by Barry Lopez
Kamoya’s courteous manner, his unperturbed composure and tact, have effectively defused the situation; but this is not an injustice that can be rectified. It can only, for a time, be mitigated. I’ve witnessed this sort of confrontation between legal and traditional owners in a variety of places—in a Warlpiri Aboriginal village in Australia’s Northern Territory; in a farming community on the Ghorband River in northern Afghanistan; and in the High Arctic Inuit town of Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island. If everything that comprises a particular stretch of land—its still and moving waters, its trees and animals, its weather and footpaths and its rocks—is viewed as a community to which human beings, too, belong, it can neither be sold nor owned, even by the people who feel they belong to it. What the Turkana man is saying, I believe, to the Kamba man is, “Why didn’t you knock when you came into my house? Why didn’t you explain what you wanted before you walked into my home?” And what Kamoya is saying to him, not without some reluctance, is that it is not necessary to ask. That’s no longer the way it’s done.
What these awkward and painful encounters come down to now, in all the old colonial places, is whose authority can most effectively be enforced. The older Turkana man knows he is going to have to concede. Short of armed revolution, pointless and suicidal, he has no other choice. But he does not want to compromise his dignity or to lose self-respect by being silent. He does not want to sever his connection with a metaphysical world that comes to him daily in his dreams and in his waking hours, as it has for his ancestors for millennia. So he has come and complained and taught the younger men how to do it, hoping they will listen and take it in and continue. And he has gone away bitter, as have so many before him in the other colonial places.
I ask Kamoya what was really going through his head during the exchange with the Turkana men. He understands, he says, that he has the authority to speak as he did, operating as he is under the auspices of the National Museums of Kenya. The presence of a white man, he tells me, added additional weight to his authority. And the material wealth on display—the Land Rovers, the gear spread around the camp, the presence of the Turkana servant—added even more. But what he really thought about the ethics behind it all, in a countryside twisted into a new shape by colonization, I never knew. My guess was that he didn’t particularly like sending the Turkana men on their way.
The only ethics I really needed to probe in this situation, anyway, were my own. What were my own reasons for not asking permission? For not having knocked?
* * *
—
WITH THE DEPARTURE of the Turkana representatives, Onyango and Ngeneo look for a shady spot in the acacia gallery to take a nap, the hottest part of the day having arrived. Wambua goes back to patching an inner tube and Kamoya and Nzube settle into a game of checkers, using bottle caps filled with black or white plaster. Christopher stands in the front door of the cook tent, drying a roasting pan and watching the Turkana men dissolving into the distant scrubland. I see he has carefully trimmed the branches of a toothbrush shrub in front of his cook tent, leaving behind short, rigid pegs on which he has hung up cups and cooking utensils.
I return to the bird guide and my notebook. As Kamoya spoke to us about the surrounding landscape, I came to understand that most everyone had been here before. The work we’ll do in the days ahead continues a survey Kamoya began in these late Miocene deposits several years earlier. (I had to glance at a laminated reference card stuck in the pocket of my notebook to remind myself, as Kamoya spoke, that the Miocene epoch preceded the Pliocene epoch in the Tertiary period.)
Off and on, as I recall Kamoya’s presentation to us and jot down recollected details, I’m scanning the acacias for birds I can hear but, unfamiliar with their calls and songs, can’t identify without the bird guide. (Wherever I travel, I purchase a guide to local birds. The book quickly becomes a vade mecum, a reference to regional life, the paragraphs of which, thankfully, lack the tendentious prose and political commentary of many travel guides.) With the help, then, of Williams and Arlott’s Birds of East Africa, I’m able to identify Cape rooks in the trees, dark crows with slender bills and long neck feathers; white-headed buffalo weavers, a heavy-billed, red-rumped bird, a seed-eater; mourning doves, with their pale pink breasts and carmine eye rings, uttering a familiar guttural murmur; and superb starlings, small, plump birds with rufous-chestnut breasts, a narrow white breast band and, depending on the angle of the sun, metallic blue or metallic green wings. There are thirty-four species of starling arrayed in several genera living in East Africa; thirteen species of dove; and forty-nine different weaverbirds, including the gray-headed social, the strange, the compact, the Somali yellow-backed, and the northern masked.
