by Paul Theroux
Going home that night, I noticed a great fuss in the streets. The taxi driver was excited, his blood was up, his radio was chattering. I suspected a riot or some kind of civil disorder, for there were helicopters going thunk-thunk-thunk overhead and the sound of ambulance sirens.
‘Trouble at the Pirates football game,’ the driver said.
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘Stampede,’ he said.
Latecomers to the game, 15,000 of them, had been trapped and crushed in a tunnel at the stadium entrance. There had been nowhere for them to go, for there were 60,000 people inside the ground. Forty-three people had been killed and hundreds injured. With the first screams and the confusion, the game had been stopped and then abandoned.
‘Someone told me to go to that game.’
‘Would have been a great game. But the stampede. Ach. Was terrible, man.’
Through a friend I met Mike Kirkinis, guide to fossil sites. I liked him immediately. He was energetic and an optimist and he worked hard. He was no snob. He said, ‘Africans in Jo’burg tell me that they’re from the bush. That their grandparents herded goats. I say, “Hey, what a coincidence! My grandfather herded goats in Cyprus.” It’s true. It helps to remember where you came from.’
Mike, in his early forties, owned a helicopter. He ran tours out to the archeological sites of Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, places that bristled with bones of humanoids, the richest fossil sites in the world and South Africa’s first World Heritage Sites. I agreed to go out with Mike one Sunday morning.
‘I’ll bring my girlfriend. We can have a picnic.’
His girlfriend, Sybilla, was a German veterinarian. She was six foot one and very beautiful. She owned a Rottweiler. As a vet, she specialized in the health of elephants. The previous year, when she was on an expedition to Mali ‘darting’ elephants and treating them, an elephant which had been insufficiently tranquilized rose up unexpectedly, tossed Sybilla to the ground and trampled her, smashing her pelvis and her legs. Mike had flown to Bamako to help her and in the course of the year she had healed. You would not have known she had come close to being destroyed by big elephant feet unless you gave way to temptation, as I did, and gazed intently at her legs. The tiny scars and stitches did not detract from their beauty but only reminded me of her strength and courage. She had long silken hair and flinty-blue eyes. She flew the chopper expertly.
‘She intimidates people,’ Mike said.
I said, ‘Not me. I mean, if you wanted to go to the ends of the earth she’s the one to go with.’
When we were aloft, Mike explained that what I was seeing down below was the ridge on which Johannesburg sat – the Witwatersrand, the White Water Ridge – clearly upraised, because (so he said) an asteroid had hit the planet right here a few billion years ago and rearranged the landscape, displacing the inland sea by pushing the gold-bearing reef, the great lip of rock, nearer to the surface. The gold, discovered in 1886, was the making of Johannesburg. (Diamonds had been found in great quantities in Kimberley about twenty years earlier.)
Flying in this helicopter was a guilty pleasure, because although I bemoaned air travel I loved flying low over the Johannesburg suburbs, looking at the mansions, the evidence of white flight from the city, and black flight, too. From aloft I could see clusters of condominiums and gated communities, stately homes with swimming pools and horse paddocks, the adjacent slums, the squatter settlements: everything was visible. Flying with Mike was a language lesson, too: the park land, the drifts, the vlei (marshland), the klows (ravines), the kopjes (little hills), the narrow tracks, known as spoor across the veld, a large wildtuin (game reserve), the snelweg (highway), the vryweg (freeway). Also, the variously named detritus from the gold mines, for they created an enormous amount of rubble and sludge – the mine dumps and slime dams.
We landed at Swartkrans, because there were buses of tourists at Sterkfontein, and no one else here.
‘The oldest bones on earth have been found here,’ Mike said, and led us through the cave system, down a narrow path. White bones like fragments of flint and chalk protruded from the wall. Looking closely I could easily discern molars, vertebrae, long hollow limb bones, talons and canines and obvious chunks of skull, every vertical surface was covered with bits of smashed bone.
