The Akie

The Akie

The Akie people live as hunter-gatherers on the vast plains of Northern Tanzania. Their Massai neighbors know the Akie as I Itorobo, a derogatory word which means ‘poor people without cattle’. Kiswahili derivatives are Ndorobo, or the Anglicised Dorobo, a word often mistakenly used to refer to several unrelated hunter-gatherer groups in East Africa.

Anthropologist Marianne Bakken estimates that there are between 2,000 and 3,000 Akie inhabiting traditional clan lands about 150 miles south east of Olduvai Gorge. The gorge is where Louis and Mary Leakey uncovered a 1.8 million year old hominid skull of Australopithecus boisei, the earliest recorded hominid footprints.

The Akie are some of the last hunter gatherers on the African savannah. Often Akie men leave their villages and head into the bush for several days or weeks, hunting and gathering honey, and living in the simplest of shelters that serve only to keep the wild animals at bay. Honey, collected from hives in baobab trees,also forms an imporatnat part of the Akie diet.

Origins, Territory and Villages

Academic opinion is divided as to where the Akie actually originated. They speak a language that is a Kalenjin dialect and part of the Nilotic language group. As the name suggests, Nilotic languages emanate from locations in, and migratory routes from, the Nile area. It has been suggested that the Akie people and language are closely related to an indigenous group of hunter gatherers now living in Kenya, who also speak a Kalenjin language, called the Okiek. Some scholars believe that the Akie may have moved south as part of a group of pastoralists and, after a period of hardship, returned to a life of hunting and gathering.

According to older Akie, the various Akie clans used to live within defined clan territories. Each clan was associated with a specific ancestral spirit, and their territory along with its natural resources was divided among smaller family units. So, effectively each family owned exclusive rights to specific resources-particularly to trees, and to the wild honey in those trees. To a lesser extent this still seems to be the case today. Wild animals were considered free for people to hunt anywhere.

Hunting

It is legal for a Tanzanian to hunt between July and March with a rifle/gun in the region, as long as the weapon is registered and a license is purchased. However, buying a license is expensive and buying a gun is simply unaffordable, so most Akie prefer to continue hunting using a bow and arrow. The government is now tolerant of the Akie hunting for subsistence with a bow and arrow, although until relatively recently they could have been fined, or even have gone to prison for doing so.

The Future

The Akie are proud of their culture, but they are often seen as primitive and an embarrassment by their neighbors and their country. Their knowledge and understanding of the environment they live in is unrivalled. Like any other group people, they want to maintain their identity, remember their heritage, and also embrace progress so that their children can have better opportunities. For that to happen they hope to secure ownership over at least some of their traditional lands.





(bbc.co.uk/tribe)