The Cape rook is the lone East African rook, one of only two rooks, in fact, to be found in all of Africa.
For a while I am lost in the fine points of the descriptive paragraphs that differentiate among the forty-nine species of weaver; but I cannot maintain the diligent frame of mind required. I glance up to watch the distant Turkana until they are absorbed, like the last fragments from an explosion.
* * *
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BEFORE I FLEW UP to Lokwakangole from Nairobi to join Richard at Nariokotome, also the British paleoanthropologist Alan Walker, and Kamoya and his crew, I had lunch alone one day at the New Stanley Hotel, where I was staying. I asked the waiter where he was from. Lodwar, he said. Oh, I said, I’m headed that way myself. Did he have any recommendations? No, he answered, but then, as an up-and-coming waiter at a fine hotel in the big city, and perhaps sensing I was a little naïve, he added, “Those people up there are primitive, but very okay.”
I could understand better now what he’d meant. One more group of isolated, underinformed, decent people, these particular Turkana were still confounded by the effrontery of invaders of one kind or another—missionaries, shills for commercial ventures, petroleum geologists—but compelled to face the consequences of not being strong enough or smart enough or ruthless enough to effectively resist. Their losses seem unjust and cruel to many people living today in the countries that originally colonized places like northern Kenya—but inevitable. Until now, this has been how Western civilization has made its way, securing resources and creating the lebensraum it wants, however that might be morally defended or achieved.
However one might philosophize or rationalize around the injustice, the departing Turkana were left with one more wound to their epistemology, the gall of their powerlessness, and the knowledge that we had, in effect, the permission of God to look into the origins of man here, that the nobility of our task, like the economic imperative behind the seismic trucks thumping the desert to the north of us in search of oil deposits, was but one more of the civilized world’s trump cards.
As evening comes on—quickly, with no lingering dusk at 3° northern latitude—flocks of doves roosting in the acacias offer a plaintive chorus and I regain a sense of equilibrium again around these old issues of colonial injustice. Their voices dampen my frustrations, embrace my confusion, and I become once more a student of the inquiry into man’s origins that has brought me here, work for which I have enthusiasm and respect. What mostly brings me out of my funk is the image of Kamoya before the irate Turkana, defusing violence, but not demanding obeisance in the face of his ultimate authority.
I close the bird book and go with that image into the evening.
* * *
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MY FIRST TRIP to Africa, to the southwestern quarter of the continent—Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe—presented me almost daily with what I thought of as archetypal imagery. In Harare one morning, the old Salisbury of Southern Rhodesia before independence, I became lost trying to find a bakery the doorman at my hotel had recommended for breakfast. I found it eventually, but not before being swept this way and that through the streets of Harare by throngs of people headed for work—courteous, smiling, seemingly uncalcul
ating people, dressed in bright fabrics. Lively rivers of people enthusiastic about life and among whom I was welcome. Under a full moon one night in Zambia, I walked alone out onto a splinter of land that fronted Victoria Falls, on the Zambezi River. I had on flip-flops and wore only a pair of shorts. The mist boiling up like smoke from the plunging cataract completely soaked me. When I turned to go, putting the full moon behind me, the only moonbow I’ve ever seen appeared ahead of me, suspended in the night air.
