturally intact people and determined to remain that way. The Maasai are thought to have migrated south from southern Sudan 600 years ago and taking by force as they went, until they settled in and around Kenya's and Tanzania's Rift Valley. In Tanzania 's case, this includes what are now the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) and Serengeti National Park. The Maasai were a proud and fierce people, feared enough that the slave caravans on their way from the Arab controlled coast to Lake Victoria passed around their stronghold of northern Tanzania. They were the only tribe to escape bondage. They were still masters of their own destiny when explorer Joseph Thomson encountered them, one of the first Westerners to do so, during his courageous crossing of their territory in 1883. He had to depart for safer parts to escape a war party of Maasai warriors, who wore frightening helmets of lion mane and who carried painted shields and glittering spears. The fit young men who comprised a war party jogged briskly to battle in tight formation, undeterred by anything in their path. Things took a turn for the worse for the Maasai after that. They suffered a bad drought and famine followed by losses of their tribe and their animals to smallpox and rinderpest. They fought among themselves. They lost their grazing rights on land that governments appropriated for colonial farmers (although this was more the case in Kenya) and then, in 1958 in Tanzania, to the newly formed national parks and game reserves. At the time the decision to exclude the Maasai from the new parks and reserves was deemed in the best interests of conservation, but the Western-driven efforts that perceived the Maasai and their migrating cattle as a danger to the ecologies of the Serengeti and the NCA were flawed. Time has vindicated the Maasai land management system. The tribe rotated pastures in the Serengeti, which allowed the vegetation to recover, and they burned some parts of the plains at the end of the dry season to encourage the growth of fresh grasses with the first rains and to discourage the growth of less nutritious ones. This was beneficial as well to the wildlife with which they shared the land. Control burning is now practiced by national park authorities because poorer quality grasses have become more widespread. Wildlife won't eat them and where there is no food there are no animals, which hurts tourism. Although the Serengeti's grasslands have been spared overuse, which is what early conservationists feared by allowing the Maasai to graze their cattle there, another problem has been created that affects national parklands just as much. The Maasai have grown confined on what pastures are allowed them where they have no choice but to overgraze. In these limited and ever shrinking spaces, they come into increasing conflict with farmers. The Maasai of the "warrior" set - known as moran in the Maasai language - are young men who have undergone the important rite of passage of circumcision. A warrior - a morani - lives separately with his fellow warriors in a man camp. He wears his hair long and braided. Later in life he'll shave it. He might plaster it with red ochre. He wears beads and aluminum ornaments around his neck, wrists, ankles and forehead, and in his ears lobes, which are pierced and enlarged enough to hold empty film canisters or to be looped over the ear tops forming a neat little knot. A morani's vanity goes over well with young Maasai maidens. He likes to sing and dance, the latter a distinctive style of hopping up and down in place and as high as he possibly can. "He's looking for the cows" was the way this dance's origin was explained to me. A warrior is known for his courage. He kills wild animals which threaten the family compound and herd. In the old days, if he killed a lion, he was praised and feted with songs and dances, and he became even more irresistible to the ladies. In the old days too, if it was called for, a morani went to war, against other tribes and other clans of Maasai. He went on cattle raids to retrieve stolen cattle or to steal them from others. Rustling was one way to accumulate wealth. Maasai society is remarkably tolerant, but it is patriarchal and life for the Maasai woman is hard. A spokesman of a Maasai village enlightened me on tribal gender job descriptions. Once the men construct the thorn bush barriers around the family compounds, they relinquish the actual house building, and much of everything else, to their wives. “Maasai men live like the male lion,” is how it was described for me, a reference to how the lioness hunts for the male of the species. On a safari in the north you stand to meet a good many Chagga too. The Mount Kilimanjaro area is their native homeland. As the first recipients of the educating efforts of Christian missionaries Chagga are dominant today in business and government. The original beliefs of ancestral worship and witchcraft endure throughout Tanzania, but perhaps nowhere more so than in Sukumaland. They have a reputation for sorcery. Beginning in the nineteenth century, two powerful Sukuma healers staged dance competitions to determine which of them possessed the stronger magic. From these fiercely fought competitions, two secret dancing-cum-healing societies were formed (which exist to this day) and dancing with pythons, porcupines and hyenas evolved, the subdued wildlife the indications of the contestant's power. One of the two societies split into two. A rival society was established by a healer still remembered for his ability to summon animals to obey his orders. It is said that snakes would fall out of trees if he pointed to them. This man could also take the form of animals, although this is a supernatural skill that the Sukuma are not alone in developing. The belief in witches who can change into lions and hyenas, usually at night, or who zoom through the night skies on the backs of wild animals, is widespread among Tanzanian peoples. When I lived in Tanzania , the newspaper reported a tribal shaman who, while flying his "magic transport" at