The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen

  Like the Dinka, the Maasai have a moon legend of the origin of death, which was formerly unknown among mankind, and is still thought of as unnatural: Naiteru, a deity residing on Mt. Kenya, instructed the patriarch Le-eyo that if a child of the tribe should die, he must cast away the body with the words, “Man dies, and returns again; the moon dies and remains away.” But since the first child to die was not his own, Le-eyo did not bother to obey, and ever since then, man has died and the moon has been reborn. Eventually Le-eyo called his sons to his own deathbed to ask what they wished as an inheritance. The greedy elder son, who became the ancestor of all Bantu, wanted part of everything on earth; the younger said he would be content with some small remembrance of his father. This modesty was rewarded with great cattle wealth, whereas the Bantu son was given a little bit of everything, and ever since has been eking out his days with his wretched agriculture.

  Within the tribes, certain Maasai became smiths, and fashioned the spear blades and the short sword known as the simi; as in Hamitic tribes, such people were inferior. When the white man appeared in the late nineteenth century, he was called l’Ojuju, the Hairy One, and lacking cattle, was despised with all the rest.

  I have tried to produce an impression on the Maasai by means of forest fires, by fiery rockets, and even by a total eclipse of the sun . . . but I have found, after all, that the one thing that would make an impression on these wild sons of the Steppe was a bullet . . . and then only when employed in emphatic relation to their own bodies. . . .5

  At the time this was written by Karl Peters, whose perfidious treaties with unsuspecting chiefs laid the groundwork for Germany’s seizure of Tanganyika, the power of the Maasai was already waning due to drought and disease and a growing resistance from such victims as the Nandi and the Kamba, as well as incessant war between their own marauding tribes; cheered on by their women, they staged great civil wars on the open plain, one consequence of which was the utter disruption of the Laikipiak Maasai, whose lands were taken over by the Samburu. In 1869, the Samburu had infected the Maasai with cholera, which raged through the tribe in epidemic, and just before the Europeans appeared in force in the 1880s, they were swept by smallpox, and their beasts struck down by waves of rinderpest, or pleuro-pneumonia, a cattle plague from Asia that also affects certain antelope (rinderpest is thought to have eliminated the greater kudu from wide areas of its former range). Kikuyu and Kamba herds, in Kenya, were also afflicted, bearing out an old Kikuyu prophecy that great famine and disaster would precede the fatal coming of pale strangers. Like the Kamba, the Maasai believe that a comet foretells the coming of disaster, and they say that a comet crossed the sky just before the appearance of l’Ojuju: the great laibon Mbatien had also prophesied the advent of the white man in a vision brought on by honey wine. On his deathbed, Mbatien bequeathed his title and attainments to his son Lenana, much to the annoyance of the elder son Sendeyo, who had reason to believe that Lenana had cheated him out of his heritage. Once again the Maasai split into hostile factions more or less separated by the boundary between what had become, in 1895, British and German East Africa. But after twelve years of rinderpest, smallpox, famine, and German harassment in the region of Kilimanjaro, Sendeyo forgave Lenana, and the Maasai were reunited. Already Lenana had made peace with the British; so weakened were the Maasai, in fact, that they needed European protection from their enemies. Because of their great misfortunes, made so much worse by their delight in fighting one another, they were unable to resist the Hairy Ones—unlike the Nandi, farther west, who were not pacified until 1905, and the Turkana, in the north, who held out for another twenty years. The Maasai wanted very much to fight against the Germans in World War I, which brought Tanganyika under British administration, but the British thought it unwise to give them arms.

  In the Serengeti, according to their own tradition, the Maasai were most numerous near Lake Lagarja and in the south part of the plain, but until 1959, when their herds were banished, they lived intermittently at Moru Kopjes and elsewhere in the park, and signs of their long stay include mints and peas that thrive in the wake of overgrazing by domestic herds. Some of the kopjes have been stripped of trees, and at others the vegetation seems induced by man—certain acanths and morning glories that accompany the disruption of the soil, and thorny nightshades (Solanum), and an introduced legume whose spiny fruits are thought to have stuck to the old Army greatcoats gotten in trade at the Asian dukas after the last war. Today these greatcoats, regardless of temperature, are a favored article of dress throughout East Africa, though most Maasai wear the shuka or toga of broadcloth, dyed in red ocher, that is knotted on the right shoulder.