I don’t know where to start with the range of African animals I felt so privileged to see on that first trip. I spent an hour in the company of two black rhinos, a critically endangered mammal, a creature of astonishing size, more reticent than its less endangered cousin, the southern white rhino. The time I had with them, watching from the roof of a Land Rover, felt like the final hour with a revered grandmother before she was called across to the other side. My grandchildren will likely never have the opportunity to see a black rhino except in a zoo. In the Kalahari Desert, in western Botswana, I occasionally encountered small herds of oryx, a large, exceedingly wary antelope with long lance-like horns. Oryxes seem to me robust, capable, and dignified as they cross great stretches of waterless and unvegetated land, as if they took water and fodder from the air. In northern Namibia, near Etosha Pan, studying what was left of a Burchell’s zebra carcass from a blind—a spotted hyena kill—I saw five species of vulture feeding together: Cape, white-headed, Egyptian, lappet-faced, and white-backed. An ecological Venn diagram working the carcass.
Encounters with dozens of species of wild animals, in as many different settings on that first African trip, fixed that part of the continent in my mind as Edenic, despite what I knew to be the extensive destruction of wildlife taking place there, to sustain local markets for bushmeat and the market abroad for substances used in traditional Chinese medicine; an Eden, despite my having attended the apartheid-era trial in Delmas, despite my having moved through war-battered villages along the Angolan border in Namibia, where South West Africa People’s Organisation guerrillas were, at the time, fighting the South African army, illegally occupying Namibia and forcing thousands of Namibian families to pay the price for their illegal incursion.
My encounters with elephants, African hunting dogs, springbok, Kori bustards, warthogs, impala, lions, ostriches, giraffes, and the others always provoked in me the same two emotions: wonder and gratitude. I felt profoundly lucky to be able to see such things with my own eyes, in landscapes that had no closing hours, no fence lines, no cultivated fields, no built structures. These encounters were so biologically and metaphorically rich that they seemed to have no bottom. The experiences of that first trip did not provide an antidote to what I’d been exposed to in that courtroom in Delmas, or blur my memories of the faces of the famine-stressed children I’d seen in the Caprivi Strip in Namibia; they kept despair over the fate of humanity at bay. Each one—the free animal in its domain, the condemned men in a South African court—intensified for me the authority of the other one.
I was immensely glad to be back in Africa again, where, by most accounts, everything began for us.
* * *
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THE ONGOING ACADEMIC and popular debates about human origins—about exactly where the line of human descent lies among hominoids in the human evolutionary family—captivated my imagination as a young man, so much so that I boldly wrote the well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey when I was nineteen, asking if I could work as a camp boy at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania (Tanganyika at that time), naïvely and self-importantly wishing to make myself part of his and his wife Mary’s efforts to learn more about where we came from. The Leakeys had brought the search for the origins of mankind into people’s living rooms in the early 1960s with a series of spectacular finds at Olduvai: the fossil bones of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and a robust australopithecine. (Kamoya and Nzube were both working with the Leakeys at Olduvai at the time I wrote to Louis.)
Louis and I were not able to put a plan together that would bring me to East Africa during the time they were working there, but many years later, still keenly interested in human origins, I wrote to his son Richard, by then himself a well-known paleoanthropologist, especially because of work he’d conducted in northern Kenya around Lake Turkana. I asked to visit with him at his sites at Nariokotome and Koobi Fora. Richard wrote back to say yes, please come, and extended an invitation to visit him first in Nairobi, where I could view the collection of hominin skulls at the National Museums. Then, he wrote, we’d travel together up to Nariokotome. When I inquired about spending some time in the field, if possible, actually searching for hominid fossils with Kamoya Kimeu and his colleagues, Richard arranged for me to go with them to Nakirai, a camp east of Lodwar where Kamoya had been working for a while. (Nakirai was the Turkana designation for that place situated among acacia trees along the Kerio River where we were to camp. Kamoya told me it means “the place of the jackals.”)
