The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen

  The descendants of these “Proto-Hamites” have persisted into recent times. The Meru (Bantu) of Mt. Kenya have a tradition of a cattle people called the Mwoko with whom they warred only a few centuries ago, and who buried their dead in a contracted position under stone cairns, as the Galla do today. Farther south, the Gogo (Bantu) know of cattle keepers who preceded the Maasai onto the steppes of Tanzania.13 This people dug wells and built reservoirs, carved holes in the rocks for the game of bao, built clay-lined huts that were fired like pottery and were red and white in color, suggesting the use of clays: probably red ocher can account for the color of the mysterious Azanians and the “red people” of the Saharan rock paintings, as well.

  Ruins left by the Neolithic tillers are found almost invariably in hill country suitable to terracing and irrigation, and eventually these hills were surrounded and absorbed by the successive waves of Bantu-speakers who came after. Then, in the late Middle Ages, the black pastoral Nilotes came down out of the Sudan, while to the eastward, the so-called “Nilo-Hamites”—the Karomojong tribes, the Nandi peoples, the Maasai—swept southward from a region beyond Lake Rudolf. Traditionally, these people have been considered hybrid between the Nilotes and the Hamites, but some of their words are neither Nilotic nor Hamitic, and recently it has been suggested14 that their Hamitic strain, at least, derives from a separate ancestral stock entirely. The term “Nilo-Hamitic” might be useful in distinguishing these brown, thin-featured herders from the darker Nilotes farther west, but even here it is not dependable: the Turkana, a tribe of the Karomojong, are coarse-featured and black. In Africa, after millenniums of human migrations, random physical traits are poor evidence of racial origin, and language is not always very much better. Most of these people are more Nilote than not in both language and customs, but the southernmost tribes, the Nandi and Maasai, have such distinctive Hamite practices as circumcision and clitoridectomy in initiation rites, the age-grade system of young warriors, despised clans of blacksmiths, and a taboo against fish. Conceivably all these practices were acquired from the Galla, who are known to have wandered the region north of Lake Rudolf in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but more likely they are the heritage of earlier Hamites absorbed in the southward migrations, who may be responsible for the lighter skin as well. These vanished peoples left their traces in the terracing and irrigation techniques of the Negroids, both Bantu and Nilote, who cultivate those hillsides where their remains have been found, and who have adopted—in these regions but nowhere else—all the Hamite customs noted above.15 The Galla tribes are the only modern Hamites in East Africa, but four hundred miles to the south, in the region of the Crater Highlands of Tanzania, peoples persist whose origins appear to be Hamitic. If so, they derive not from the Galla but from older stocks that have been isolated for many centuries, perhaps since the time of the earliest invaders out of the north.

  Lake Rudolf glimmered in the west, a silver sliver down among dark mountains. Still fifteen miles inland from Allia Bay, the track turned north toward Koobi Fora. This cauterized region, in wetter climates of the Pleistocene, attracted huge companies of animals, including early hominids whose stone tools, dated at 2.6 million years, are the oldest known. Last year near Ileret, a frontier post just south of the Ethiopian border, Leakey’s expedition found a skull of Australopithecus boisei which he believes to be 850,000 years older than the celebrated cranium of this man-ape uncovered by his parents at Olduvai Gorge. In Richard’s opinion, this land east of Lake Rudolf is the world’s most important archeological site, not excluding Olduvai, though others say that finds of comparable significance are being made by a French expedition to the Omo River, at the north end of the lake, in Ethiopia, which has come upon remains of Homo sapiens that have been dated at two hundred thousand years, or about twice the age of former estimate.

  At twilight the track passed an oasis of borassus palms known as Derati that was the water source for Leakey’s base camp at Allia Bay in 1968 and 1969. Beyond Derati, gray zebra and oryx clattered across stone ridges, and a black-bellied bustard rose in courtship, collapsing its wings on the twilight sky like a great cinder in the wind. Then a striped hyena rose out of the rock, a spirit of the gaunt mountain: it turned its head to fix us with its eye before it withdrew into the Shadows. This maned animal of the night, with its cadaverous flanks and hungry head, is the werewolf of legend come to life.

