The Hadza is an ancient and remote tribe that still retains its 40,000-year-old culture and traditions of hunting and gathering. Archaeologists believe that people very much like the Hadza have lived on the same land since the Stone Age.
In order to capture portraits of the Hadza for the Smithsonian magazine, photographer Christopher Wilson and his guide had to drive off-road through an expanse of rough, arid land and after wandering on foot, eventually reached a Hadza encampment. They set up a makeshift studio right on the spot, and members of the tribe helped hold up the tent.
The whole experience clearly left a deep impression on Christopher, as he tells us,
“I wish I were Hadza like these Hadza. I’d own nothing but the baboon skin on my back, and the bow and arrows in my hand. Every night I’d sleep in a nest of grass; and every day I’d hunt and forage for food. I’d scale baobabs to steal honey from their skyscraper beehives. I’d track towers of giraffes over an ocean we call Serengeti; hoping for a kill and the honor of eating the brain. On full hunter gather moons I’d tie bells around my waist and dance with my ancestors. I’d click a language only a thousand of us click; a language that has no word for “time” or “god” or “worry.” I wouldn’t celebrate birthdays or Independence Days or Easters, as I’d know nothing about calendars or countries or religions. I’d just be Hadza, which simply means “human being,” and that would be enough. But I’m not Hadza. So the foggy trumpeting of all the elephants along the Rift Valley could never drown out the crying of all the children of Ukraine – no matter where I stood or where they fled. And so I sink a bit, unsure of how to breathe under this tsunami of sorrow. Maybe if we all thought of ourselves as human beings, like the Hadza, that could help. And maybe this Easter we could celebrate a different sort of death and resurrection: an Easter in which detachment and desecration are what dies, and what is resurrected is, well, I don’t know. Just something better. Something heart-shaking and audacious and that maybe demands of us a moral courage we thought we never had. Something that could maybe help tilt our world towards a greater compassion for all human beings, Hadza or not.”
