The Tree Where Man Was Born (5 page)

The road edge glittered with night eyes—jackals, a porcupine, mongoose, a squirrel, small cats, gazelles, and the small woodland antelope known as duiker. I kept an eye out for an antelope known as Mrs. Gray’s lechwe, but this intriguing creature remained hidden. Toward nine, the truck surprised a pair of lionesses in the track; two males crouched down into the grass off to one side. These first wild lion I had ever seen were stirring, turning their heads without haste to regard the lights, then vanishing in matched bounds into the dark, one to each side. I stared at the dusty grass where they had gone, but the night was still. Perhaps the cats had been stalking a tiang, for moments later a band of these large blue-flanked antelope (the East African race is called the topi) fled past, eyes flashing. Panicked by the truck, they seemed at the same time drawn to it, rushing the headlights, one by one, before veering away.

That night was spent on the floor of a Dinka hut, with bats chirping in the thatch above and the rhythm of chants and tom-toms in the distance. Toward four, we resumed the journey
south. In a rainy mist, at dawn, a giraffe crossed the track and moved off westward toward the Sudd, pausing after a time to peer over its long shoulder. By midday, the track had come to Equatoria, the southernmost province of the Sudan, and late that afternoon it arrived at Juba, where we said good-by to Gabriel Babili.

At Juba, the sweet smells of rot on the soft air, the tin ring and squawk of radios across the bare dirt yards of open-air cafés, the insect din, the mango trees in silhouette against the southern stars, evoke all tropics of the world. In the river, a few hippos rise and sink, and a tame ostrich, property of the governor, skirts pools in the mud street, and lepers come and go like the brown kites, tattered and scavenging. In early February, 1961, it was a refuge for displaced Belgians from the Congo, who occupied every bed at the hotel, and in a lot nearby the cars abandoned by refugees already fled to Europe were gathering red dust. The hostel of sorts to which we were sent had been commandeered by fleas, and we slept outside upon the ground, departing Juba without regret the following day. Through the border town of Nimule, the Sudanese assured us, passed all manner of transport into Uganda, for was not Nimule the frontier city of the largest country in all Africa, with vehicles arriving from all corners of the world?

Our truck climbed all afternoon toward the plateaus of central Africa. But thanks to a dispute with the Arab driver incited by the soldier, who had risked our lives on more than one occasion by saluting the Moslems with hurled spit, we were thrown off in the dead of night at a silent crossroads known as Mangara. The culprit, who would clown in hell, ran after the truck down the road: “Hey, fellas,
wait
a minute! Like, there are
lions
here!” A kind citizen, attracted by his outcry, soon stood beside us in the darkness, and opened a room of the crossroads store for us to sleep in, and toward noon of the next day another truck picked us up and took us on to Nimule. There the border guards admitted that no machine of any kind had challenged their barrier in many days, though they, too,
expressed confidence that Nimule was the crossroads of the world.

Nimule is little more than a gathering of huts to which women carried water on their heads a mile or more uphill from the river, and the fried fish, bananas, papaws, and a scrawny pullet scavenged in the village would not be enough to see us through the long hot days. But we did not know this in the beginning, and at dawn on the second day, before any vehicles that might take us south could arrive from Juba, the South African and I walked a few miles downriver, where a small tract has been set aside for wildlife.

Nimule is the only national park in the Sudan, and in the number and variety of animals to be seen in a small area, it is one of the best in Africa. It is also one of the most beautiful, a natural park between the mountains and a bend in the Albert Nile. To the south and west, early one morning, the mountains of Uganda brought the sky of Africa full circle. Somewhere in those mountains, down to the southeast, lived a light, small people called the Ik who until recently used pebble tools of the sort made in the Old Stone Age; in the Congo’s Ituri Forest, to the west, lived Pygmies who still carried fire rather than make it.

