The Tree Where Man Was Born (8 page)

Much has been written of the colorful decades when the Kenya Colony could be spoken of as “white man’s country,” and there seems no point in adding to it here. I wasn’t there, and anyway, the patterns of colonialism do not differ very much from one place to another. For me, the least fascinating aspect of East Africa is the period of technocracy and politics that began under white rule, which lasted little more than half a century among the millenniums that man has been in Africa. Jomo Kenyatta, born Kamau wa Ngengi, whose lifetime easily
spans the entire colonial period, never laid eyes on a white at all, so it is said, until after the turn of the century, when he was already ten. And one of Livingstone’s bearers was still living in the 1930s, when Karen Blixen, in her splendid
Out of Africa
, began the lament for the end of the great days. In 1970 I chanced to meet the Kikuyu hero of that book, her servant “Kamante.” Kamande Gatora is a contained person with the watchfulness of the near-blind; he had taken the Mau-Mau oath, and been imprisoned, in the years after his mistress had gone home to Denmark, despite “the kind deeds I was receiving from her untold and the old life we stayed with her, like black and white keys of a piano how they are played and produce melodious verses.”
¹³
It was idle to address him, and I stood silent, for my words could not be understood, and my face was but a blur in his blind eyes, though the eyes were cold and clear.

In a letter dictated a few years ago, Kamande gave a “description of my mind concerning the old life and the new. Simply I can see just like the same. We were enjoying what we had, and until now we are enjoying what we have, so I don’t see any different. And the times were not so old for the history begins in our lifetimes. When Baroness leave for England the Mr. Matthew Wellington leave in Mombasa. Mr. Wellington help carried Dead Bwana Livingstone to the sea, so the history is now.”
¹⁵

A half century after he had come to work for the “everlasting dear Baroness,” as a sickly boy responsible for her dogs, Kamande
stood there in the Langata dusk in the last light from the Ngong Hills and the Maasai Plain. In this old African’s remote unsqueamish gaze one saw that reasons were beside the point, that such events as Mau-Mau and the passage of his mistress had causes not apprehended by the stranger, who must fail in a logical comprehension of the African, yet may hope to intuit his more mysterious, more universal sense of existence. Life begins before a soul is born and commences once again with the act of dying, and as in the Afro-Asian symbol of the snake of eternity swallowing its tail, all is in flux, all comes full circle, with no beginning and no end.

Of all roads in East Africa, the road north from Nairobi toward Mt. Kenya will hold most associations for the traveler with any acquaintance with the brief history of the region. One soon comes to Thika and the Blue Post Hotel, a relic of the days not long after the turn of the century when the first planters of coffee and flax and pyrethrum were clearing Kikuyu Land, and continues to Nyeri, named in 1903 by Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the hero of the Nandi wars, who witnessed a procession of some seven hundred elephants through its village street. Crossing the equator at Nanyuki, the high road begins a slow descent over the ranching country west of Mt. Kenya—Kere-Nyaga, named for Nyaga or Ngai, which is the Maasai word for God used also by the Kamba and Kikuyu—a formidable mountain, dark and looming, jagged and malign, rising to snow fields that the Africans avoided, for the bright whiteness was a kingdom of Ngai.

Before World War I, when Elspeth Huxley was a child on a Thika farm, a few Dorobo still wandered in these highlands:

Like the Bushmen of south Africa, who were hunted down or driven into swamps and deserts by black men and white alike when they struck at domestic stock that threatened their hunting lands, the Dorobo were threatened by the clearing of their forests, and doubtless there were skirmishes and killings before they attached themselves to the Nandi and Maasai as rainmakers and tricksters, circumcisers and attendants of the dead. Probably it is too late to discover the true origins of this outcast people, who have lost their own language and whose name (from the Maasai il-torrobo, meaning “poor man,” or “person without cattle”—thus, any hunter-gatherer) is now used to describe almost any man who has reverted to subsistence in the bush, or “turned Dorobo.” Still, it interests me that the Muisi Dorobo who once inhabited Mt. Kenya’s bamboo forests were said
³
to have been very small, and that one of the two main clans of the Dorobo was known as the Agumba—the other was the Okiek—who lived in covered pits and were said
to have gone away toward the region of Kismayu after failing to stop the clearing of their forests by the Kikuyu; I like to think that the Agumba and the vanished Gumba may be one. Perhaps the Dorobo are related to such remnant hunting groups as the Ik of northeastern Uganda, who were also hunters until recent years, and are also described as lighter-skinned and smaller than their neighbors, and conceivably both groups may derive from the same ancestral stock as the larger Khoisan or click-speaking peoples (such as the modern Bushman relatives known as the Khoi or Hottentots) whose traces have been found as far north as the Blue Nile and Ethiopia. (Both Bushman and Pygmy, where unmixed with other groups, are slight and small and yellow-brown in color, and while differences in other physical characters appear to justify a racial separation, their Bantu-speaking neighbors, from Uganda to South Africa, know both groups as the Small People—the Abatwa or Twa.)

