If I Were Human

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 empire baobabs and steal all the 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 moons I’d tie bells around my waist and dance with my ancestors. I’d click a language only a thousand of us could 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 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 die; and what is resurrected is, well, I don’t know. Just something better. Something heart-shaking and audacious. Something that maybe demands of us a moral courage we thought we never had. Something that might help tilt our world towards a greater compassion for all human beings, Hadza and not.

"We created you into tribes so you may know one another, not hate one another” - The Qur’an

Outtakes from a project on the Hadza of Tanzania for Smithsonian Magazine.