The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  For the rest of his life, she was determined that he would be both.

  4

  On completing the radiotherapy, Edwin went back into hospital for a series of tests. Faced with the constant stream of doctors seeking to monitor his brain function, he joked that he had a formula ready to spout at the first sight of a white coat: ‘My name is Edwin Granville. I was born in 1924. The prime minister’s name is Gordon Brown.’

  The joke fell flat when one of the white coats revealed that the radiotherapy had failed to shrink the tumour. Marta took Edwin home where, within days, he was showing a marked decline. He sat stock-still for hours and, when he did move, he invariably forgot the reason, causing himself much distress. He was given heavy doses of steroids which greatly increased his appetite. For all the satisfaction it afforded Mrs Shepherd, whose cooking hadn’t met with such enthusiasm since Mark left home, the extra bulk made it harder for Marta to manage him. She cursed the irony that, whereas other cancers made people lose weight, his made him balloon. Confronted with tasks that would have daunted a younger, larger woman, she employed two nurses, Ruth and Linda, to bath and dress him. They gradually took over his care, until there was little for her to do but count out his pills, remembering which he should take on an empty stomach and which with food. She gave thanks that the regimen was so complex, conscious that the small mercy she was able to offer him amounted to a vital one for her.

  She seized the moments when he was resting to work on her Royal Society lecture. She had been elected an honorary fellow and, as an additional accolade, invited to address her new associates on the afternoon of the admissions ceremony. It was so hard to focus on anything other than his illness that her first thought had been to decline, but Edwin refused to hear of it.

  ‘Since when have you been a quitter?’ he asked. ‘Besides you don’t have the right. It’s a tribute not just to you but to anthropology. Have you forgotten how it used to infuriate you when diehards dismissed it as “sociology in tents”? Not to mention my mother who, no matter how often you explained, could never get a handle on it?’

  ‘She thought I was a phrenologist.’

  ‘Yes, and told all her friends you’d gone to Africa to measure the bumps on the natives’ heads!’

  Marta laughed and realised that she had no choice but to accept the invitation. As she typed up her notes on her trusty Remington, she relived the excitement of her initial encounter with the Hadza. People had thought it mad, and even indecent, for a young woman to be travelling alone through Africa. Edwin’s had been a rare voice of encouragement. Her trip coincided with his curacy in Clapham. They joked that they would both be at the mercy of savages, a joke which in retrospect filled her with shame. Her reception in Kampala had been equally discouraging. The colonial government looked askance at anthropologists who, by living among the locals, fostered the subversive notion that whites were no different from blacks. She had to obtain permission to enter the savannah from the District Commissioner, who summoned her to a humid office where he sat sweatily swatting flies under a mildewed photograph of the Queen.

  ‘I’d no idea you’d be so young,’ he said in a manner at once avuncular and menacing.

  ‘If you keep me waiting any longer,’ she replied, ‘I won’t be.’

  It was because she was young that she made light of the difficulties, both of the language and the terrain. It was hard enough to locate the tribe, entailing an arduous three-day drive through the Serengeti, but harder still to gain their trust. For once being short worked in her favour, since even the Hadza men were no more than five foot tall. In the end she won them round by a mixture of sympathy and blandishment, asserting that the Hadza had a history worthy of record. While neighbouring tribes disparaged them as thieves and murderers who had fled from settled communities to live as outlaws, her aim was to redress the balance and restore their good name.

  She thought that the War had prepared her to survive anything but, whether because life in England had softened her or else conditions in the bush were tougher than those she had previously known, she found the first few months very wearing. No field report or guidebook had warned her of the long nights in rudimentary shelters and the incessant noise: the shrilling, shrieking and chirruping, and, most enervating of all, the cackling of the hyenas (many years later, taking the children to a Hollywood version of King Solomon’s Mines, she scorned the entire film except for the soundtrack). She was similarly daunted by the lack of privacy. She came from a world in which it was easy to shut people out – indeed, one that was built on that premise – but, apart from going into the bush to have intercourse, the tribe remained constantly together. For all that there were no guards or walls, she might have been back in the ghetto, especially given the reeking bodies, the only difference lying in the undertone of wood smoke to the Hadza sweat.

  She had to accept the fact, as wounding to her self-esteem as the District Commissioner’s condescension, that she was as much an object of curiosity to them as they were to her. Even after the children had ascertained, with a complete lack of inhibition, that her hair was not grass, that she was white all over and that she was a real woman, their mothers expressed doubts as to whether she reproduced in the same way. Recalling their confusion, she amused herself by speculating on the impressions that a Hadza anthropologist would have gathered had she come to the West, returning to the tribe with the cautionary tale of The Babylon People.

  Her lecture drafted, she left Edwin in the care of Clement and the nurses and went up to London to attend the New Fellows seminars at the Society. The thrill of being party to the latest scientific developments palled, as she listened to a young geneticist’s account of implanting a growth chromosome from cows into pigs that caused them to triple in size with no decline in the quality of pork. The only defect was a weakness in the legs that required them to wear callipers. She baulked at his comparison of his butcher’s hybrid (pow? cog?) with a nectarine, as if he were simply intervening at a different stage in the food chain. As he appealed for the audience’s discretion to avoid inciting the animal rights lobby or, in his phrase, ‘the flat earth brigade who refuse to accept that animals are subject to the same evolutionary forces as humans’, she felt an unexpected sympathy for Noah’s Ark.