  Maasai herds are still seen intermittently along the eastern boundaries of the park, and a few moran may turn up at the settlement at Seronera. One-legged or ankles crossed, leaning on their spears, they gaze impassively at the less aristocratic Africans in the service areas. Ostensibly they have put aside their warlike ways, but not long ago a dead morani was discovered on the plain—speared to death, apparently, since no predators were near. As yet, only vultures had found him. A passing Maasai might pluck some grass, which as cattle food is a symbol of good will and peace, and spit on it in benediction, and place the grass upon the skull, to protect himself from evil, but the body would be left untouched on the great siringet, under the African sky.

  When the rain stopped, I climbed Naisera. Leite came with me, bringing along his muzzle-loading musket, taken from a poacher. This gun was long since defunct—it had not worked for the poacher, either. Even in the time of Livingstone, such muskets were very common in the interior—it was firearms that persuaded the Arab traders to venture inland—and with the advent of the breech-loading rifle, then the repeater, late in the nineteenth century, great numbers of muskets were inherited by the Africans. In Tanzania, thousands of muzzle-loaders are still registered, and guns of the mid-nineteenth century are still carried for purposes of prestige.

  Three klipspringer stood outlined on the rock’s crest; by the time we reached the top, they had disappeared. We crouched in the wind and gazed up and down Ngata Kiti. To the eastward, far beyond the far end of the valley, the Mountain of God rose for a long moment in the swirling clouds, then vanished. The Maasai say that Lengai or Ngai moved to this place in the sky after a Dorobo hunter shot an arrow at him, and most of the day for most of the year his realm is hidden; now Ngai is remote, beyond their reach, and they are visited by death and famine. Leite took delight in my elation at the sight of the holy mountain. Later he exclaimed to Myles, “Lengai must be the Mountain of God—it is so extreme!” In 1967, this last active volcano of the Crater Highlands erupted, shrouding its slopes and all the country around with fine gray ash.

  I spoke no Maasai and Leite no English; we communicated with hand signs and good will. Leite cautioned against touching a certain euphorbia whose milk was hurtful to the eyes, and showed me a small plant, ol-umigumi, taken as a stimulant with meat before a lion hunt to give warriors courage. The moran surround a big male lion, then rush in with their spears—“Fantastic!” says Myles, who has seen this twice. “Not one hangs back, they all want to be first. And when the wounded lion knows it must break out of that circle, and charges, and gets one of them down, he just curls up under that buffalo-hide shield. The others are in there so quick that he’s up a second later. I saw two lions killed, and not one of those chaps ever got a scratch!”

  It is said that many of the best moran died of infection in the years that followed the great rinderpest plagues, when the proliferating lions, having finished the dead cattle, turned to the live ones; even a slight mauling from a lion or leopard can be fatal, since the smears of carrion adhering to the teeth and claws make the wounds septic. Today the Maasai are forbidden to kill lions or steal cattle, much less spear their fellow Africans. In an effort to damp their warlike nature, the buffalo-hide shields, black, white, and red, have been taken away from them, although spears may be carried as a defense against wild animals, and
are still used occasionally on people; a white man was killed only a few years ago in the region of Narok. The Maasai have been compared6 to predators such as wild hunting dogs that seem strangely delicate in their adjustments to their environment, and fade quickly in the face of change. When jailed by the colonial authorities, they died so regularly that a system of fines had to be set up instead.