  The striped hyena is less uncommon than unseen. Even Jock Anderson, who was born in Kenya and has traveled the bush country all his life, had only glimpsed one once before, at Amboseli. But the pleasure we took in it was shadowed by the knowledge that the estimated distance to Koobi Fora was long past, with dark upon us. We stopped for a conference. At midday, I had felt uneasy about travel in desert country with two gallons of water for nine people—what would happen in the event of an engine breakdown, a wrong turning, one car separated from the other? But Leakey had made things sound so simple that Anderson had not anticipated the slightest trouble. Not that we were in trouble now, but we were down to two quarts of water and a ration of beer and fruit juice, and could not be sure that the eight gallons of spare gasoline would carry both vehicles back to North Horr, much less Loiyengalani, even if we turned around right on the spot. Presumably we were close to the Koobi Fora track, but side tracks are no more than shadows on this stony ground, and if the search failed, our only course was to go north to Ileret and radio for help. “We’d have to get in contact with somebody,” Jock said shortly. “Assuming we make it,” Adrian added, “past the blood shifta.” In the frustrating knowledge that Richard’s camp was within fifteen miles of where we stood, it was decided to make camp at Derati and retreat to North Horr or Loiyengalani the next day.

  Jock Anderson was grim and quiet; he is a man who dislikes turning back. But Jock had more to worry about than gas and water. We had been warned at Marsabit that an armed escort was desirable in this country, and at North Horr the police had described a gun battle that had taken place in the past month at Derati, where Leakey’s supply caravan, with its armed guard, had come upon camped shifta, and five shifta had been killed. For the moment, Jock spared the party this ominous news. He was amazed at Leakey’s claim that he had traveled from Marsabit to Koobi Fora in a single day, and annoyed that Richard had been so casual in his directions.

  In the dark, at Derati, lacking a decent lantern, we could find no water, only foul-smelling pits of algal murk under the roots of the borassus. We rationed out the beer. Everyone was hot and dirty, and Eliot Porter cut his leg badly in the darkness, and nobody looked happy. There was more discomfort than emergency, but trouble, once started, has a way of unraveling until it is out of control, and when Stephen Porter said, “It’s not a game, we could die of thirst out here,” his wife told him to hush up, but nobody contradicted him.

  Derati is a gloomy place in the shadow of a mountain, and the one bright element in that evening there was the old Kamba cook, Kimunginye, who made supper without benefit of lamp or pot. With a panga he cut neat sticks by shearing palm sections from the central stalk of a fallen frond, and these he laid crossways on paired logs to make a grill; in the wood ash, deftly, one by one, he laid potatoes. Strips of meat were broiled upon the sticks and a can of string beans heated in the fire. For lack of liquid we ate lightly, but the food was good. Kimunginye is a calm old African who at midday had not asked for water, even in the 100-degree heat: the Kamba are tough—tough as the hyena’s sinew, as the Maasai say. Perhaps Kimunginye recalled how, in his parents’ time, these “red people,” ugly as raw meat, had caused the great locust famine by running a railroad through his country (the man-eaters of Tsavo were seen by the Kamba as the spirits of dead chiefs protesting the encroachment on Kamba Land) and brought an end to the ivory trade by forbidding the Kamba to hunt elephant. If so, he gave no sign. This day was no different from another, and he went on about his work, as one felt certain that he would even if the next day were his last, his movements slow an gentle because so sure, w
ithout waste motion. The Kamba know that man dies “like the roots of the aloe,” and dying was serious enough, so said his manner, without putting one-self to extra trouble over it. Kimunginye was the embodiment of what the Samburu call nkanyit,16 or “sense of respect”—that quiet that comes from true awareness of the world around, with all its transience and strange significations. And I was filled with admiration, knowing, too, that Kimunginye was not exceptional, that his qualities are shared by many Africans who, seeing no need to emulate the white man, have remained in touch with the old ways.

