The Gallery
All text and photographs copyright of Our Forgotten Children
Tanzania
This may be the ultimate pastoral scene: against the giant sweep of Tanzania's northern plains, a thirteen year-old Masaii tribesman guides his cattle along a gulley.
In the Masaii tribes, it is up to the young boys to take care of the livestock. Leaving the sanctuary of his village for months at a time, he must herd the cattle across vast distances in search of food and water.
Back at the village - a congregation of huts made from cow dung and straw - the elders eke out a simple life from the surrounding land; the women prepare food and make bead jewellery to sell to passers-by.
Most of the young girls are engaged to be married by the age of eleven. At the onset of puberty, the older tribesmen take them as wives, ostensibly to forestall unwanted pregnancies.
Far to the west, the Hadzabe Bushmen have no need of huts or villages: their home is underneath the acacia trees surrounding Lake Eyasi.
The tribe resists all entreaties to join the modern world: the elders, when asked, have no interest in how old they are. "What's important is that we are alive.". None of them has ever seen a doctor or a school. From an early age, the boys are taught how to light a fire, and make a bow and arrow, and hunt for food. If a child gets sick, they treat him with herbs and roots.
As the little boys joined their elders in tearing apart the innards of a lynx and roasting it, one thing was clear: these may be the last truly self-sufficient people on Earth.