The Tree Where Man Was Born (43 page)

In a few swift days of a dry summer this ancient cave in central Africa, blackened by centuries of smoke, has become for me my own ancestral place where fifty millenniums ago, a creature not so different from myself hunched close to the first fire. The striped swallow that nests under the arch was here before man’s upright troupes came through the silent baobabs, and so were the geckos, hornets, and small mice that go about their bright-eyed business undisturbed.

Giga and Gimbe mind the cave, which stays cool in the dry heat of the day, and one or the other is always by the fire, playing delicately on an mbira. Meals are at random in the African way, and we have no wish to give them order. We eat before going on a hunt and after we return, and on some days there are two meals and on others four or five. When least expected and most wanted, Gimbe will come with a basin of fresh water—karibu—and then he will stir our posho into his charred pot with his wood spoon and present this warming stuff with a fine stew of whatever wild meat is at hand. In the afternoons, we bathe in the river and stand on the cool banks to dry, and toward twilight almost every night we climb onto the toppled monolith that forms the roof over the cave, and smoke, and watch the sun go down over Sipunga.

To the rock cast like a gravestone, the oldest woman, muttering, comes home each twilight with a bundle of sticks for her night fire. When, out of happiness, I greet her, she gives me
the cold cheerless stare of ancient women—Why do you greet me, idiot? Can’t you see the way that the world goes?—and totters past me to her hearth without a word. At darkness, in wind, three fires light the rock face, with leaping shadows of the three small human forms, clattering and cawing under the skeleton of their lone tree. But the dance of shadows dies as the fires dim, and the three panakwetepi, the “old children,” fall silent. The eldest draws bat-colored rags about her, hunched and nodding, and subsides into a little heap of dim mortality. I wonder if she hears hyenas howling.

An Mbulu donkey gives its maniacal cry, and far away on the escarpment, probing slowly across the mountain darkness, shine the hard eyes of a truck, bringing in cheap trade goods for the duka. From the Seven Hearths, the Hadza see the outside world, but the world cannot see them. “This valley, this people—it is a tragedy we are watching!” Enderlein cries. “And it is a sign of what is happening everywhere in this country, in the whole world! Sometimes I really don’t think it is bearable to watch it, I have not the heart for it, I will have to leave. And other times, especially when I am drunk, I can see myself as a spectator at the greatest comedy there ever was, the obliteration of mankind by our own hand.”

When the air grows cold we come down off the rock. In the cave, Hadza are gathered at the fire, shoulder to shoulder like the swallows, clicking endlessly in their warm tongue, with big sighs and little groans of emphasis and soft
n
and
anh
and
m
sounds, hands moving in and out among the embers, the scraping of a knife blade on a stone, a cough, a whiff of bangi, until finally the people of the Seven Hearths depart. The last man squatting, Magandula, crawls off to his sleep with a loud self-conscious sigh that tells the white men, stretched silent as two dead beneath the stars, that the worldly Magandula, although patient to a fault, has no place among such simple folk. Already Giga the fire tender is breathing his night breath that sounds like a man pulled down in flight; I watch his face, asleep, and feel a tingling at the temples. Giga has been in Africa forever, he is the prototypic model of a man, the clay, and one loves not
Giga but this being who is mortal, a kind humorous fellow of great presence and no small intelligence who will die. And Gimbe, too, singing his songs and playing his sweet irimbako, and even the brash Magandula, donning his magic street shoes for his flight from the old ways: to perceive them in their sleep—Enderlein, too—is to perceive and to make peace with one’s own self.

Toward dawn, Giga hurls faggots on the fire and rolls himself a fat and lumpy smoke and coughs and coughs and coughs to his heart’s content, and one forgives him even this. Soon the cricket stops its singing, and after a silence there is birdsong, the bell note of the slate-colored boubou, the doves and turacos, a hornbill. At sun-up comes an electric screeching that signals the passage of swift petal-colored lovebirds.