At the base of the cave, Mike said, ‘This site contains the evidence of the first controlled use of fire by early man anywhere in the world. That was probably the single major pivotal point in human evolution a million years ago. Imagine what a difference fire made. It gave humans the ability to master their environment and to become the most destructive species in the history of the planet.’
The remains of prehistoric hand-made bone tools had also been found in the cave, as well as evidence that the humans there had been the prey of large animals. The site at Swartkrans had been excavated since the 1930s, Mike said, and two types of early hominids co-existed here almost two million years ago, homo erectus and homo robustus. But the cave had been continuously occupied for those two million years. Besides early man, animals had also used it as a lair. It had served as a shelter for African pastoralists for hundreds of years. During the Boer War this cave had been used by Boer soldiers. And more recently such caves had been the hideouts of African guerrillas in the struggle to overthrow the white government.
With Sybilla working the controls, we flew into a remote gully and had a picnic by a cold spring, among twittering birds and ochre butterflies and watching hawks.
‘Humans evolved here,’ Mike said. ‘Right here where we’re sitting. We’ve found stone tools, and bones, and everything else. Africa was perfect for evolution. But you want to know something?’
Sybilla had been combing her long hair by the spring. She looked up at Mike, and I too tore my attention away from the comb-tugs fluttering Sybilla’s hair and gave him my full attention.
‘Probably none of those bones are those of our direct ancestors.’
‘I thought that was Adam and Eve in the cave back there.’
‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ Mike asked. ‘There’s a guy you have to meet. He’s got this amazing theory.’
The man to whom Mike introduced me in a sushi bar in an upscale Johannesburg mall was Professor Lee Berger. He was head of the Paleoanthropological Unit for Research and Exploration at the University of Witwatersrand. A paleoanthropologist studies ancient humans, but Professor Berger has said that this science of taking the widest view of history is ‘one of the greatest privileges… of being human.’ It was a vast search into our own elusive ancestry.
He had published a book in 2000, elaborating his research, In the Footsteps of Eve. A genial American from Georgia, in his late thirties, his theory was that humankind’s direct ancestor was probably not among any of the bones or fossil forms that had been dug up in Africa or anywhere else. Yes, humanoid species had been found and the forms were more related to us than to chimps. But while that was extraordinarily close, it was not a direct link to us. Our actual ancestor had not been found.
I said, ‘What about these people who report startling findings? “The ancestor of man.” There was one just this year.’
‘Kenyanthropus,’ Professor Berger said. He was smiling. ‘Imagine naming a new genus, just like that. And so quickly – three weeks between the submission of the research findings and the acceptance.’
‘So you don’t buy it?’
He said, ‘Paleoanthropologists are competing for money and grants, so they tend to make earth-shaking pronouncements about finding our ancestors. If you need money for research it helps to make headlines.’
Professor Berger’s forthrightness and skepticism, his insistence on presenting fossils in the right context, his habit of doubting and demanding proof, had earned him many admirers and some enemies. Because paleoanthropology involved so much interpretation and ‘emotional resonance,’ rivalries were inevitable and competition among scientists and fossil hunters was intense. He said that the Leakeys, competitive within
their own family, had not found Adam in Olduvai Gorge, and for him the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton that I had seen in Addis Ababa was not Eve, but rather a three-foot-tall bipedal ape with a chimp-like jaw.
‘She’s in our family tree. We were an ape until two million years ago. We became erectus – had skills, learned to control fire, learned hunting, got weapons. But the Lucy fossil is probably a dead end.’
‘Family tree’ was not an expression he used much, and in fact he said that such a concept misrepresented the progress of our origins. The notion of a tree was too simple for being so linear, for the pattern of our ancestry more likely resembled a ‘complex bush.’
Disputing fossil finds had given him some predictable supporters, among them Creationists who believed literally in Adam and Eve, and the Flood, and Lot turning into a pillar of salt. Taking Professor Berger’s words out of context Creationists cited his work as evidence that Darwin and his heresies were nothing but a low trick in getting God out of America’s schools.
