by Barry Lopez
I’d grown to admire Mary Leakey for several reasons. She was a successful paleoanthropologist at a time when the profession accommodated very few women, and she’d pursued a pioneering study of African rock art as a mostly unheralded researcher. And she’d accomplished all this while working in the shadow of her self-regarding and lionized husband, Louis, who was not always discreet in his relationships with admiring women. She was an astute observer of human foibles and dubious about human virtue.
I enjoyed her candor and the enthusiasm with which she discussed what interested her. When the waiter arrived, she ordered for both of us. Afterward, we took our coffee outside on the veranda, where she enjoyed a cigar. In her fashion, she then held court, but with no trace of overbearing self-importance. We spoke mostly about prehistoric art, about her research into it in Tanzania, about the cave paintings at Altamira in northern Spain, and about the White Lady, a famous pictograph in a grotto in western Namibia, which I, too, happened to have seen. She made no effort to be definitive, to insist on the validity of her own interpretations. She seemed content to marvel and speculate from the security of a confident and well-informed intellect.
Out of the blue she surprised me by saying, “Well, has my son been rude? Has he shown contempt for your ideas?”
She seemed delighted to have posed the question, and eager to hear something in response that would make her laugh. I said no, that Richard had been welcoming, courteous, accommodating. He was confident about his own views, I said, and I thought he liked to spar. I also thought he might have been slightly suspicious about my reasons for wanting to visit Nariokotome and my wanting to accompany Kamoya and the others to Nakirai. But I understood all that, I said. (In a letter to Richard, before I came to see him, I’d said something about enjoying my conversations with Donald Johanson, an archrival of Richard’s at the time.) But no, I thought Richard quite decent. Just a bit wary.
She gazed at me through the blue haze of her cigar smoke with a bemused look, as though I did not really understand how the world worked.
* * *
—
KAMOYA AND THE OTHERS came back into camp about one. When I asked if they’d found anything interesting, he said they hadn’t, but that it had been a good day. “So,” I asked, “none of Turkanapithecus’s pals turned up?” A short, bright laugh lit up his face. Sometimes I thought Kamoya was so full of laughter that any jostling of his state of mind would cause it to burst from him. I’d watched him sit by, composed and seemingly indifferent, while one white man upbraided another white man for his faith in the capacity of Kenyan blacks to accomplish anything of importance without the guidance of white people. Later, when Kamoya told this story to a group of black men, his retelling was punctuated with sudden bursts of laugher, the laughter provoked by the absurdity of the notion.
After lunch, and after Kamoya had had his game of checkers with Nzube, and after we’d all had a nap, and after Christopher had brought the two of us afternoon tea, Kamoya talked with me about his early years. He’d grown up in a much more colonial Kenya than the one he was living in now. Back then he made one pound sterling per month working at a dairy. One day he took some milk for himself and was caught. His employer offered him three options: three months of work with no pay; twenty-five strokes across the back with a beating stick; or six months in jail. He refused it all and that same night slipped away, returning to his homeland in central Kenya. He was twenty-three. In the months following, when he heard about a need for workers at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where the Leakeys were looking for hominid fossils, he made up his mind to apply. The Leakeys had obtained funding from the National Geographic Society to continue their work, after Mary’s discovery of a partial Paranthropus boisei skull, the spectacular find that made the Leakeys internationally famous and which boosted the search for mankind’s ancestors into prominence. Once at Olduvai, Kamoya and seven other Wakamba men began digging in what they at first understood was a graveyard. Kamoya remembers that there was little water at Olduvai, but that they ate well, and that when he showed a knack for the work, Mary invited him to dig alongside her so she could teach him. Still, he told me, he remained uncertain about the nature of the project. “No one in school,” he said, “had ever mentioned anything about this.” He took note of the relative wealth and social status of the white people who came to visit Olduvai, and of how impressed they were with the Leakeys’ work. Whatever it was that he was helping with, he finally decided, this would be a good job for him.
In 1964 Kamoya found—when he tells the story he uses the pronoun we, not I—an australopithecine mandible at Lake Natron. It was the first of many major finds by Kamoya, for which the National Geographic Society would award him the John Oliver La Gorce Medal in 1985, by which time Kamoya had found more hominid fossils than any other person.
He was glad he’d been selected for the job at Olduvai and glad, he told me, that he’d stayed with it, despite his early misgivings. Paleoanthropology had provided him with a very good life.
The last slant rays of the setting sun picked up a bird in one of the acacias and prised it from the camouflage of its perch. A dark chanting goshawk. A hunter. Kamoya indicated it with a gesture, raising his eyebrows and tilting his head. I told him the story of the pale chanting goshawk I’d seen in Kalahari Gemsbok National Park (now Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park), in South Africa/Botswana. Where, figuratively, the human eye might gather a single pixel of information in its search of unfamiliar country, these accipiters gathered ten pixels. I told Kamoya I wished I could experience that degree of acuity.