Soft hills inset with outcrops of elephant-colored boulders rose beyond a bright stretch of blue river, and elephants climbed to a sunrise ridge from a world that was still in shadow. More than a hundred moved slowly toward the sun; the landscape stirred. The small boat manned by two askaris—rangers in khaki shirts and shorts, rakish safari hats, and long puttees—pushed through reeds and scudding nympheas to the open water.

On the west bank, the askaris shook small bags of a fine dust to gauge the direction of the wind. We moved inland. Very soon there arose out of a copse a herd of buffalo, with its coterie of cattle egrets rising and settling once again on the twitching, dusty backs. To judge from the rapidity with which the askaris cocked their rifles, we were too close; the beasts took a
few steps forward. Wet nostrils elevated to the wind, they wore an aggrieved, lowering expression. There were no handy trees to climb, and I wondered how to enter most promptly and least painfully the large thornbush close at hand. But the buffalo panicked before I did, wheeling away in dark commotion, leaving the white birds dangling above the dust.

To the south, on a rise that overlooks the Albert Nile where it bends away into Uganda, a herd of kob antelope stepped along the hill—some sixty female kobs and calves led by a single male with sweeping horns and fine black forelegs—and the delicate oribi, bright rufous with brief straight horns, scampered away in twos and threes, tails switching. A gray duiker, more like a fat hare than an antelope, gathered its legs beneath it in low flight, and a sow wart hog with five hoglets, new sun glinting on the manes and the inelegant raised tails, rushed off in a single file at the scent of man. Here and there a stately waterbuck regarded us, alert.

Kob and waterbuck would be large animals elsewhere in the world, but here they seemed almost incidental, for to the east of them, the entire hillside surged with elephant, nearly two hundred now, including a few tuskers of enormous size. And to the north, on a small hillock, stood four rhinoceros, one of these a calf. The askaris approached the rhino gradually, keeping downwind—not always a simple matter, as the light wind was variable—and eventually brought us within stoning distance of the animals; they were astonished that we had no cameras, but simply wished to
see
. The rhinos were of the rare “white” (
weit
, or wide-mouthed) species, a grazing animal that lacks the long upper lip of the black rhino, which is a browser; mud-crusted, with their double horn, their ugliness was protean. The cow and calf having moved off, two males were left, and these, aware of an intrusion but unable to detect it, moved suspiciously toward each other, stopping short at the last second as if to contemplate the risks of battle, then retreating simultaneously. Having just come to Africa, I did not know that the white rhino is gentle and rarely makes a charge; buffalo in herds are also inoffensive, and no doubt the askaris were
teasing as well as pleasing us, though they kept their laughter to themselves.

Beyond the rhino, dry trees rose toward the dusty mountains, and beyond the hills hung the blue haze of Africa, and everywhere were birds—stonechats and silver birds, cordon bleus and flycatchers, shrikes, kingfishers, and sunbirds. Overhead sailed vultures and strange eagles and the brown kite of Africa and South Asia, which had followed me overland two thousand miles from Cairo, up the Nile. Here in Equatoria, in the heart of Africa, with Ethiopia to the east, Uganda and the Congo to the south, Lake Chad and the new states of what was once French Africa to the west, one sensed what this continent must have been, when the white rhinoceros was not confined to a few pockets but wandered everywhere, like the kites, from the plains of Libya south to the Cape of Good Hope. Today Libya is desert, and the wild things disappear. The ragged kite, with its affinity for man and carrion, will be the last to go.

Those days at Nimule I recall as the longest in my life. There was no point in trying to cross the border, as the nearest town
was far away across an arid plain. For fear of missing the stray vehicle that might pass through, we waited forever at the guard post, and during this period—though we never knew the reason for the crisis until days later, when finally we got away into Uganda—Patrice Lumumba, the firebrand of the new Africa, was murdered at Katanga in the Congo.

