Fifty thousand years of living wisdom, now held in the hands of our own storytellers.
Who We Are
We are the Hadzabe. For over fifty thousand years, our home has been the acacia woodlands and rocky hills around Lake Eyasi and the Yaeda Valley in northern Tanzania. We are one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth.
The land here has always provided what we needed. Birds and game for meat. Roots, fruits, and wild honey for food. Plants that heal. Our skills in tracking animals, foraging, harvesting wild honey, and using plants as medicine have been passed down through countless generations. Our children grow up fluent in the language of the forest.
But in the last century, we lost over ninety percent of our ancestral land. Waterholes are drying. Bees are disappearing. Our language, Hadzane—a language isolate with no relation to any other—is spoken by barely a thousand voices. For the first time, we are buying food. Our youth leave for cities, and our elders sit with wisdom that may have no one left to receive it.
This is not just our loss. It is a quiet vanishing of knowledge that belongs to all humanity.
For years, others came with cameras and left with our stories. We had little say in how we were shown, and almost nothing returned.
Coming of the Media Center
2022 - Where it began
Our journey began in Yaeda Valley with our first storytelling and filmmaking workshop. We were asked which stories mattered to us and what we wanted people to understand about our lives. Together with African filmmakers, we shared our ideas and created two films.
When the films were shown in our communities, we asked for more. We wanted longer films that included our music, dance and everyday lives. We also wanted to learn photography and filmmaking ourselves, to be behind the camera and tell our own stories.
2023 - An idea takes shape
Our requests became the beginning of the Media Center. We imagined a place where our photographs, films, sounds, culture, language and knowledge could be created, kept and shared by us, for us and for future generations.
We began developing the skills to make this possible through photography and storytelling mentorships, learning how to document our own lives and the things that matter to our community.
2024 - Building skills and a home for our stories
We took part in an eight-day photography training in Domanga, learning camera handling, composition, exposure, angles and visual storytelling. We created photo stories about traditional crafts, food gathering, hunting, bow and arrow making, traditional knowledge and everyday life, with three women also taking part in the training.
That same year, construction of the Hadzabe Media Center began. Shaped around our vision, the space was designed with a studio where we could create and an archive where we could preserve the stories we make.
2025 - We began making our own films
In 2025, we stepped further behind the camera. We learned from experienced mentors how to find and develop stories, film them, and bring them to life through our own perspective.
Why It Matters
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Climate Solutions
Thanks to the our understanding of the natural world, our sophisticated Indigenous knowledge system could benefit the world by offering solutions to climate crisis.
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Endangered Language
Hadzane, is among the most endangered languages in the world. As language isolate, it possesses vocabulary about natural processes which have no equivalent in other languages.
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Collective Cultural Heritage
We have a rich tradition of song, mythology and storytelling which has survived thousands of generations currently risks becoming lost forever.
Our Mission
To empower us, to document, protect, and share our cultural and ecological knowledge through our Hadzabe community-led media, supporting accurate representation and ensuring our stories are preserved for future generations and shared in our own voice and on our own terms.
Our Vision
A future where our Hadzabe culture, language, and Indigenous knowledge are preserved, lived, and passed on through stories we create and own.