  Turner has a high opinion of the Maasai, of their independence and their physical courage and their ferocity as warriors, and he favors a popular theory that they blocked the northward advance through East Africa of the formidable Ngoni Zulu of the South. “The Zulus were well organized, you see, none of this other Bantu lot could do a thing with them; took the Maasai to stop them. They never got farther north than the Maasai Steppe!” Myles’s face is not often alight with such enthusiasm—“Oh, they’re wonderful people!” He compared them to the Somali of Kenya’s Northwest Frontier, and laughed in sympathy with those British officials who, after only a few months out in Africa, became “white Maasai” or “white Somali”—“No, no! Wouldn’t hear a word said against them!” Even Lord Delamere had been a champion of the Maasai, who have an unquenchable sense of their own aristocracy, and won the admiration of the whites by looking down on them.

  Myles much regrets the passing of the days when stately files of Maasai raiders in black ostrich plumes and lion headdress, spear points gleaming, crossed the plains without a sideways glance. He is proud of his library of Africana, and has read virtually all of the early accounts—the missionary-explorers like Krapf and Rebmann who first saw the snow peaks of Kenya and Kilimanjaro, and Livingstone and Speke and Burton, who explored the lakes, and Joseph Thomson, the first man to traverse Maasai Land, in 1883, and Count Teleki, who discovered Lake Rudolf, and the ivory hunters such as Frederick Selous and Arthur Neumann and Karamoja Bell, who were of necessity explorers, too. But the time of the hunter-explorers was coming to an end in 1909, when the cousins Hill who had settled on the Kapiti Plains southeast of Nairobi let Theodore Roosevelt hunt lions on their ranch and became the first of the “white hunters.” Selous, who escorted Roosevelt (he died a few years later in the German wars in Tanganyika) was the last of the great hunters of the nineteenth century, and those who came after, such as John A. Hunter, began their careers as meat hunters for the Mombasa railroad, or in game control. By the 1920s, Hunter and Philip Percival, whose brother Blayney was the first game warden in the Kenya Colony, were the most renowned of the “white hunters,” whose small numbers included Percival’s partner, Baron Bror von Blixen, as well as his estranged wife’s lover, Denys Finch-Hatton, who was to become the hero of Out of Africa.

  In East Africa, hunters have ever been great liars, and except as fuel for nostalgia, their exploits make repetitious reading, clogged as they are with stupefying lists of the carcasses left behind and encounters with death so constant as to cancel one another out. Nevertheless, a great many of the adventurers were extraordinary men, and much of the seeming exaggeration in their accounts comes less from inflamed imaginations than from the compression of the inevitable adventures into a few pages, unleavened by all the quiet days in between.

  The rangers had built an enormous fire which lit up the north face of Naisera. We stood at the fire with stiff drinks. Myles was raised in the Kenya Highlands, and for many years had worked with game control, killing animals for the farmers of Mt. Kenya; he reckons that he shot seven hundred buffalo. After three years of this, he was offered a job by Ker and Downey as a white hunter, and traveled all over Africa. He recalls a mid-morning encounter outside the Norfolk Hotel with Ernest Hemingway, whose work he much admires. “Hemingway was a friend of my clients, and invited me into the bar for a drink. I told him thanks very much, but I hadn’t finished up—we were going off on safari, you see.” Hemingway was very offended. “Any man who doesn’t drink with me fights with me,” the great man told him.

  Eventually Myles married a girl who worked at Ker and Downey, and in this period, like many hunters before him, he turned from hunting to protection of the game. “I was sick of killing animals,” he told me. “Thought I’d try a bit of the other side.” Myles was then thirty-five, which John Owen, the former director of the Tanzania parks, considers to be the age when most men outgrow shooting big animals. As a District Commissioner in the south Sudan, Owen killed a good number of elephant, and he is not sheepish about it in the least; he feels to this day that the present trend toward photographing animals instead of shooting them is like flirting instead of making it—there bloody well ought to be a certain risk involved.

