During my time abroad in East Africa, I had the unique opportunity to spend about a week with the Hadzabe people of Tanzania, some of the last truly nomadic hunter-gatherers on Earth. They spend much of their time harvesting yams and roots beneath trees, picking berries, harvesting honey, and pursuing wild game. Their impact on the environment is negligible and they live in amazing symbiotic relationships with nature that raise interesting questions about what it means to be human.
Let me give you an example.
One of the staple food items for the Hadzabe is honey that must be harvested from hives that dwell deep within tree branches. The hives are identifiable by a tiny tube protruding from the branch, visible only by a special bird that eats bees. 
When this bird discovers a hive, it begins calling out until one of the Hadzabe people follows the sound and uses an axe to split open the branch and grant access to the hive for the bird. After the bird has eaten the bees, the Hadzabe harvests the honey and a portion of the bee eggs, leaving enough for the hive to regenerate and start the process all over again. Pretty sustainable, if you ask me.
Unfortunately, the Tanzanian government has decided that living this way is “primitive” and “uncivilized”, and the Hadzabe people face real danger of losing their way of life. In many instances, the government has encouraged encroachment of Hadzabe land by pastoralists, who are losing their own land to the most “advanced” method of agriculture. While not all of the Hadzabe wish to maintain their current livelihoods, I firmly believe they should have the choice to continue doing so.
More importantly, I think that mandating specific land use for people who have lived in an area for hundreds or thousands of years is a terrible idea. Agriculture is simply not an effective use of land in parts of Africa.
While spending two weeks with the Maasai people at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I saw this first hand. Pressure to privatize communal land has led many to lease plots for farming, overseen of course by various development programs and “experts” in agricultural production. The reality is that these tracks of land do not produce the volume or quality of crops to adequately compete in the cash economy transplanted by the West in the past century. In fact, many are struggling to survive and can only use an area for a few years before the land stops producing.
Of the hundreds of farmers we encountered, none had been on one track of land for more than five years, and few had even heard of such a situation.
In addition to the obvious degradation of converted land, agriculture has caused conflict in the area between pastoralists and farmers. This is by no means a unique situation. In fact, many of the current high profile conflicts on the continent have roots in land disputes caused by restructuring and reorganizing of land.
Consider Darfur. Most people in this arid region of Sudan have historically relied on grazing livestock and cultivating large tracks of land communally. In wet seasons, sufficient grazing land is relatively easy to come by, and pastoralists spread out over a large area. However, in the dry season, only a small percentage of land is fertile enough to provide nutrients for livestock, so everyone congregates and shares these few areas until the rains allow their dispersal once again.
When the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) introduced Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) in the 1970s and 80s, they provided important loans and development services that benefited many of those who received them. However, in order to receive many of these services, people were required to privatize land.
When you privatize land and introduce individual ownership, one family or group “owns” these crucial areas. When the dry season comes, or there is temporary drought or famine, conflict arises as other groups must use this land to survive. As this continues over time, these groups polarize and ethnic violence, now based largely on land ownership, becomes a major concern. Many scholars and experts on African culture and history recognize this as one primary reason certain groups are willing to join the government-sponsored militia force called “Janjaweed” and participate in attacks on villages in the region. This violence continues as I write this article.
Now, as we begin this millennium with a new development framework, we must pay close attention to the lessons of the past. When pursuing the MDGs and looking especially at Goal 1 to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, we must be careful to pay close attention to the desires of those we seek to serve. We must continually analyze and dissect our own notions of “civilized” and “developed” so as not to repeat the mistakes of similar initiatives only thirty years ago. We should strive to be truly open to the ideas and rich knowledge of the people we are assisting and not presume to advance any agenda of our own, even one as seemingly simple as agricultural production, in an area of the world where we all have much to learn.
Reynolds Whalen is a 2008 graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and has traveled extensively in Kenya, Uganda, and Sudan. He spent fall semester 2006 in Kenya working with AIDS orphans -- read his blog on it here and has made a documentary film on that experience. He is currently raising funds to spend 2008-9 working in Rwanda for Millennium Congregation helping people in the villages of Rwanda tell their stories. You can give toward Reynolds work in Rwanda with Millennium Congregation here (be sure and put Millennium Congregation - Reynolds Whalen in the designation field)