The Hadza hunch close to their fires, getting warm; when the sun has heat in it, the day begins. Soon the akwetepi, the “little people,” come past the cave, first boys with bows, then younger children seeking berries—“
Shai-yaamo!
” they call. And the answer is
Shai-yamo mtana
, to which they echo a soft
m
-
taa
-
na
. They pull berry branches down and strip them, laughing. At the fire, long-legged in shorts and boots, the restless white men sip their tea and listen, warming cold hands on their tin cups. In the next days we will go away without the game scout Magandula, who is muttering about poachers in the region, and asks if he might linger in the bush.

The last day at the cave is slow and peaceful. The hunters come down from the Seven Hearths to a discreet fire from where they can spy politely on the visitors; they carve and chew and soften and sight new arrow shafts, bracing them by inserting them between the toes, or cut pipe holes into new pieces of stone found in the river.

“
Dong-go-ko
.” One man sings softly of zebras and lions. “
Dong-go-ko gogosala . . .
”

Zebra, zebra, running fast . . .

The women are out gathering roots and tubers, and also the silken green nut of the baobab which, pounded on a stone and
cooked a little, provides food for five months of the year. The still air of the hillside quakes with the pound of rock on rock, and in this place so distant from the world, the steady sound is an echo of the Stone Age. Sometimes the seeds are left inside the hull to make a baby’s rattle, or a half shell may be kept to make a drinking cup. In the rains, the baobab gives shelter, and in drought, the water that it stores in its soft hollows, and always fiber thread and sometimes honey. Perhaps the greatest baobab were already full grown when man made red rock paintings at Darashagan. Today young baobab are killed by fires, set by the strangers who clear the country for their herds and gardens, and the tree where man was born is dying out in Hadza Land.

From a grove off in the western light, an arrow rises, piercing the sun poised on the dark massif of the Sipunga; the shaft glints, balances, and drops to earth. Soon the young hunters, returning homeward, come in single file between the trees, skins black against black silhouetted thorn. One has an mbira, and in wistful monotony, in hesitation step, the naked forms with their small bows pass one by one in a slow dance of childhood. The figures wind in and out among black thorn and tawny twilight grass and vanish. Once more as in a dream, like a band of the Old People, the small Gumba, who long ago went into hiding in the earth.

CHAPTER I

1
. Willard Trask, ed., The Unwritten Song, Macmillan, 1966.

2
. A. J. Arkell,
A History of the Sudan
, Oxford, 1961.

3
. Godfrey Lienhardt, “The Shilluk of the Upper Nile,” in
African Worlds
, ed. by Daryll Forde, Oxford, 1954.

4
. Trask,
op. cit
.

5
. Mary Douglas,
Purity and Danger
, Praeger, 1966.

6
. E. E. Evans-Pritchard,
The Nuer
, Oxford, 1940.

7
. Geoffrey Parrinder,
African Mythology
, Hamlyn, 1967.

CHAPTER II

1
. Marjorie Perham, in Preface to
Mau Mau Detainee
by J. M. Kariuki, Penguin, 1964.

2
. J. M. Kariuki,
Mau Mau Detainee
, Penguin, 1964.

3
. Patrice Lumumba, quoted in
The Horizon History of Africa
by Horizon Editors, McGraw-Hill, 1971.

4
. G. P. Murdock,
Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History
, McGraw-Hill, 1959.

5
. K. R. Dundas, “Notes on the Origin and History of the Kikuyu and Dorobo Tribes,”
Man
, no. 78, 1908.

6
. Joseph Thomson,
Through Masai Land
, Cass, 1968.

7
. Ludwig R. von Hohnel,
Discovery by Count Teleki of Lakes Rudolf and Stephanie
, Cass, 1968.

8
. J. H. Patterson,
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo
, Macmillan, 1963.

9
. R. Oliver and G. Matthew,
History of East Africa
, vol. 1, Oxford, 1963, p. 417.