  Most professionals agree that a hunter who takes no risk is no hunter at all; since he lives by violence, he ought to be prepared to die that way. Yet they also agree that in the modern hunting safari there is virtually no risk to anyone but the professional, who may have less to fear from the wild animals than from his clients. A story is told of one of the Greek shipping magnates who took with him a bodyguard of three hunters, then damaged his expensive gun by dropping it when an elephant screamed; the gun’s discharge sent it skidding across the rocks, and the bullet just missed one of his guards. Latin Americans, especially, think themselves unmanly if they do not pursue their own wounded animals into dangerous situations, and one hunter speaks of a Brazilian who kept firing furiously over his head as he crawled into dark bush after a wounded leopard—the hunter got it with a lucky shot at the white flare of its teeth—then refused the trophy with disdain until told that it had value, whereupon he claimed it. Another who had wounded a lion handed the hunter a movie camera, instructing him to film the inevitable charge and the destruction of the lion. “Don’t shoot,” he begged, “unless he has me down.” The hunter refused, on the grounds that the loss of a client meant the automatic loss of his own license. (In the good old days, when hunters were not penalized in this way, one of their number obeyed such rash instructions to the letter, and the filmed record of his client’s demise, together with his personal effects, was duly sent home to his loved ones.)

  Myles had no use for his Latin American clients, who were notorious for killing every animal they were legally entitled to, whether they meant to take it home or not. Once he walked out on such a safari, asking the Nairobi office to send out another hunter. Whatever one may think of hunting, there is a great difference between the true hunter and the butcher, and Myles recognized it: the love of the hunter for the hunted, while scarcely of the spiritual quality attained by the Bushman or Dorobo, is no less real for having been sentimentalized and overblown. But killing without hunting, for mere souvenirs, describes most of the motorized or airborne excursions that pass today for the hunting safari. Also, the professional hunters are no longer a small band of colorful adventurers as they were in the early days when Fritz Schindelar, riding a white horse, risked and received a fatal attack from a charging lion. In Turner’s time, after World War II, there were already eighteen hunters; today sixty or seventy are licensed, and their numbers increase as the animals decline.

  In his days as a hunter, Myles depended heavily on his Dorobo gun bearers and trackers, who moved quietly and missed nothing: “They’ve incredible hearing. Not only did they know that a big animal was laying up in there, but they’d know just how far away it was, and whether it was a buffalo or rhino. They could hear him breathing.” And it was from Myles that I first heard of the primitive Tindiga hunters east of Lake Eyasi, some sixty miles to the south, where he had once gone on safari. “One day we passed a small man with a bow, sitting on a rock by a small pool. Two weeks later, when we came back through, he was still there; he hadn’t moved. He’d got one zebra in the interim.”

  According to Myles, the wild Tindiga were still independent of surrounding tribes, unlike the Pygmies and Llo-molo and Dorobo, and had even retained their ancient tongue, which was a click-speech like that of the Bushman. Avoiding all others, they moved in small bands through the hills surrounding the hot arid Yaida Valley. I asked Myles if one could visit them, and he shrugged: there migh
t be a few at the Yaida game post, but the wild ones would be very hard to find.

  A cold night wind off the Gols whipped the steep walls of Ngata Kiti, and this wind, by morning, had shifted into the northeast. “Dry weather wind,” Myles muttered, sipping tea at the morning fire. “Blows the dhows south from Arabia.” Though it is generally erratic, the northeast monsoon blows from late October or November through February; the southeast monsoon blows the rest of the year. In summer, the land has dried to tinder, and the dry wind keeps everyone in a bad temper: black man and white actually grin, says Myles, at the first sign of the rains.

  Leaving camp and the truck behind, we went eastward down the valley, taking along a driver and two rangers. Animals were scarce, and became scarcer. A hyena in the distance had this region to itself, to judge from the number of ungnawed bones along the way. The valley was much rougher than expected, and two hard hours passed before we came onto a rise that descended to the Salei Plain. To the south, in a kingdom of black rains, the Crater Highlands mounted toward the rim of Ngorongoro, thirty miles away; away from the Ngorongoro road, the Crater Highlands, girt by dead volcanoes that rise ten thousand feet and more into their clouds, are little known. Northeast was the rim of the escarpment, and beyond it and far below lay the great lonely Lake Natron, stretching away to the Kenya border. Straight ahead, lost in the clouds, Ol Doinyo Lengai rose nearly ten thousand feet from the Rift Valley floor.