  She stayed in London overnight and, the following lunchtime, made her way back down a drizzly Pall Mall to the Society’s headquarters, where she waited for her family to arrive. Carla was the first, wearing a bright batik dress that failed to conceal the tiredness in her eyes. ‘Curtis sends his apologies,’ she said, ‘but his boss has just bought a large collection of 78s that he wants him to catalogue.’

  ‘I quite understand,’ Marta replied, unaware that she had invited him.

  Minutes later, Clement and Mike came in with Edwin, whom they had driven down from Beckley that morning. As they led him slowly up the steps and into a hastily vacated chair where he sat with a blank look and a mild tremor, Marta felt the same thought running through all their heads: whether he would ever be well enough to make such a journey again.

  Shoana was the last, blaming her delay on the sudden downpour and the dearth of taxis. Her sharp recoil from the porter who offered to take her sodden coat alerted Marta to her failure to allow for her daughter’s diet. ‘There must be something you can eat,’ she said in dismay. ‘What about salmon? That was safe for Zvi.’

  For a moment Shoana looked pained, but a glance at her father put matters in perspective. ‘Don’t worry, Ma. I had a sandwich at my desk before I left. I’m happy to sit and chat while the rest of you eat. Truly!’

  Deeply grateful for the fiction, Marta led the way to the lifts through a knot of smartly dressed new fellows and their families. Clement and Mike took Edwin down in the first lift, leaving Shoana, Carla and herself to wait for the second. Just as its doors opened, two young men in morning coats ran up.

  ‘Room for a couple of little ones?’ the fleshier of the two asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Marta said.
/>   ‘I’ll take the stairs,’ Shoana said.

  ‘We can easily squeeze up, darling.’

  ‘No, I could do with the exercise.’

  As Shoana strode off, to the men’s consternation, Marta realised that a squeeze was precisely what she wished to avoid.

  After a subdued meal in the gloomy subterranean restaurant, Marta was glad to escape to the library for an official photograph. She returned downstairs for the ceremony, pausing only to smile at her family strategically grouped by the door, as she was escorted to the front of the hall. Sitting alongside the other new fellows, she studied the portrait of Charles II, the jovial features befitting the Merry Monarch sobriquet, until a steward, dwarfed by a huge silver mace, led in the formal procession. Following the president’s speech of welcome, the four dozen new fellows were called up to the platform one by one, receiving their scrolls and resuming their seats by way of the archivist’s table, where they added their names to those of the host of luminaries in the Charter Book. As the sole honorary fellow, she was left until last, hesitating only when the archivist handed her a quill which looked as venerable as the mace. She dipped it in the inkwell, signed her name and returned to her chair, relieved to have blotted neither her own copybook nor theirs.

  She was less confident when, after a fraught family tea on the terrace during which a stubbornly independent Edwin tipped the milk jug over Carla’s new dress, she returned to the packed hall to deliver her talk. Despite the catchpenny title, Eden Revisited, she intended it as a sober account of the lessons to be drawn from Hadza life in the first decade of a new millennium. Having thanked the Society for the double honour of the fellowship and the lecture, she took up the theme.

  ‘Fifty-four years ago as a very young anthropologist, I made my first trip to what was then Tanganyika to study a little-known gathering-hunting society, the Hadza. It wasn’t a popular line at a time when the emphasis – not to mention, the money – in academic circles was on examining social change. I was regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned for wanting to visit the tribe in its traditional setting rather than charting how such people had adapted to the growth of independence movements and urbanisation. For all that I disagreed, I could never have predicted the extraordinary impact that an account of the Hadza was to have on people across the globe. Wherever you went in the late sixties and seventies, be it a university campus or a peace rally, a pop concert or a protest march, you could be certain of finding at least one person wearing a T-shirt with the slogan We are the Eden People. To my mind, the reason for such identification is clear. The Hadza help us to answer a question that remains as urgent today as at any time in the past: ‘How do we live an authentic life?’ Some people seek answers in the Bible or the Quran, observing man-made laws that purport to be God’s. They’re so frightened of the conflicts of modernity that they cling to an ancient mythology. The Hadza, on the other hand, observe laws that go back much further and are rooted in the earth.

  ‘From my very first encounter with the Hadza, I had a profound sense of coming home, an instinctive connection that went beyond that of family or nation to the deepest level of my psyche. I’m aware, especially in this august gathering, that it may not be best scientific practice but, having spoken to many other visitors, I’ve found the instinct to be widely shared: a feeling of kinship with our earliest ancestors.

