In this chapter I discuss beliefs and practices associated with death in four African hunting and gathering societies – the Hadza of Northern Tanzania, the net-hunting Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, the Baka Pygmies of Cameroon and the !Kung Bushmen of Botswana and Namibia. Hunters and gatherers form a tiny minority of sub-Saharan African societies and their total population is substantially less than 1% of the whole sub-Saharan population. All of these societies are hunting and gathering in a world of agriculturalists and pastoralists and although each has enough space to be able to retreat for periods of the year from contact with these neighbouring farmers, all are profoundly aware of the similarities and differences between their custom and the custom of their neighbours and of the fact that certain of their customary practices – not least those associated with death – are regarded by their neighbours as curious, even abhorrent. Two of these societies, the two Pygmy ones, are forest-dwelling and two, the Hadza and the !Kung Bushmen, live on the dry open savanna, the !Kung habitat being rather drier than that of the Hadza. These societies are not merely geographically widely separated but are culturally and linguistically quite distinct: if they share any historical connections they are certainly extremely distant ones.

I should start by stressing that members of all these societies are constantly dealing in death, in the death of the game animals they hunt. Death is for them a way of life.