10
. Jomo Kenyatta,
Facing Mt. Kenya
, London, 1938.

11
. Peter Beard,
The End of the Game
, Viking, 1965.

12
. Placide Tempels in Basil Davidson,
The African Past
, Grosset & Dunlap, 1964.

13
. Peter Beard,
op. cit
.

14
. Karen Blixen,
Out of Africa
, Random House, 1937.

15
. Peter Beard,
op. cit
.

CHAPTER III

1
. Gerhard Lindblom,
The Akamba in British East Africa
, Uppsala, 1920.

2
. Elspeth Huxley,
The Flame Trees of Thika
, Penguin, 1962.

3
. Dundas,
op. cit
.

4
. G. W. B. Huntingford,
The Southern Nilo-Hamites
, London, 1953.

5
. Paul Spencer,
The Samburu
, University of California Press, 1965.

6
. J. A. Hunter,
Hunter
, Harper, 1952.

7
. Dr. Alan Jacobs, Correspondence.

8
. Spencer,
op. cit
.

9
. John G. Williams,
Field Guide to Birds of Central and East Africa
, Houghton, 1964;
idem., Field Guide to the National Parks of East Africa
, Houghton, 1968.

10
. M. Posnansky, ed.,
Prelude to East African History
, Oxford, 1966.

11
. Sonia Cole,
The Prehistory of East Africa
, Macmillan, 1965.

12
. R. Oliver and G. Matthew,
History of East Africa
, vol. 1. Oxford, 1963.

13
.
Ibid
.

14
. G. P. Murdock,
op. cit
.

15
.
Ibid
.

16
. Lindblom,
op. cit
.

17
. Jacobs, Correspondence.

18
. von Hohnel,
op. cit
.

19
. Joy Adamson,
The Peoples of Kenya
, Collins & Harvill, 1967.

20
. Kariuki,
op. cit
.

21
. Spencer,
op. cit
.

22
. Thomson,
op. cit
.

CHAPTER IV

1
. Huntingford,
op. cit
.

2
. Murdock,
op. cit
.

3
. George B. Schaller,
The Serengeti Lion
, Univ. Chicago Press, 1972 (uncorrected proofs).

4
. Frederick C. Selous,
A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa
, London, 1881.

5
. Parrinder,
op. cit
.

6
. George B. Schaller and Gordon R. Lowther, “The Relevance of Carnivore Behavior to the Study of Early Hominids,”
Southwestern Jour. Anthrop
., vol. 25, no. 4, 1969.

7
. Hugh Russell, Conversations and Correspondence.

CHAPTER V

1
. C. W. Hobley, “Notes on the Dorobo,”
Man
, no. 76, 1906.

2
. H. A. Fosbrooke, “An Administrative Record of the Masai Social System.”
Tanganyika Notes and Records
, no. 26, 1948 (hereafter cited as TNR).

3
.
Ibid
.

4
. Joseph H. Greenberg,
The Languages of Africa
, University of Indiana Press, 1963.

5
. Karl Peters, quoted in Fosbrooke,
op. cit
.

6
. G. W. B. Huntingford, “The Peopling of East Africa by Its Modern Inhabitants,” from
History of East Africa
by R. Oliver and G. Matthew, Oxford, 1963.

7
. Robert F. Gray,
The Sonjo of Tanganyika
, Oxford, 1963.

8
. Ian Henderson (with Philip Goodhart),
The Hunt for Kimathi
, Hamish Hamilton, 1958.

9
. A. Wykes,
Snake Man
, Simon and Schuster, 1961.

10
. C. P. J. Ionides, “Southern Province Native Superstitions,”
TNR
, no. 29, 1950.

11
. Russell,
op. cit
.

12
. Colin Turnbull,
The Lonely African
, Simon & Schuster, 1962.

13
. H. K. Schneider, “The Lion-Men of Singida: A Reappraisal,”
TNR
, no. 58, 1962.