The Datoga Tribe, the Oldest Tribe of Tanzania
The Datoga people live in the vicinity of Lake Eyasi in northern Tanzania in the Rift Valley. They are skilled farmers and craftsman. The Datoga are a proud people and have a reputation as being fierce warriors.
The Datoga people consider themselves the oldest tribe in Tanzania. About 2000 years ago they migrated from the area that is Southern Sudan today. As pastoral nomads, they depended on milk products and moved whenever their cattle needed to relocate for grazing purposes. At that time they were traditional pastoralists but about 500 years ago they became agriculturalists, who were farming in the highlands. Cattle are the Datoga’s most important domestic animal. Additionally they raise chickens and herd goats, donkeys as well as sheep. Similar to the Massai culture they eat meat, cow dung, hide fat, milk, horns, blood, tendons for feeding or for rituals. They have now adapted to an agrarian lifestyle and farm plots of maize, beans, and millet. Living in a semi-arid area where water is scarce and often unclean, their live is difficult. Though group pressure serves as the primary form of social control, leadership and authority rest with a council of elders. The elders can impose both fines and curses. Today the number of remaining Datoga is estimated to be around 30,000.
The Datoga keep their traditions and beliefs alive and build the villages exactly as their ancestors did. However, at the same time they adapted to their new environments and started dressing in the reddish brown color of soil. The colorful clothes worn by Datoga women are patched leather dresses. They also wear bead work, brass bracelets, and necklaces. The Datoga can be identified by their decorative tattooing in circular patterns around their eyes. The tattoo, in fact is realized with scarifications, that are engraved on the face and that often cause painful infections.
The Datoga are polygamous and their wives are ranked in the order of their marriage. Marriage partners must be from outside the clan. Funeral ceremonies and mourning practices last up to a year. . Honey beer Is considered a sacred drink to men at ritual occasions.
As the Datoga resist formal education, almost all of hem are illiterate and very few speak Swahili, the primary language of Tanzania. Their hygiene standards are low and they have high and small child infant mortality rate. The Datoga bypassed modern political developments. They have few contacts with neighboring peoples and relationships are mostly conflictual.
We visited Tanzania on our overland trip by car (a Toyota LandCruiser 4WD campervan) from the Netherlands to South Africa and South America; see our channel / janvanbekkum for hundreds of clips. More clips of Tanzania can be found here: • Tanzania . Enjoy more traditional tribes by playing the clips in this playlist: • Traditional Tribes .
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