  Overhead, the crashing palms lashed wildly at the stars. In this bleak land the wind seems constant, with gusts that come as suddenly as avalanche. Grimy from a long day in the heat, we put our cots down in the fire smoke to discourage lions and mosquitoes; we would travel after midnight, to avoid the desert heat of day and its demands upon the water. Wind, discomfort, apprehension made sleep difficult for everyone except Adrian, who was so tired from the long day’s drive that he went to sleep without his supper. Jock and I scarcely slept at all. He had confided to me the news of shifta, and my mind kept turning on the fact that there were two women to look out for in the event of trouble.

  The wind still blew at 3:30 a.m. when we rose and broke camp and drove southward without breakfast. No water could be spared for tea, but if anyone was thirsty, he did not say so. Progress on the stony track was very slow, and it was near daylight when we passed the track down to Allia Bay, barely discernible in the cinder waste. From a visit by air last year to Allia Bay, Anderson knew of a rock pool inland, at the head of a rocky gorge; here, just after sunrise, we found water. In celebration, washing and drinking, we remained at the place two hours, then went on southeastward toward North Horr. The lonely sea, still silver, still remote, vanished behind its somber walls. Twenty-five miles from North Horr, just past the well called Hurran Hurra, a track turned off toward Loiyengalani, and as the spare gasoline was still intact, we took it; it was better to walk the last miles into Loiyengalani and send the truck back to the Land Rovers with fuel than to be stuck indefinitely at North Horr, where no fuel was available, nor transport out. The track went south along the Bura Galadi Hills, then west again, and at mid-afternoon Lake Rudolf reappeared, some seventy miles south of where we had last seen it.

  Lake Rudolf, one hundred and fifty miles in length, was once connected to the Nile, and still contains the great Nile perch, two hundred pounds or better, as well as Kenya’s last significant population of the Nile crocodile. Today the brackish lake is six hundred feet below the former channel to the Nile, and still subsiding, its only important source being the Omo River, which flows in the Rift fracture that crosses Ethiopia from the Red Sea. The prevailing winds of the southeast monsoon drive waves onto the west shore, in Turkana Land, 23,000 square miles of near-desert wilderness extending west to the Uganda Escarpment, which forms the divide between the Rift Valley and the Valley of the Nile.

  In the western light, the lake was a sea blue, choppy with wind. The foreshore was littered with water birds—flamingos, pelicans, cormorant, geese, ducks, sandpipers and plover, gulls and terns, ibis, egrets, and the Goliath heron, largest of all wading birds in Africa. Behind them ran herds of feral ass, big-headed and wild as any zebra. At one time, the Turkana say, this shore had wild animals and good grassland, but generations of domestic stock have eaten it down to thorny stubble.

  The first human beings seen since leaving North Horr were Turkana nomads, camped in a dry stream bed. To the south rose a forest of borassus palms that was sign of a large oasis; the two vehicles rolled into Loiyengalani with three gallons of gasoline between them. Word had come by radio to the police post that a truck from Koobi Fora had been shot at the day before in the region of Derati, and neither the North Horr police post nor the people at Koobi Fora had any idea where we might be. Subsequently Leakey told me that the killing of five shifta had occurred, not at Derati, but at the spring a few miles south where we had found water.

  Loiyengalani is composed of a police post and a small Asian duka that serves the nomad herdsmen and El Molo; often these Indian shopkeepers were the first to penetrate unsettled regions, and few urban Africans with the training to replace them would care for the loneliness of their life. At the source of the spring, not far away, a safari lodge had been constructed, but in 1965 three men were killed here by the shifta, including the lodge manager and a priest who had come here to set up a mission. Since then, a mission has been established, but the Loiyengalani lodge subsides into the weeds. An old African sweeps the fading paths in the hope of a future, and hastened to fill the swimming pool in honor of our arrival. One of his tasks, as he conceives it, is to keep the lodge grounds clear of Samburu, Turkana, and Rendille, whose grass huts, like clusters of small haystacks, litter the oasis. None of these people of bare open spaces takes shelter from the sun and wind among the trees, preferring to build their thatch ovens on the round black stones between the oasis and the shore. The region abounds with a small venomous snake known as the carpet viper, and palm fronds left lying even for a day or two are sure to harbor one—hence the preference for the bare stones. Anyway, as one man says, the wind keeps the huts cool enough, and with one hand, one can make a window anywhere one likes.