But it was understandable that little was known about our ancestors, he said. ‘The study of human origins is only thirty or forty years old. That’s all. Before then it was like stamp collecting.’
Professor Berger had come to South Africa via Kenya in the 1980s. He had worked with Richard Leakey on a dig in Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya. At that time South Africa awaited discovery. Because of the Nationalist Party, which came to power in 1948, and the academic boycott that was called because of the white supremacist policies of that party, there was no digging at all in South Africa for forty years – no work in paleoanthropology, and no finds from 1948 until 1989. Just as bad, a great deal of fossil material that had been found earlier was useless because it was undated.
‘It’s not like Europe, where they have lake sites. Lake sites are easily datable. We didn’t have vulcanism. No geochemical signals. No one here knew exactly what they had found.’
In 1990, when Professor Berger started seriously looking for fossils, there were only five established early hominid sites in South Africa. ‘But there were dozens of caves – dozens and dozens,’ he said. ‘I began by walking in the bush around Krugersdorp’ – Swartkrans was near there – ‘and I’d see a cave and we’d dig and find fossils. There were fossils everywhere. We started digging in Gladysville and two weeks later we found fossils of hominids. In some caves we found hominids that had been preyed upon by saber-toothed cats – no, not the other way around.’
Talking about Africa, the larger meaning the fossils had, Professor Berger lost his circumspection and spoke of ‘the incredible binding power of fossils,’ how they brought people together. The lesson of evolution in Africa was not tribalism and division, but cooperation.
‘Every critical event in the development of homo sapiens has come out of Africa,’ he said.
In his book In the Footsteps of Eve he had written,
Humanity is a product of Africa. We are what we are today because we’ve been shaped by our environment – and it was the African environment that hosted almost every major evolutionary change we’ve experienced on our journey towards being human.
‘The morphology of the face, how we lost our canines, the very definitions of our humanity,’ he said. ‘We are defined by peacefulness and cooperation. Those qualities developed here in Africa.’
There were four of us at the sushi bar - Professor Berger had brought a friend, and Mike had brought me.
‘Look at us,’ Professor Berger said. ‘You couldn’t take four of any other mammalian species to sit down as we are doing here. This is the proof that we are the cooperative species.’
Picking up a spicy tuna hand roll, Mike said, ‘So maybe there’s hope for the world?’
‘We are undoubtedly a peaceful species. We developed a pedomor-phic face - child-like, non-threatening. Go ahead, Paul, threaten me with your face.’
I attempted a fierce face.
Professor Berger crowed to the table, ‘See, he didn’t show his teeth! Mammals express threat by showing their teeth, but humans don’t. Warfare is symbolic – it was, anyway, until this century. The idea of mass slaughter is pretty recent.’
A recurrent human event in history that has always fascinated me is First Contact. The most vivid examples come from travel – exploration and discovery. Usually, First Contact is construed as Columbus meeting his first Arawak and calling him an Indian; but consider the converse – the Arawak meeting a fat little Italian clutching a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels on the deck of a caravel. In the year of Contact, 1778, the Hawaiians believed Captain Cook to be the God Lono. The Aztecs in 1517 took the Spaniards to be avatars of Quetzal-cóatl, the Plumed Serpent, God of Learning and of Wind. The Polar Inuit assumed that they were the only people in the world, so when they saw their first white stranger, the explorer Sir William Parry, in 1821, they said to him, ‘Are you from the sun or the moon?’
And as recently as the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors and New Guinea Highlanders met for the first time. The grasping world-weary Aussies took the Highlanders to be savages, while the Highlanders, assuming that the Aussies were the ghosts of their own dead ancestors, on a visit, felt a kinship and gave them food, thinking, They are like people you see in a dream. But the Australians were looking for gold and killed the Highlanders who were uncooperative.
