Tanzania Cultural Safaris
MAASAI TRIBE
A proud, charming, friendly and intelligent community, there are now a million Maasai living in the homelands of Tanzania and Kenya. Much of their tribal land has been absorbed into the National Parks in return for promises of cultural security and community wellbeing in surrounding reserves which have not always been kept.
This can be done in a superficial way, as ethnic entertainment, presenting a popular tourist conception of red-robed Maasai warriors, leaping and drumming, singing and dancing as a touring concert party, or as a deeply felt collaborative project in which the past, present and future are confronted in an authentic setting by real people. AfricanMecca procures the latter experience at all times.
HADZABE TRIBE
They usually get sick with malaria and yellow fever from mosquitoes or sleeping sickness from tsetse fly. They are a pride but also an embarrassment to a modern nation for its failure to progressively uplift the declining community from extinction, but out of respect for their chosen way of life, they are now the only people permitted to hunt with bows and arrows in the Lake Eyasi area.
DATOGA TRIBE
They wear collars and bracelets of beads and brass and tattoo circles around their eyes. They are polygamous, ruled by a council of elders, and are aggressive, adversely affecting Hadzabe and Iraqw neighbors, and sometimes refuse to cooperate fully with the government. Their attitude deters sympathy for their plight. They live in mud huts in stockaded cattle enclosures.
Like the Hadzabe, they claim to be the oldest Tanzanian people, with a 10,000-year old culture, but they came from Ethiopia about 3,000 years ago to settle around Lake Manyara and Eyasi. They resist development and education, have high infant mortality, and are seen by other tribes as primitive, disapproved and disenfranchised. Less than 7% speak the national language, Kiswahili.