Kamoya wondered what the camps were like around Kalahari Gemsbok. The difference between here and there, I answered, was that there you had to secure your camp against troops of baboons, and there were also spotted hyenas to deal with, so you couldn’t sleep outside on a tarp like we were doing. You had to sleep inside a tent and be sure to zip the flaps shut, or the hyenas would stick their heads in and bite you. And some nights you could hear the stomachs of elephants gurgling and churning, they were standing so close to the tents; but you didn’t hear their footfalls. In the morning we’d sometimes see their spoor only a foot from the tent walls.
“Do you imagine,” I asked Kamoya, “that we are comprehensible to the Turkana?” He shook his head no. I told him that I sometimes thought of us as a flock of birds moving through the Turkana universe, gleaning seeds the Turkana had no interest in. At other times, I said, I thought of us as a pack of hyenas, like the ones who came into a camp I was in in northern Botswana once and took a few things we needed. Without a gun, you could do nothing about them. You just put everything you wanted to keep in a safe place and got out of the hyenas’ way.
I told Kamoya that I’d seen tribal people treated like pariahs when they approached camps I had been in, and that this sort of thing happened in cities as well. And that I was sometimes embarrassed by the attitudes of my own people, even though I knew that, occasionally, tribal people who turned up in remote camps were conniving. They were looking to steal things, and they seemed to enjoy how uncomfortable their begging made us. It was hard to know what to do. We condemn racism and say it’s driven by ignorance and fear, but it’s also a tool some people use to survive. Everywhere in the world I’ve been, I told Kamoya, you see people making distinctions just as vicious and unwarranted about someone’s social or economic class, though this kind of dismissal of a person is not as widely condemned.
I told Kamoya I admired his tact and his empathy in dealing with the Turkana people. Maybe, like genocide or exploiting people for profit, racism is a failure of empathy, an inability to imagine more than one’s own point of view, an effort to solve paradoxes rather than learning to live with them.
I didn’t try to frame for Kamoya a thought that had been running through my mind, about the psychological struggle for equality that I’d seen among tribal or traditional people in so many places. Everywhere I’d been I’d watched
indigenous people attempting to pull themselves through that jagged hole that would give them entry to the white world. For some, acculturation was a transformation necessary to survive, to eat, work, and raise a family.
I wondered what it might be, in the thoughts we were exchanging, that made Kamoya sense their complexity, that his feelings about racism, for example, were so loaded with the possibility of being misunderstood that he might quit thinking of which words to use and, like me, just stare into the side-lit world around us, the last bright minutes of violet light before the swift fall of equatorial night. As we rose from our camp chairs, two Abyssinian rollers streaked past, twenty feet over our heads. They are stout, large-headed birds with formidable hooked bills, radiant azure plumage, chestnut-colored backs, and cobalt blue wing tips. The outermost tail feathers on each side have developed into streamers. They trace the bird’s passage through the air like Japanese calligraphy brushes.
* * *
—
THE NIGHT AIR is still when we retire, completely without tension. Later, a soft wind comes up, blowing south from the Turkwel River. Past midnight a low-pressure cell somewhere farther to the south of us begins to draw air off the plain on the west side of the lake. As the breeze builds into a wind, it gathers mosquitoes off the river. It carries them southward over the desert, where they find little to attract them. They prefer the environs of the river, where animals come regularly to drink. Around three in the morning, thousands of them drop out of the wind and are upon us. We sit up quickly, alert, casting about frantically for insect repellent.
Six men in their undershorts in the pale moonlight, the hiss of the spray cans, hands slapping skin, the soft curses. Wet with chemicals, we return to our sheets. Wherever I touch my body I trigger an angry itch. In the morning, forever measuring things, I count more than sixty bites.
I’ve had only a few encounters with mosquitoes since coming up from Nairobi, but I’ve been taking an antimalarial called chloroquine regularly. No drug can prevent malaria, but a few moderate the symptoms. In the back of my mind is the thought that the generations of protozoa for which the mosquito serves as a host turn over so quickly that eventually the drugs serve only to weed out the susceptible, leaving behind the drug-resistant phenotypes of this protozoan to breed up, in my case, a population of chloroquine-resistant parasites. Then an alternative drug is called for. Before I left home, my travel doctor had told me I’d be safe around Lake Turkana with chloroquine. No chloroquine-resistant strains of the protozoan were known to be there, he said. Still, it was a bit scary, being surprised like that.
In the morning we’re all scratching ourselves and shaking our heads.
We leave camp together at the usual hour, on what will be my last day with these men. My scheduled flight to Nairobi from Lokwakangole two days hence has been canceled. Kamoya says I should go up to Lodwar this evening, and then in the morning get a matatu, a small passenger van, which will take me to Kitale. From there I can get a bus south to Nairobi. He’s been on the radiotelephone to arrange a room for me at the Turkwel Lodge. We’ll drive up after tea, with Onyango and Nzube.
The day before, Nzube had gone off on his own to walk a section of land he and Kamoya thought promising, and this is where we’re going this morning. The first place we sweep is a low hill, composed mostly of mixed gravels. We find part of a large turtle plastron exposed there. I find a few crocodile teeth, which look like gleaming agates in the fine rubble of a gravel outwash. There seem to be fish bones everywhere. The richness of Nzube’s discovery is spellbinding. Everywhere I look across the dozen square yards immediately around me, I’m able to pick out the fossils of an animal I recognize.
