The Tree Where Man Was Born (14 page)

Chewing hard twigs of mswaki, the Rendille stand like herons on one leg to contemplate our ways. One man presents himself before me:
“Kabala Rendille,”
he announces: I am of the Rendille. This is all the Swahili that he knows. He has a thorn encased in a foot that is swollen hard, and looks on with a cold smile as Eliot Porter tries in vain to remove it with a pocket knife. “He wouldn’t flinch if you cut his foot in half,” Adrian said, with that headshake, part condescension, part respect, that white East Africans reserve for the nomad’s stoicism and endurance.

Days on this shore, though very hot, are bearable because the heat is dry, and because the wind is never still for more than a few hours. Each evening it comes howling down out of the Kulal Mountains to crash into the palms. Mounting in wild fits until after midnight, it causes the ballooning tents to lunge on their doubled moorings, and banishes all hope of sleep. Toward dawn, the winds abate, and by mid-morning may subside in vague light airs, or die with the same suddenness with which they came. The desert waits. Soon the palm fronds twitch again, and by mid-afternoon the wind is gathering toward the tumult of the night. In other seasons, said to be far worse, man takes shelter from the sandstorms in his hut, waiting dully for the months to pass.

June had turned into July; one morning we headed south. The winds and days were much the same, yet the lake has turned from a clear blue to jade, and we turned a last time to observe it from the southern mountains. From above, the inland sea is seen at its most beautiful, flowing north between two ramparts of dark mountains into the lost centuries of Abyssinia: on the desert horizon, in a desert light, the lake falls off the world into the sky. And seeing such splendor as he saw it, one regrets that Teleki named so strange a place after a Hapsburg princeling.
^*
Before Teleki it was a lake of legend called “Samburu,”
²²
but a better name still might be Anam, Great Water, a name used by the Turkana.

There is no road around the south end of the lake, only the foot trails of the few Turkana who pick their way over the lava flows to Loiyengalani. A bad track climbs out of the Rift and heads for South Horr across a region of black boulders, cairns, and strange stone circles in the sand, tracing the way of the ancient nomads toward Baragoi, and Maralal on the Laikipia Plateau, and the high savannas of East Africa.

One winter dawn of 1961, looking westward from the Olbalbal Escarpment, I saw the first rays of morning sun fall on the Serengeti Plain, in the country that was still known then as Tanganyika. Eight years later, when I stood in the same place, in Tanzania, the mighty landscape had not stirred. No road was visible, nor any sign of man, only a vast westward prospect spreading away to the clouds of Lake Victoria. Off to the north rose the Gol Mountains, in Maasai Land; in the near distance, scattered trees converged in the dark shadow of Olduvai Gorge. Beyond the shadow, spreading away in a haze of sand and golden grass, sun rays and cloud shadow, lay lion-colored plains that have changed little in millions of years.

Occupation by man’s ancestors of the Olduvai region at the edge of the great grassland has probably been continuous or nearly so since hominid creatures first emerged from the forests of central Africa. Like the modern baboon, man’s ancestors were primarily vegetarians that turned to small game and carrion
when berries and roots were scarce, and evolved gradually as scavengers and hunters when the stones used for splitting hides and seeds and bones were flaked into hand-axes and missiles. The earliest hominid found at Olduvai is the man-ape
Australopithecus
, heavy of brow and small of brain; he is thought to have been slight and swift, with an arm fit for slinging rocks and sticks.

In the early Pleistocene, perhaps three million years ago, crocodiles floated in the shallow lake at Olduvai where
Australopithecus
left his remains, and ever since, in response to variations in the radiation of the sun, or cyclical variations of the earth’s axis, that lake has died and come again and died many times over in the long rhythms of rain and drought that characterized the Ice Age. In Africa, where these oscillations were less violent than on other continents, many great animals still survive, but tool-users such as
Homo erectus
and his contemporaries, who were large creatures themselves, hunted mastodonts, gorilla-sized baboons, wild saber-tusked pigs the size of hippopotami, and wild sheep as large as buffalo, as well as such animals as the white rhinoceros, once common on these plains. Possibly the white rhino, which is twice the weight of the black, is a giant form that has persisted into the present; although confined to the west bank of the Nile in the south Sudan and adjacent regions of Uganda and the Congo, it was once more common than its relative throughout the continent.

