Lessons Learned from the Hadza - Privilege

None of the Hadza knew who Lil Wayne was. They didn’t ask us if we lived in the OC. They never wondered if we ate the kind of food they ate. They weren’t offended that we weren’t going to add them on Facebook because a) they don’t have Facebook and b) they wouldn’t want it if someone tried to sign them up for an account. In general, the Hadzabe didn’t give two damns about America.

Because of that, they didn’t seriously/jokingly ask us to take their children with us, or propose to us, or shake their heads at us because we weren’t up on the latest Hadzabe/Tanzanian/East African news.

And we loved it.

We loved not being idealized and envied. We loved not being judged for our ignorance of the wider world. We loved not being conflated with the power of our government. We loved not being held responsible for all the world’s ills.

Before staying with the Hadzabe, we had been living with and amongst people that were not shy about reminding us that we, as Americans, were very privileged people. Even though those reminders were “Mzungu!” and (skeptically) “You don’t have money?,” they were enough to make sure we remembered our place in this world.

When we stayed with the Hadzabe, we reveled in our break from social responsibility. In allowing our privilege to be swept under a rug, we stopped thinking about how we could correct the wrongs that our government, economic system, etc. commits against others around the world. We voluntarily forgot that our inability to act doesn’t excuse the oppression of others.

The Hadzabe allowed us to forget because they didn’t care about our responsibility to them and the rest of the world. They didn’t care because they didn’t see themselves (only) as victims of our privilege. In not focusing on how the “modern” world has disenfranchised them, the Hadzabe asserted their own sense of privilege/power, and thus, were not fazed by our status as citizens of an elite country. As noted in the last post, they have a power all their own. (Even still, that does not mean the privileged have no responsibility to them…)

After living with the Hadzabe, I’ve concluded that privilege is a state of mind that is actualized or suppressed depending on how we are able/allowed to use our immediate environment. If this is so, then privilege is the ability and permission to exercise the imagination: Outsiders see Mongo wa Mono and see a barren landscape that they need to be saved from. A Hadza sees it and can dig up a tuber big enough to feed her family. She has power. She has privilege. A Hadza might look at my laptop and see a useless piece of something that has no word in Hadzane. Among a host of other things, I see a way to raise awareness about their lives.



When we returned to Nairobi, we were greeted with the usual, “Mzungu, mzungu!” and general discomfort with our inability/apathy to act on the privilege we were being told we have. Thinking about how we were with the Hadzabe, how we are in Kenya, and how (relatively) less-privileged people treat us. I ask myself,

Where has our imagination gone and who’s holding it captive?