Cultural Tours
Roots & Rhythms
Tanzania with population of over 60 millions, more than 125 ethnic groups or tribes with diverse cultures, each tribe speaks its own language. All these tribes live in peace and harmony and Kiswahili being the unifying language among Tanzanian.
Cultural tours in Tanzania can be combined while in safari or special activity tour to visit ethnic tribes to the area, site or villages to experience everyday life of the people and participate in ceremonies, rituals traditional dances, local cuisine preparations, home stay, daily homestead chores, handcraft, visiting community development initiatives, visiting traditional healers, artisan, hikes in nature walks, historical heritage.
Tourists can learn indigenous knowledge, local folklore, their history, and hospitality as a tour product. Thus, provide employment and income generating opportunities to local members of communities, and contribute towards poverty alleviation to the community visited.
Popular cultural tours while in safari northern Tanzania.
MASAI TRIBE
Nilotic ethnic semi nomadic inhabiting northern Tanzania and part of Kenya though can be found all over the country throughout Arusha city on the way to Ngorongoro conservation area and near Serengeti national park. They have distinctive customs and traditions, they carry their age-old customs, however this is changing, albeit slowly.
While in safari Maasai can be recognized quickly with their hair style, traditional tattoo, clothing in which young men wear black for several months after traditional circumcision. Red is a favored color among Maasai, black blue, checkered and striped together with multicolor African garments.
They have social organization in which the unit of Maasai society is the age- set.
They have special local medicine, songs and dance style, body modification – traditional tattoo, stretching of earlobes and missing tooth in the lower jaw.
Their diets include raw meat, blood from the cattle and milk though nowadays there are lots of influences among Maasai from neighboring communities. Their village consists of special house made up with cow dung and clay soil in which they sleep on animal skin.
Hadzabe/hadza
Khoisan – Bushmen of East Africa, Last Hunters-Gatherer of Tanzania.
Are an indigenous ethnic group in the scrubby bush lands in north central Tanzania living around Lake Eyasi neighboring Serengeti plateau, its population is nearly 2000.
They survive exclusively based on traditional foraging, their classified with Khoisan language with clicks sound, they are aboriginal hunter-gatherer believed to have kind of relation to the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.
Men hunts and bring back home wild honey and wild meat usually baboon, primates and antelopes, while children and women gather fruit such as baobab fruit, berries, tubers and roots to supplement their diet.
Hunting takes place in the early morning by using bow and poisoned arrows and sometimes snares.
Trip tours to this tribes includes
- Visiting Hadzabe in their homes and villages with their huts made up of dry grassy and poles.
- Hunting excursion which vary between 5 – 8 kilometers a day and a walk is fairly quickly
- Learning hunting techniques
- Learning survival skills
- Food preparations and cultural norms.
- Enjoying the wild scenic view of Yaeda valley where they resides.
DATOGA
Swahili called Mang’ati, The name Mang’ati comes from Maasai word “Ilmanga’ti” Which means “enemy” The Datoga earned this name because they have always bested pastoral Maasai in their occasional bouts of reciprocal cattle raiding and small-scale wars.
They are agro-pastoralist nomadic nilotic people resides in Manyara, Mara and Singida in Tanzania. . It is believed that their original is south – east of the present day Khatoom or western Ethiopia highlands. They consider themselves as the oldest tribe in Tanzania. Mount Hanang is the sacred mountain to the Datoga. They are proud people and fierce warriors, they prove themselves by killing or eliminating their enemies not a Datoga or killing a dangerous animals like lion or buffalo.
They are skillful and are also known for their blacksmith skills, beads works, bras, bracelets, and necklaces, while supplying arrowheads to the Hadzabe tribe. Other Tanzanians consider the Datoga primitive because they resist education and development; they live in low standard of hygiene and have high infant mortality.
Datoga tradition dress for woman is a leather cape or a piece of woven cloth often reddish brown color of soil where they live, married woman distinguished by special skirt made of thin strips of leather with metal neck, arm and ankle ornaments, beads may be sewn on to clothes or warn as a decoration. Men wear Maasai blanket often a red color around their shoulder or short trousers and a shirt and carries stick with a widened end.
Datoga are distinguishable by their decorative tattooing in circular patterns around their eyes.
Religious and beliefs
The Datoga supreme deity is Asseta, an androgynous, powerful and inherently good deity invested wish, creative potential that can be communicated with by the mediation of ancestral spirits. Those ancestral spirits talk to divines are appealed to in prayers and can bless or punish.
Life and Dearth
Traditionally the Datoga have considerable respect for the dying, as the dead are believed to become guardian spirits. The majority of Datoga maintain animistic beliefs and practices and respect ancestors, they are said to practice divination rainmaking, witchcraft and sorcery.
