Feral

by George Monbiot

  As usual, Toronkei had outpaced me, but every so often he had stopped and pretended to scan the land to allow me to catch up; he was more protective of my feelings than I was of his. We had no particular objective, other than visiting his uncle; running over the savannahs was an end in itself. He and the other moran would push themselves to accomplish remarkable feats, such as driving their cattle 140 miles in three days, without eating, drinking or sleeping. Occasionally, though they were now severely punished if caught by the Kenyan police, they would raid cattle from the Kikuyu who lived in the surrounding lands, sometimes escaping under a storm of bullets. Talking to Toronkei and the other warriors, it had struck me that escaping under a storm of bullets was as much the purpose of the exercise as stealing the cattle. In crossing and recrossing their wide lands, the moran came to know them as well as we know our own suburbs.

  I had followed Toronkei through the defining phase of his life. He had been circumcised six years before I had met him. During the operation he had had to sit calmly, without twitching or blinking. Those who succeeded were given cattle; those who flinched would be ostracized. The warriors trained themselves to overcome pain: Toronkei had a circular scar on each thigh, where he had pressed glowing embers into his flesh.

  Now, at nineteen, he had begun the long round of the warriors’ graduation ceremonies, at the end of which they would acquire the status of junior elders, and be permitted to marry and set up their own homes. I had watched him, across the course of months, dancing, carousing and travelling with the other moran. I had seen them catch a sacrificial ox by the horns and tail–it flung them across the manyatta until they overpowered it–force it to drink a gourd of beer, then suffocate it and drink its blood. I had witnessed the strong bonds of love between the warriors, but also seen how their knives appeared from under their cloaks as soon as an argument began.

  They had–though I had not seen it–killed a lion, in the manner tradition prescribed: they cornered it, one of them caught it by the tail and the others sought to spear it to death. Nothing appeared to perturb the moran–except chameleons. Danger to them was a delicacy, to be sought out and savoured. They were volatile, passionate, impetuous, open to everything. Perhaps because, being nomadic, they mixed with many cultures, I found it easier to engage with them than with the indigenous people among whom I had worked in West Papua and Brazil. They accepted me in the same spirit as they accepted everything else that came their way; nothing was permitted to impede experience. Though I was eleven years his senior, Toronkei and I, in a way that had not been possible elsewhere, became friends.

  A few weeks after we had run to his uncle’s house, I returned to Toronkei’s manyatta, to watch the last of the ceremonies. The moran were dancing slowly and sadly, with a gentle murmur like the wind in the trees. The years of wild adventure were coming to an end. As I watched, a young man strode up to the edge of the group carrying the long, loosely spiralling horn of a greater kudu antelope. He put his mouth to a hole in the horn and blew four loud blasts, so deep that I felt them vibrating through my body. Screaming and howling, the dancers scattered, knocking me over. Four or five warriors collapsed and lay on the ground, quivering and groaning. People tried to pull them to their feet, but they seemed to be unconscious. They growled, drooled and blew. Their heels drummed on the ground. The horn was blown only in the last days of graduation, and whenever they heard it the warriors were overwhelmed with grief.

  I followed Toronkei into the graduation hut that his mother had built for him–a small wicker box rendered with cow dung–and crouched for a while beneath the low ceiling until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. When I could see, I noticed an unfamiliar woman sitting on the cowhide pallet. She was very dark, with strong eyebrows, a smooth, round forehead and a cool, almost mocking look. I introduced myself. She turned away with an oddly bashful smile. I looked at Toronkei, puzzled, and was surprised to see that he was laughing.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is my wife.’

  Three days before I arrived in the manyatta, he had run thirty miles to visit a friend. As he approached the friend’s village, he met the girl walking up the track, and changed his plans. They spent the day together, and by nightfall he had persuaded her to elope with him. They waited until everyone in her village was asleep, then slipped out of the compound and ran. The dogs woke, and her brothers set off in pursuit. The two lovers darted through the scrub, but soon after midnight the brothers surrounded them. The girl refused to go home. She told her brothers that if they wanted to talk to her they would have to come to Toronkei’s village. The brothers returned to their compound, and Toronkei and his fiancée reached his manyatta just before dawn.