We talked about this, appropriately, four strangers discussing the elements of meeting, the hope implied in our amiable lunch. First Contact was a vivid and recurrent event for everyone - bumping into a stranger on the subway, finding yourself with a fellow rider in an elevator, knocking elbows with your seat-mate on a plane, at a bus stop, a check-out counter, on a beach, in a church or movie theater, wherever we were thrown together and had to deal with it. As a traveler, First Contact was the story of my life, and was a motif of my African trip, the safari that had taken me through the Sudanese desert, on a cattle truck from the Ethiopian border, on a steamer on Lake Victoria or in a dugout on the Zambesi, at a lunch table or a farm in Harare, and right here in the sushi bar.
‘All the evidence in First Contact proves that we are a peaceful species,’ Professor Berger said, summing it up. ‘The aggression comes later.’
Africa, ancient in human terms, was the best place for studying our ancestry, he said. Humankind had been able to develop here without leaving, had roamed over this enormous fruitful place, with a good climate and shelter. Africa had everything, Europe not much, which was why there were humans living in Africa 160,000 years before anyone remotely human existed in Europe.
‘We are a coastal species – we lived, historically, with access to the sea,’ Professor Berger said. ‘That’s especially true in Africa. We were able to conquer the marine environment. When we ran out of animals to kill we turned to the sea. There’s never a lean season if you know how to fish.’
One theory he had discussed in his book was that the larger brain size of early man was attributable to the protein-rich marine diet available on the African coast.
I said, ‘But what about the people who have always been living in the African forests, in the jungle, even in the deserts.’
‘People in the forest were historically sidelined,’ he said. ‘Look at the pygmies in the Ituri Forest. Also the desert-dwelling Arabs, the Khoisan, and certain native Americans. The people who lived away from the watercourses were people who became marginalized.’
He had painted a bright persuasive picture – we humans were peaceable, resourceful, cooperative. But there was a dark side. Not long after that lunch, a Johannesburg psychologist described South Africa as ‘a society that has come out of an abyss.’
The man was Saths Cooper, a close colleague of the murdered Steve Biko. Cooper’s political activism had earned him a jail term of nine years, more than five of it on Robben Island. He was now a doctor. He chaired the Statutory Professional Board for Psychology at the Health Professions Council of South Africa. He said, ‘We have not come to actual grips with the depth of depravity that occurre
d.’
At its high-minded best South Africa was a society concerned with justice, dealing with its murderous past in a noble way, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and trying to get a handle on its conflict-ridden present. Capital punishment had been eliminated, mercy and forgiveness were the text for every sermon and for most political speeches. But at another level there was something akin to savagery suggested in the crime figures – fifty-five murders a day, and a rape every twenty-three seconds. These were just the reported incidents; the actual numbers were higher. The society that existed in South Africa – probably the most open in Africa - had a free press, virtually no censorship, no political terror, and had produced a distinguished literature in two languages. Its very openness insured that every lapse, every crime, every transgression was scrutinized in detail.
At a popular level, a mall culture had begun to develop at the edge of its cities, partly as a response to the insecurity and high incidence of crime in city centers but also because there were enough consumers with money to spend on new clothes and restaurants. The suburbs of Rosebank and Sandton were multiracial and generally safe, and their shopping malls were palmy and serene.
I took heart from a wise paleoanthropologist who knew his hominids saying: Here we are, four strangers together, sitting at the same table. We are peaceful We are the cooperative species. That was hopeful, and the fact that he was saying that in the clean and safe food court of an African shopping mall, was hopeful too.
20 The Wild Things at Mala Mala
The big furry reason that draws most people to Africa is the possibility of viewing dangerous animals from the comfort and safety of a Land-Rover, wearing a silly hat and carrying a scorecard. At the end of the day, the score has to show the Big Five. I could tick off only one of those, a tottering tembo I had accidentally glimpsed from the train in Tanzania. Much as I despaired of tourism in Africa and mocked the voyeurism that amounted to pestering animals in the bush, my idea was to satisfy myself that my own improvised safari would also include a week of peering at the wild creatures Africa was famous for.