Overnight, the friendly Sudanese became bitterly hostile. Guards and villagers gathered in swarms, their pointing and muttering interspersed with shouts and gestures. We could not understand what was being said, but it seemed clear that our crime was being white—so far as we knew, there were no members of our race closer than Juba, a hundred miles away—and that our fate was being decided. (Numbers of whites were killed that year in Africa; a thousand died in Angola alone.
¹
) Until now, the people of Nimule had been gentle and hospitable. The schoolmaster had offered us his hut, and even his own cot, and when our food ran out, the border guards shared their calabash of green murk and tripes into which three dirty white hands and seven or eight black ones dipped gray mucilaginous hunks of manioc, a low vegetable that, like maize, was brought to Africa from the Americas at the time of the Atlantic slave trade.

After a day and night of dread, peremptorily, we were summoned once more to eat from the communal bowl. Doubtless the schoolteacher had interceded for us, though he had been at pains to seem as hostile as the rest. I knew we must accept the food to avoid discourtesy, and the South African agreed; bravely he gagged down his tripe, retiring immediately behind a hut to puke it up again. But my countryman refused to feed, declaring that if he ate he would die anyway; he ignored our pleas and curses. The Africans took baleful note, and muttered, but did nothing; like the tribesmen on the truck south from Khartoum, they feared this hairy avatar, who sat inscrutable behind dark glasses, making strange ceremonial dipping motions with his hand.

In Uganda, parting company with my companions, I made my way southwest to Murchison Falls, where the upper Nile,
descending from the high plateaus of the central continent, bursts through a narrow gorge. From there I went to Queen Elizabeth National Park, across Lake Edward from the Congo, which has a prospect of the Mountains of the Moon, and from there to Kampala, north of Lake Victoria. This wet and fertile country of the central lakes is a great kingdom of the Bantu peoples, who form the mass of the population throughout east, central, and south Africa. The Bantu—their own word for “people,” used by scholars to describe a language family rather than an ethnic group—are made up of many tribes in many countries, most of them tillers of the soil. Banana fronds and smoke-plumed villages fill a landscape of wild sunlit colors set against purple clouds. Graceful people in white shirts and bright kangas walk everywhere along red roads to flowering markets, and the umbrella, jitney bus, and bicycle are ubiquitous—an African of Kenya tells
²
of seeing a Ugandan with a whole stove mounted on his bicycle, upon which he prepared and cooked and ate his meal while pedaling along.

For all its life, there is something about this domesticated country of rank greens and imminent rain that I found oppressive. In East Africa, most of the limited land suited to agriculture lies in the weather of great lakes and mountains, in country of heavy humid leaves and bruised thick skies, and the small farms or shambas, each with its corn patch, thatch hut, and roosters, differ little from those to be seen in tropics all around the world—this was not the East Africa of my imaginings, a remote region shut away until a century ago by deserts and mountains of north Africa, the rain forests of the Congo, the gray thorn nyika and unnavigable rivers of the Indian Ocean coast, a land of wild beasts, silence, and immensities where man was a lone herdsman with a spear or a small aborigine with bow and arrow. Also I felt ambivalent among the Bantu, or at least among acculturated Bantu, whose adoption of western dress and aspirations had been accompanied almost everywhere by rejection of western rule. Patrice Lumumba, whose murder had involved us so abruptly in the chaos of anti-colonialism, had been a Bantu, and these people share
much with the black American or West Indian whose ancestors were transported out of Africa in Anglo-Saxon ships, and whose anger and unrest and hope lashes the white conscience in the cities of the West. The Bantu is the new African who is met with in Kampala and Nairobi, in streets and offices, shops, customs, roadsides, markets. I shook his hand, said, “Jambo, Bwana!” and smiled warmly. In shirt and tie, speaking good English, he seemed deceptively familiar, and only several journeys later did I see that in my ignorance and lack of curiosity I had failed to perceive him at all. Yet it is these people, not the gentle hunters, the fierce herdsmen, whose history is the most remarkable on the southern continent, these Bantu-speakers who overcame the stupefying obstacles of tropical climate and disease, tribal warfare and wild animals, to move and expand and found cities and kingdoms far in the interior of what the western world, until a century ago, had dismissed as Darkest Africa.