What interested me about Nakirai—and Nariokotome and also Koobi Fora on the east side of Lake Turkana—was the certainty that seeing them would add greatly to my sense of what the search for human origins looked and felt like. Most of the academic discussion about human origins tends to speculate on how Homo sapiens came to be, based on relatively scant (and somewhat problematic) fossil evidence. Too often, it seemed, these earnest disagreements drifted toward tedious and pedantic sparring. The chance to work alongside people like Kamoya, searching for the residue of ancestors tens of thousands of generations removed from us, a chance to experience the physical place where a large portion of the evidence has come from, promised something richer than what I had been gleaning over the years from the pages of Science and Nature.
In the spring of 1984, during a visit to New York to see my ailing stepfather, I saw an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History featuring many of the most famous hominin fossils. (Some owners, fearing loss or damage to these irreplaceable objects, had sent replicas instead.) The show was called “Ancestors: Four Million Years of Humanity.” The physical evidence used in support of any of several different routes humans might have followed from their australopithecine ancestors to the fire pits at, say, a Cro-Magnon shelter like Gönnersdorf in the Rhine Valley made a profound impression on me. Afterward I walked for miles across Manhattan, in an expanded state of awareness, knowing the immense length of the line of our descent, from a protohuman existence some five or six million years ago to the present moment, which found humanity in the forms I now saw, cultural sophisticates navigating Manhattan’s streets impatiently at dusk. For the first time, I think, under the spell of the show, I saw them as the last surviving members of the hominin family.2
I walked across Central Park to the Upper East Side and then headed downtown on foot, passing the apartment buildings of the very-well-off and, at the southern edge of Midtown, passing through the Murray Hill section of the city, where I’d spent my teenage years. Eventually I found myself south of Houston Street, in SoHo, a part of the city famous at the time for its thriving community of artists and galleries.
While I walked I tried to picture the gap between the individuals I took note of on the street and the individuals in the museum, the fossil skulls, of course, of particular individuals, put on display millions of years after they had died. What would our ancestors look like to us if we viewed them from a vantage point in time other than our own? What if it were possible to stand beside a Homo habilis father while he shaved meat from the femur of a gazelle for a meal 2.2 million years ago, in what is today the Rift Valley in Tanzania? What if you could watch a young Homo erectus woman cracking nutshells beside her sister in what is now Hebei Province in China, 600,000 years ago? What if it were summer in the hills of Cantabria, in what is now northwestern Spain, 41,000 years ago, and you could lean against a tree and watch while a Homo sapiens girl approached a Homo neanderthalensis boy? What if you were standing in a Natufian settlement in what would one
day become Jordan, at the dawn of “the age of civilized man” 11,000 years ago, watching a child inexpertly thread a bone needle while her mother rolled her eyes at the attempt? What if you had more than this one moment of your own life from which to see, seated next to a table on a sidewalk at a restaurant in SoHo, where a woman is toasting her husband with a glass of Chablis on the occasion of his just having sold a painting to the Guggenheim Museum?
What if the perspective you could imagine for yourself, the foundation for your ethics and your politics, was not the condescending now of right now?
* * *
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WHEN I WAS YOUNG and wanted so much to see the world, my mother gave me an atlas, Hammond’s Illustrated Library World Atlas, published in 1948. Overlaying some of the pages with tracing paper and using colored pencils, I lined out the journeys I wanted one day to make. Down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Shanghai. Across the Great Victoria Desert in Australia. From Panama across the Darién Gap to Tierra del Fuego. Decades later, I took the old atlas down off a shelf. Its maps were now much dated—French West Africa and Belgian Congo, gone; Yugoslavia, dismantled; Ceylon had become Sri Lanka and Siam, Thailand; the Ellice Islands, Tuvalu. Several loose sheets of tracing paper fell free as I paged through the book. I’d completely forgotten about them. As I retrieved and stared at these tracings, I realized I’d managed to make many of these journeys in the intervening forty years. In that moment in front of the bookshelf I suddenly felt the familiar sensations of wonder and gratitude, emotions I’d known for years now as a traveler, but this time they rose up around the daydreams of an eight-year-old who wanted to go but didn’t know how.