Most of the surface of Earth, outside of Antarctica and the deep beds of the oceans, has been examined with discriminating sets of eyes, but the details have been assembled by cultures with dissimilar feelings about what’s not worth remembering and what’s worth knowing more about. What the Samburu in northern Kenya know about their place, what they can recall and enumerate and elucidate for a stranger, or Nunamiut Eskimos living in the Brooks Range in Alaska, or pastoral Rabari nomads in Rajasthan, Apurinã in the upper Amazon, Bedouin in Algeria, or Pintupi in the Gibson Desert in central Australia, represents an expanse of knowing born out of long and intimate contact. When scientific observers arrive to study a place, another layer of knowing comes into play. Turkana people no doubt know about the crocodile emerging here at my feet, but they’ve let it be. This morning, people with different ideas about what is to be valued or carried off to show others stand about, staring at an anonymous crocodile from the Miocene, and at the turtles and fish that once swam with it.
In these situations, I try to keep track of two important questions. Has anyone in the scientific group spoken to the local people about this? And what is the level of recent disturbance here? Anthropogenic disturbance. What has already been taken away from this spot, and what has been added to it in recent human lifetimes? This morning, the land all about us looks overgrazed, punished as it were, by herds and flocks of domestic animals, but otherwise not greatly disturbed, unless you are thinking about yet one more place in Africa that has been stripped of its wildlife. No stone ruins are here, no signs of agriculture. Still, most everywhere we have gone we’ve found the tracks and tread marks of oil exploration vehicles. The heavy vehicles break apart the thin hemispheres of fossil mammalian crania. The wind blows in the odd bit of paper, or perhaps a plastic bag that hangs up in the brush and eventually disintegrates in the sun. I’ve made little effort to learn to distinguish the spoor of zebra or of the relict populations of gazelles and antelopes here. I know how infrequently we cross their trails or see their droppings. Every few minutes, though, we find the spoor of camels, donkeys, sheep, and goats.
We spend about forty-five minutes at the crocodile site, picking up pieces of the fossil animals here, turning them over and over in our hands, fitting some of them together without comment.
From the crocodile site, the six of us fan out, signaling to each other occasionally, but we find nothing as impressive as that. Like casual strollers we wander through the bones of this Miocene menagerie, evidence of another time, days when there was water everywhere.
A historian interested in more than just these ancient creatures that so intrigue us, someone who wanted to offer up a comprehensive sense of the place to a person who did not have the means or the time free of obligations to come here, would want more than what the six of us might be able to offer. She would want someone who knew the plants, who could pick out their seeds amid the silt and gravel—someone who could recognize the pollinators, could sort through the shriveled acacia pods, the bleached beetle carapaces, the palm nut husks, the smallest feathers of the sandgrouse—and say what it had once meant and what it means now. It has always slightly amazed me how infrequently scientific expeditions make room for people who are highly conversant with the place but whose goals are not scientific, people who have no command of the technical vocabularies of science, who aren’t as constrained as the logical positivists when it comes to a philosophy of being, who wear the wrong clothes, show up with the wrong color skin, or lack professional ambition.
We move over the gravel plain, circling back gradually to the place we’ve parked the cars. Some distance shy of that, I signal Kamoya for help. The point of my stick rests next to a fossil.
“Coprolith,” he says. “Crocodile.”
If you took it apart grain by grain, would you be able to discover what it had eaten in the hours before it left this behind?
At the cars we drink cool water and watch a flight of C-130s lumbering north over the Loima Hills to the west, ferrying supplies to southern Sudan, where in those days, blacks and Arabs, Christians and Muslims were at each other, lethally, in the old way.
* * *
—
CHRISTOPHER HAS BAKED a loaf of bread. We can smell it downwind of camp as we approac
h. Goat stew and rice. Dark tea. I will miss the hospitality and courtesy that obtains in this camp. (A friend of mine who’d once been in the field with some of these same men, when I asked her about camp etiquette, told me never to ask for seconds. That would mean the cook wouldn’t eat.)
Ngeneo and Onyango are at a game of checkers. Onyango always wins. Exasperated, again, Ngeneo will soon be off to visit with young Turkana women at a nearby settlement, where he will perhaps have better luck. Kamoya and Nzube are off somewhere, probably sleeping under the acacias. Wambua is flat on his back, enjoying his cigarette slowly, the way some men enjoy a drink straight up at the end of a day of work.
It doesn’t take me long to pack. I’ve picked up a number of small stones, one or two each day while we walked. I wrap them in scraps of toilet paper to keep them from scratching each other and bind them together in a handkerchief by cross-tying its corners. These are my surrogate fossil bones.
I have a small deerskin pouch with me from home in which I keep a few stones from my own home ground, several covert feathers from birds there—winter wren, northern flicker, Swainson’s thrush—a black bear claw, several small mammal bones, and seeds. Together, they remind me that I come from a real place and that I have responsibilities there. I’m not very aware of this now, as I pack, but will be in a few days when I board a plane in Nairobi to begin the journey home, and three security men find with this pouch an opportunity for sport.