  The man who said this was an El Molo, or, more precisely, in their own pronunciation, Llo-molo; the name, he said, came from the Samburu Loo Molo Osinkirri,17 the People Who Eat Fish. The main village of the Llo-molo, perhaps twenty huts in all, is situated still farther from the oasis than the huts of the herdsmen, on a bare black gravel slope above the lake. Stuck onto the rocks like swallows’ nests, the huts have triangular mouths protected from the heavy wind by a screen of palm fronds. The black gravel all around is littered with tattered fronds and livestock dung, fish bones, old hearths, bits of rope and netting, rags. Fish dry on the thatch roofs, and on the rocks above wait rooks and gulls. Below, a smaller village stands outlined on the inland sea.

  The Llo-molo, who pride themselves on honesty and hospitality, accommodate the nomads in their village even though they do not like them. The Samburu and Turkana here are forever pilfering and fighting, and a few may linger for weeks at a time as guests of the Llo-molo, who have plenty of fish and cannot bear to eat with all these strangers hanging around looking so hungry. Other tribes, the Llo-molo say, know how to eat fish better than they know how to catch them, although the Turkana fishermen on the west shore, who use set nets and fishing baskets, would dispute this. “We have to feed them,” one Llo-molo says, “so that they will feel strong enough to go away.”

  The Llo-molo are mostly smaller than the Samburu, and many have bow legs, apparently as a result of rickets caused by their specialized diet. The men have white earrings carved from the vertebrae of cattle or Nile perch, and the women wear skirts of braided doum-palm fiber under the red trading cloth, but otherwise they imitate the Samburu, to whom they claim relationship: their moran are indistinguishable from the Samburu moran who joined them in a dance to honor the strangers. The faces of both were outlined in red masks of livid ocher, the dress and ornamentation were identical, and both carried paired spears with cowhide sheaths on the honed edges.

  The dance, essentially similar in all the cattle tribes, was joined by a few Turkana warriors and women; no other women danced. Alone in East Africa, the women of the Turkana are treated as individuals worthy of respect. Though less elegant than the Samburu women, they have a bold stride and gay manner, and great character in dark, strong faces set off by beadwork and thick metal earrings. Turkana men wear black grease in their hair instead of red, and the hair is balled up in a wad of blue clay into which black ostrich feathers are inserted, and they are not circumcised. Between 1909 and 1926, the Turkana, who trade cattle into Ethiopia for rifles and to this day stage cattle raids against other Karomojong, resisted the combined authority of Kenya, Uganda, and the Sudan. But repression was less damaging to the Turkana than the drought and overgrazing in their arid lands, and today the tribe
sends its men southward, seeking work.

  The dancers pack together in a phalanx. As the dance begins, the moran, spears upright, step out whooping one by one, in the long, leaping Maasai trot that in time of war and cattle raids carried the herdsmen three hundred miles or more over the plains. (Adrian remarks that the Giriama of the coast, most of whom have never laid eyes on a Maasai, say to this day that there is no sense fleeing a Maasai, they have legs that can run forever.) The dancers tremble. Now two or three step out at once, and those in the main body begin to leap straight up and down, spears glinting in the sun; they shoot the chin out as they rise and stamp with the right foot as they touch the ground, and on each rise the upright spears and clubs, or rungus, are twirled all the way around. Some dancers make shrill whoops, patting their mouths; others clap hands in rhythm: “N-ga-AY!” The chant is heavy and guttural, repetitive, but one man sings a litany in counterpoint, and another orates fiercely in the background as the dance accumulates its force. The young women and old men become excited, swaying and laughing; an infant in a necklace of tiny dik-dik bones is bouncing on a girl’s bare shoulders. At first these onlookers had teased the dancers but now they are caught up by the dance, eyes shining: “UM-ba-AY-uh! AH-yea-AY-y!” The old women, sullen, sit in the hot shadows of the huts, weaving palm fronds into skirts and nets and harpoon line. Perhaps they sense a condescension in the visitors, or wonder if the village will be paid.