  Her father was furious, but there was little he could do: his daughter would not be dissuaded. Toronkei had opened negotiations: the father had demanded a bride price of five cows and 10,000 shillings. Toronkei’s parents were trying to talk him down. The girl came from a rich family, and the deal would be tough.

  Hearing this story, watching the proud, conspiratorial looks he exchanged with his bride, seeing the hero’s treatment he now received from the other moran, I felt, not for the first time in my friendship with Toronkei, a spasm of jealousy. I sat in the hut drinking milk and greeting the procession of young men who came in to pay their respects to him, troubled by a sense of inadequacy. As I watched the warriors sitting hand in hand on the pallet, and the young woman looking tenderly at her husband, I was struck by a thought so clear and resonant that it was as if a bell had been rung beside my ear. Had I, as an embryo, been given a choice between my life and his–knowing that, whichever I accepted, I would adapt to it and make myself comfortable within it–I would have taken his.

  Despite six rich years of adventure in the tropics, mine now looked like a small and shuffling life. I thought of what awaited me when, in a few months’ time, I returned home. I had been planning to finish my book, find new work, rekindle old friendships, perhaps put down a deposit on a house. After two bouts of cerebral malaria, as my expenses mounted and my savings trickled away, as I tired of lice, mosquitoes, foul water and corrugated roads, it had seemed appealing. But now I thought of the conversations confined to the three Rs: renovation, recipes and resorts. I thought of railings and hoardings. I thought of walks in the English countryside, where people start shouting at you as soon as you stray from the footpath. I succumbed, not for the first time in my life, to an attack of the futilities.

  In 1753, Benjamin Franklin, writing to the English botanist Peter Collinson, made the following complaint:

  When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.1

  Elopement with indigenous peoples was seen by the colonial authorities as a major threat to their attempts to subjugate the New World. When, in 1612, young men started defecting from Jamestown, the first sustained English settlement in North America, the deputy governor, Thomas Dale, hunted them down. According to a contemporary account,

  Some he apointed to be hanged. Some burned. Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to death.2

  The severity of these sanctions hints at the strength of the attraction. Despite the penalties, Europeans continued to defect, or to remain with the indigenous peoples who had captured them in war, until the Native Americans had been so reduced and broken that there was no longer a life to be drawn to. In
1785, Hector de Crèvecoeur remarked upon the fierce determination of European children to stay with the Indian communities that had kidnapped them, when their parents came to collect them during periods of peace.

  . . . those whose more advanced ages permitted them to recollect their fathers and mothers, absolutely refused to follow them, and ran to their adopted parents for protection against the effusions of love their unhappy real parents lavished on them! Incredible as this may appear, I have heard it asserted in a thousand instances, among persons of credit. In the village of -------, where I purpose to go, there lived, about fifteen years ago, an Englishman and a Swede . . . They were grown to the age of men when they were taken; they happily escaped the great punishment of war captives, and were obliged to marry the Squaws who had saved their lives by adoption. By the force of habit, they became at last thoroughly naturalised to this wild course of life. While I was there, their friends sent them a considerable sum of money to ransom themselves with. The Indians, their old masters, gave them their choice . . . They chose to remain; and the reasons they gave me would greatly surprise you: the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us . . . thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of these Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!3

  The encounter between the Old and New Worlds was characterized by dispossession, oppression and massacre, but in some places there were periods of friendly engagement. As Crèvecoeur documents, Native Americans were sometimes given the opportunity to join European households as equals; and in many cases Europeans were able to join Native American communities on the same basis. It could be seen as a social experiment. In both instances, people had a choice between the relatively secure, but confined, settled and regulated life of the Europeans, and the mobile, free and uncertain life of the Native Americans. There was no mistaking the outcome. In every case, Crèvecoeur and Franklin tell us, the Europeans chose to stay with the Native Americans, and the Native Americans returned, at the first opportunity, to their own communities. This says more than is comfortable about our own lives.

  So why did I not defect to Toronkei’s community? It is a question that still troubles me.

  I was, as I had kept discovering, too soft for his life. I could not quite keep up physically. More importantly, I could not cope with the uncertainty: with the dislocation of not knowing whether I would eat today or eat tomorrow, or still possess a living–or a life–in a month’s time. The Maasai accepted wild fluctuations in their fortunes with equanimity. In one season, their cattle would darken the plains; in the next, drought struck and they had nothing. To know what comes next has been perhaps the dominant aim of materially complex societies. Yet, having achieved it, or almost achieved it, we have been rewarded with a new collection of unmet needs. We have privileged safety over experience; gained much in doing so, and lost much.