night, fell off and crash landed in the midst of a gathering of Christians, who gave him clothes to cover his loincloth. The wizard took it as a sign that his magic wasn't as strong as theirs and so he burned his talismans and converted to Christianity. The following day, a Dar expatriate wrote in to ask if the wizard would give flying lessons. (Okay, it was me.) Last but not least, there is the Swahili culture of the Indian Ocean coast. The word Swahili comes from sahil, Arabic for coast. Beginning in the first millennium, Arab sea merchants established trade with East Africa and intermarried with coastal people to bring about the development of a distinct Swahili culture. Shirazi Persians, Indians, and Mediterranean races added their bloodlines as well to the cosmopolitan mix. What's more of a mystery is the patrimony of the original coastal African with whom these migrants mingled. They might have been the descendants of Indonesians who sailed across the Indian Ocean in their outrigger canoes (which is why Africa has outriggers) and members of a tribe of fishermen and pirates called the Azanians. To the ancient Greeks the East African coast was Azania. Whatever its' ethnic synthesis, Arabia and its religion most characterize the Swahili identity: Islam was firmly entrenched along the coast by the eleventh century. So too does the Swahili language which evolved with a lexicon borrowed from a variety of tongues, but most predominantly from Arabic and Persian. Swahili settlements stretched from Somalia in the north to Mozambique in the south; most became busy centers of hybrid culture and commerce. Several were located on islands off the mainland of present day Tanzania to which they now belong. Of these, Mafia and Kilwa lie in ruins. Zanzibar has survived to become another cash cow of Tanzanian tourism, offering beaches, diving, sophisticated shopping, flavorful cuisine which makes use of homegrown spices like nutmeg and clove, and a tangible sense of history. |
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The Maasai are the primary residents of what is today the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, but the Datoga, who the Maasai call "Mangati" - or "Respected Enemy" - arrived before them. The word Ngorongoro may be Datoga, although I have often heard that its origin is Maasai. The Datoga fought hard against the Maasai, but they were driven south to Lake Eyasi and the Mangati Plains. 
For all of the Datoga's beaded goatskins and facial decorations, it is the Hadza who are Eyasi's most popular attraction. The Hadza - or the Hadzapi, Kindiga, Tindiga, Wakindiga or Kangeju as they are also known - are a small surviving tribe of hunter-gatherers, their exact numbers - several hundred or several thousand - unknown. It is no longer possible for the Hadza to live entirely from hunting. Formerly the Eyasi and neighboring Yaida Valley areas supported large populations of both residential and migratory animals, but now the pickings are slim - some small antelope, wild pigs, hyenas, baboons and monkeys are all that remain. When their search for meat widens the Hadza must be careful not to contravene game reserve laws which favor paying hunters over indigenous ones. Out of necessity the Hadza have added the African staple of corn meal porridge to their diet. This has created a dependency on people and places where they can buy it. Hadza cultural survival is tenuous. There is the valid argument that making the Hadza into a human zoo for tourists, who make them gifts of grain and cash, only hastens their decline. There is also the opinion that at this point, tourist revenues help them survive. 
Maasai society is organized around a series of life-cycles of which each can last between 15 and 20 years. Boys become warriors. Warriors become junior elders. Junior elders become senior elders. Each advance is observed with the same comrades or age-set. Age-organization is like building a strong wall, each cycle becoming the foundation for the one that succeeds it. Without a foundation, there is a risk of collapse. It is difficult to think of education as anything but positive, but the problem for today's Maasai is that schooling can undermine their age-organization system by becoming a substitution for the cycle of warrior-hood, and by instilling in the school graduate a non-Maasai set of values. 
Some of Tanzania's tribal groups are very small in number after years of assimilation. The Bantu Sukuma, whose homeland borders Lake Victoria, is the largest tribe, although they count for only 15 percent of the country's total population of around 33 million. The Sukuma were originally pastoralists who took up farming. Today they grow subsistence crops like cassava and maize and cash crops of cotton, rice and sugarcane. They keep cattle and those closest to Lake Victoria, Africa's largest, are fishermen. 
Another tribe of significant numbers is the Makonde of Southern Tanzania along its border with Mozambique, where many Makonde also live. Along with woodcarving and facial cicatrices - although the latter custom is dying out - the Makonde are known for their love of drums and dancing, especially masked dancing. I remember a few days I spent on the Mozambique border when I was serenaded to sleep by drums from a nearby village celebrating the harvest. The Makonde were early immigrants to Dar es Salaam, and their nightly drumming once a familiar sound. When I lived in Dar, I was disappointed not to hear them more, but the few surviving troupes play only when hired for a wedding or other special event. At Mwenge in the city, a ramshackle collection of conjoined huts which sell artifacts and souvenirs, the Makonde make up the majority of resident wood carvers. They create anything upon demand, but traditionally they work in ebony and from a single piece of wood, producing complex sculptures of either intricately connected human and animal forms which symbolize the interdependency of the African family and village, or demonic figures from the underworld. At Mwenge you might also find masks used in Makonde dances.