  ‘This isn’t sentimentality. The human race is generally held to have descended from people who lived on the edge of the Central African savannah. Both external evidence and their own oral tradition suggest that, whereas other tribes moved on, the Hadza have stayed in the same place. In a very real sense they are our earliest ancestors, providing us with a family tree that stretches back two thousand generations. Is it any wonder then that the evolutionary psychologists, who make so much of an ancestral environment in which we developed our repertoire of hard-wired responses, have launched such a sustained and, if I may say so, intemperate attack on my work? For, in offering an account of this ancient people, who reject fixed gender roles and small family units, who exhibit neither elitism nor aggression, I’ve dared to challenge them on their own ground.

  ‘My greatest challenge was – and is – to the field of biological determinism. At no time since the Calvinist heyday has the ideology of determinism held such sway as it does today. Not only our intellectual but our economic and political life are governed by the theory that human beings are mere mechanisms to ensure the survival of our genes. But it’s important to remember that it is just a theory, and likewise to remember how previous dominant theories have been displaced. Plato believed in the Four Humours. Was he such an intellectual lightweight? Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most eminent former members of this Society, was a dedicated alchemist. So surely it’s possible – I go no further – that current genetic theories will themselves one day be superseded? In the meantime, we should beware of building them into an overarching philosophy. From St Augustine’s Original Sin through Hobbes’s collective self-interest to Darwin’s survival of the fittest, theologians, philosophers and scientists have focused on the vicious and competitive aspects of human nature. The same is true of today’s biological determinists. Yet, when we visit the Hadza in their ancestral environment or, more pertinently, the ancestral environment of the Hadza, we find not greed, violence and constraint, but altruism and collaboration.

  ‘Why so many intellectuals should be suspicious of altruism is a matter on which I can only speculate. We live in a system which depends on dissatisfaction, on our desiring more than we need and forever being enticed to desire more. By championing a tribe who desire little and have their needs totally fulfilled, I’ve shown how such a system is not preordained. Another reason to attack my work! Rather than engage with my arguments, my detractors have accused me of wanting to drag people back to the Stone Age. They’ve vilified me as a woman who, having strayed beyond the appropriate areas of female study, namely education and childbearing, misunderstood the political – i.e. the male – side of Hadza life. They assert – on what basis I’ve yet to discover – that the Hadza must have leaders, whom I failed to identify because I was kept away when the men conferred. Finally, shifting ground with breathtaking perversity, they allege that, in an egalitarian society, selflessness is in fact selfish, since, if to possess is to share, then it’s more expedient to possess nothing.

  ‘I speak as someone who, as a young girl in Nazi-occupied Poland, was exposed to the most brutal form of biological determinism. My critics have claimed, with as much sensitivity as they can muster, that, as an adult, I’ve sought to redress the balance, denying any form of determinism, insisting on the supremacy of cultural conditioning and distorting the evidence to fit my own agenda, all charges which I vehemently refute. There is, however, one analogy with my past that I would like to draw. Contrary to the widespread belief that Hitler wanted to wipe out every trace of the Jews from the face of the earth, the records show that he wanted to wipe out every Jew but to preserve the traces of our culture in a vast ethnological museum to be built in Prague. My greatest fear is that we’re doing the same to the Hadza: turning a people who should be an example into a curio. The serpent in their Eden is us.

  ‘The Hadza have been put under more pressure in the past thirty years than in the previous fifty thousand. Their harmonious existence has been threatened by a mixture of government policy, Christian mission-work and Western tourism. I myself have been hounded by the Tanzanian authorities, who saw The Eden People as a smear on the portrait of African life which they were at pains to promote. I was asked by one government minister why I didn’t write an account of the Chagga farmers on Kilimanjaro who were growing coffee and making splendid progress. I was accused by another of trying to keep the Hadza primitive – their term, not mine – in order to continue studying them. I’ve even been called a pornographer, who wanted the Hadza to remain naked so that white visitors could come and photograph them. For many years I was denied a visa to enter the country, leading my Hadza fri
ends to fear that I’d abandoned them.

  ‘The traditional Hadza values of gentleness, cooperation and sexual equality have been eroded as people are herded into villages, where Norwegian missionaries teach the women to plant maize. In economic terms the experiment has been a disappointment since most years the crop fails due to lack of rainfall, but in social terms it’s been a catastrophe since, in good years, the planters refuse to share the grain, insisting on preserving what’s theirs in anticipation of a bad harvest. Altruism, which was once their second nature, is being bred out of them and they’re taught to put their own interest before that of the tribe. I’m loath to cite the Bible, especially when those who do so have done the Hadza such harm, but I’m reminded of the Genesis story in which Esau, the honest hunter, is tricked of his birthright by Jacob, the cunning farmer.

  ‘Meanwhile, the missionaries collude with the military in forcing the children into schools where they’re made to speak English. On my last visit five years ago, I was greeted for the first time in Swahili rather than Khoisan, the native click language. What’s more, the girls, separated from their families, are regularly raped by men who’ve fallen for the myth of their sexual licence, with many being driven into prostitution. The Hadzaland has been damaged by ranchers, whose intensive cattle-breeding methods are a condition of Western aid. In a final insult, the government has banned the men from hunting game, as they have done for millennia, while turning their land into game reserves for trophy-hunting foreigners.