In the Pleistocene, the volcanoes of the Crater Highlands were still forming, and campsites of the early men who stared at the smoke-filled sky have been located beneath layers of volcanic tuff. The west foothills of the highlands, under Lemagrut Volcano, are steps made by tilting and faulting of the earth’s surface that only took place some fifty thousand years ago, in the time when the Rift Valley was created. In this wet period of the Middle Stone Age, the use of fire had already spread throughout the continent, and remains found recently at the Omo River in Ethiopia together with a smooth-browed skull found earlier at Kanjera, in west Kenya, are evidence that modern man (
Homo sapiens sapiens
) existed at the time of these
great tectonic movements, sharing the earth with more primitive men whose end he doubtless helped to bring about. Man the hunter had long since lost his body hair and developed sweat glands to dispel the tropic heat, and no doubt he also produced pigmentation to protect his bare skin from the tropic sun. In the next millenniums, while the heavy-browed
Homo sapiens Rhodesiensis
subsided slowly into the earth, his smooth-browed cousin modified his tools and developed language, learned to daub himself with ferruginous red clay, and suffered the first stirrings of religious consciousness, represented by the burial of his dead.
Homo sapiens sapiens
, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla are the sole survivors among the host of African apes, man-apes, and men that once competed for existence, and the gorilla, like the white rhinoceros, may soon follow the defeated ones into oblivion.

Little is known of man’s evolution between the bone shards of a generalized
Homo
who used hand-axes a half-million years ago and the Kanjera skull of fifty thousand years ago, and there is a like absence of prehistory between Kanjera Man and the remains of the Negroid fishermen of Khartoum and their contemporaries, the so-called Proto-Hamites, who were the earliest invaders of East Africa from the north, some seventy centuries ago, and whose remains are the most recent found at Olduvai. Furthermore, no line of descent between these men and today’s Africans has been clearly established, although many authorities see Bushmanoid characters in the Kanjera skull, and at least one
²
has suggested that the Irakw peoples of the south part of these highlands, who speak in a strange archaic tongue, may actually derive from Proto-Hamite hunters rather than from the Neolithic herdsmen and tillers who came after. In any case, hunter-gatherers have wandered this region since man evolved. The Bushmen have retreated into inhospitable parts of southern Africa, and such groups as the Gumba are entirely gone, but Dorobo hunters still turn up in the vicinity of Loliondo, trading honey and ivory to the Maasai whose ways they have adopted, and in the arid hills
near Lake Eyasi to the south, where Rhodesioid Man left his remains, a few bands of Old People still persist, living much like Stone Age Man of forty thousand years ago.

The vast open space known to the Maasai as “siringet” is bordered in the east by the crater Highlands, in the west by hills and a broken woodland that thickens as it nears the rain belt of Lake Victoria. Northward beyond Loliondo, in Maasai Land, it touches the Loita Hills and the plateaus of the Maasai Mara, in Kenya; to the south, it dies away in the arid thorn scrub west of Lake Eyasi. This eastern region of the plain lies in the rain shadow of the Crater Highlands, and is very dry. In winter, Serengeti days are made by the prevailing southeast winds, which lose their precipitation when they strike the east wall of the Highlands; even regional storms that come up over Oldeani and Endulen, on the south slope of the volcanic massif, fade at the Olbalbal Plains—hence the near-desert dust, black rock, and thorn of Olduvai Gorge, which is dry almost all the year. From Olduvai, the plain stretches west for thirty miles across short-grass prairie and long-grass plain to the riverain forests of the Seronera River, where weather from Lake Victoria becomes a factor.

The sun going north after the equinox causes a northeast monsoon, and the meeting of northeast and southeast monsoons produces rain; the winds, colliding, are driven upward, and in the cooler atmosphere, discharge their water. In summer a hard southeast monsoon comes from cool latitudes of open ocean east of Madagascar, and because the meeting of monsoons takes place over the south Sudan and Ethiopia, rain is scarce in the Crater Highlands. But distant anvil clouds and cumulo-nimbus herald the separate weathers of the lake basin, and by late spring the plains animals are already moving down the drainage lines that flow west toward the woodlands. In November, when the northeast monsoon swings southward and the Pleiades appear, white clouds rise on the eastern sky. Then the short rains fall, and the great herds, drawn by the first
flush of new grass, return to the open plain in the annual movement, known as the “migration,” that serves as pasture rotation for the wild animals.

In the winter of 1961, when I first visited the Serengeti, the greatest drought in memory was in progress. The short rains had failed entirely and the cow gnu or wildebeest, lacking milk, abandoned many of the calves; the following year there were no calves at all. But herd animals are adapted to calamities, and by the winter of 1969, when I returned to Seronera, their numbers had already been restored.
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That January, the wildebeest were still moving eastward. The endless companies of animals, filling the sullen air with sullen blarting, are divided into cow-and-calf herds and herds of bulls; the bull gnus, especially, are wildebeests in their behavior, leaping, kicking, scampering, bucking, exploding crazy-legged in all directions as if in search of stones on which to dash their itching brains.

Often the wildebeest are accompanied by zebra. The striped horses, which foal all year instead of in a single seasonal avalanche, have less young to look out for and more intelligence to look out with; it is rare to see a zebra foal lost from its family band of stallion and mares. But among the gnu, the bony-legged calves are hard put to it to keep pace with their foolish mothers, and are often lost among the milling animals. Once separated, they are doomed, and fall to the predators in short order. The very plenty of their numbers in the few weeks of the calving may help preserve the species: the predators are too glutted to take advantage of all the opportunities, and many calves survive to blart another day.