In Africa, for all its space and emptiness, there is no place any longer for the Small People, most of whom have been described by those who found them as gentle and quiet, in harmony with the land and the changing seasons, with none of the aggressiveness and greed that the domestication of plants and animals, with its illusion of security and permanence, brought to mankind. In former times, the Bushmen say, wild animals spoke with men, and all were friends. They had a reverence for the life and death of the animals they hunted—what the Nandi, in reference to the wilderness instinct of the Dorobo, call
comiet
, “affinity”
⁴
—and their legends have the ring of all creation. The Small People, the Old People, still quick with instinct, knew the secret of the silence, and I wanted a glimpse of the vanishing hunters above all.

In Nairobi one heard of bands of hunters that were said to derive from the Old People, including one group “somewhere” in the hills east of Mt. Kenya that were described as a remnant of the Gumba, but those for whom good information was available had long since adopted both language and ways of the stronger tribes around them (even the Ovajimba of southwest Africa, the last tribe known that makes and uses crude stone
tools, have adopted the speech of the Herero Bantu who pass through their country). The only hunter-gatherers in Kenya said to be living more or less as they had always done were a few primitive fishermen of Lake Rudolf, the El Molo, considered by some authorities
⁵
to be a relict group of the Dorobo.

In June, 1970, I accompanied the photographer Eliot Porter, his two sons, and a daughter-in-law on a journey to Lake Rudolf by way of Mt. Marsabit, a well-organized safari into remote country with scant water that I could not attempt alone in my old Land Rover. Until recently, this Northern Frontier District, or NFD, a waste of desert and near-desert scrub and thorn extending north and east to Ethiopia and Somalia, has been closed to travel, being under control of Somali shifta who claim it for their country. Shifta, or “wanderer,” is a name for tribesmen without property, but the term has come to signify guerrillas or bandits; the Somali guerrillas and the true bandits, who may be Somali or Boran, are lumped together under this same term. The Boran are also the chief victims of the shifta operations; their villages are burned and livestock stolen by bandits of all persuasions, and those left standing may be reduced to rubble by Kenya’s security police, who often conclude that those Boran settlements not actually composed of shifta give shelter to the raiders. In consequence, numbers of Boran must turn to banditry in order to survive, and others subsist as refugees at Isiolo, where they mix with Somali traders, Bantu laborers from the south, and a few Samburu and Turkana.

Beyond the sentry barrier at Isiolo, the road disintegrates to dirt, and fences end. Traditionally this frontier region between the highlands and the NFD has been a province of the Samburu, and a tract of high plains by the Uaso Nyiro River has been set aside as a game reserve named in their honor. Here the safari truck had set up camp in a grove of umbrella thorn with a westward prospect of the Laikipia Plateau; the Uaso Nyiro comes down out of Laikipia and dies eventually in the Lorian Swamp, east of Mado Gashi. With water so close, it came as a surprise, each day at daylight, to see a flight of white egrets
undulating southward over the dry scrub, bound for waters unknown under Mt. Kenya.

The plains and hills that surround the Uaso Nyiro are inhabited by striking animals such as the reticulated giraffe and Grevy’s zebra (seen here in mixed herds with the more common Burchell’s zebra) that are absent farther south; the fringe-eared oryx and the blue-legged Somali ostrich have replaced the more southerly races of their species, and the gerenuk is the most conspicuous of the gazelles. This extraordinary creature, stylized even to the carved eyeline and the bronzy gloss that gives its form the look of well-oiled wood, browses habitually on its hind legs, tail switching, fan ears batting, delicate hooves propped on the swaying branches. When I came to Samburu previously, in winter, the long-necked animals had been nibbling on florets of a gum acacia that filled the air with its sweet scent, but now the long dry season had begun, and the high plains had reverted to near-desert.

Samburu has been a game reserve since 1966, but most of its life it has been closed due to the shifta; bandits on a poaching raid killed two of its African game scouts only this year. Such tracks, fords, dams, and bridges as it can claim are largely the work of Terence Adamson, who in February was living in a thatched banda of his own construction by the river, and had been kind enough to lend me the only complete map of Samburu’s tracks. A strong old man with a white head, in floppy hat, huge floppy shorts, and heavy shoes, Mr. Adamson is a bachelor and hardened recluse who in the seven years he was stationed at Marsabit, one hundred miles off to the north, went to Nairobi just once, for a bad toothache; he loathes Nairobi and what it represents of the change in Africa, and will never go again if he can help it.

Although a veteran of shifta raids on Isiolo, where an African district commissioner has been assassinated, Adamson is sympathetic with the guerrillas. “Why should these Somali be under Kenya? Somalis don’t think of themselves as African at all, and of course they’re right.” He sighed. “They have odd ways, granted, like all Arabs, but they stick to their word, and
they stick to their code, like it or not—once I saw half a Samburu in the fork of a tree here; he’d been dragged up by a leopard after the Somali had caught up to him for cattle stealing.”