  But, perhaps overwhelmingly, I was aware that the old life was over. The Kenyan government was breaking up the Maasai’s lands. Powerful elders were seizing as much as they could lay hands on; now the others scrambled to grab something for themselves. The community was collapsing; there was no common land left on which manyattas could be built and ceremonies held. As the power structures changed, the age groups, around which the life of the Maasai had been constructed, became an anachronism. Toronkei’s was the last generation of warriors that would graduate in his community. The people were beginning to settle down, to move to the cities, to lose the freedoms which distinguished them from us.

  But even had these pressures not existed, the wild life of the moran would have become less viable. Lion hunts are now severely punished by the Kenyan authorities, as lions are becoming scarce. The principles of universalism are arriving slowly in Kenya, where politics still divide people on tribal lines. But I doubt that the Kikuyu have ever enjoyed having their cattle raided–and their warriors speared–by the Maasai. As groups other than our own are able to make their needs and their rights known to us, as we come to recognize their humanity, we can no longer subordinate their lives to our desires; no longer expand our world into theirs. The freedoms the Maasai enjoyed at the expense of others–thrilling as they were–are rightly being curtailed. Perhaps there is no remaining moral space for the exercise of physical courage. Wherever you might seek to swing your fist, someone’s nose is in the way.

  Though it is now almost universally admired, when Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem began to be noticed it sharply divided its audience. At the end of the performance I watched, in the last week of its first, incandescent West End run, half the audience stood to applaud, the rest barged out with thunderous faces, snapping and muttering.

  Johnny Byron, played mesmerically by Mark Rylance, is the last of the Mohicans. He is sensuous, feckless, promiscuous, wild and free. He is a charismatic but ignoble savage, living in a mobile home in the woods, mad, bad and dangerous to know, the last man in England still in touch with the old gods. His totemic creature–his avatar–is the giant he claims to have met and whom he insists he can rouse: the undiminished ancient being, free from regulation or social constraint, who no longer belongs to a world in which new estates crowd the woods and council officers in yellow jackets patrol with their clipboards.

  ‘Grab your fill,’ Byron tells us. ‘No man was ever lain in his barrow wishing he’d loved one less woman. Don’t listen to no one and nothing but what your own heart bids. Lie. Cheat. Steal. Fight to the death.’

  He lives by this creed, the curse of officialdom, the bane of the tidy, sedentary people who hate and envy him, a drug-dealer, fighter, seducer, former daredevil, teller of tall tales, magnet for disaffected teenagers, scabby, piss-soaked, drunken prince of revelry, master of the last wild hunt. He is pitched against his childhood friend Wesley, now the landlord of the local pub (from which, of course, Johnny has been banned), who is ground down by the demands of the brewery, by health and safety regulations, by his humdrum, responsible life and the sanitized, pasteurized world he has created. ‘. . . fiddly bloody sachets, broken bloody towel dispensers, fucking stupid T-shirts. I come to bed when the last cunt’s gone home. I lie there next to her and I can’t breathe . . . Number one, work all your life. Number two, be nice to people . . .’

  There is no room for Johnny Byron in our crowded, buttoned-down land. He answers a need–expressed by the young people who flock to him–but it is a need that society cannot accommodate. The tragedy at the heart of the play is that the world cannot make room for him, just as it can no longer make room for the raids and lion hunts of the moran. Much as we might yearn for the life he leads, much as the death of the raw spirit that moves him impoverishes us, he is too big for the constraints within which we have a moral duty to live, the confines which, as Wesley discovers, seem to crush the breath out of us.

  There are several ways in which I could try to show that we feel the loss of the wilder life we evolved to lead. I could discuss the urge to shop as an expression of the foraging instinct; football as a sublimated hunt; violent films as a remedy for unexorcized conflict; the pursuit of ever more extreme sports as a response to the absence of dangerous wild animals; the cult of the celebrity chef as an attempt to engage once more with the fruits of the land and sea. The connections in these cases are plausible, unprovable and mundane. I think I have found a more interesting line of evidence.

  5

  The Never-spotted Leopard

  Truly men hate the truth; they’d liefer

  Meet a tiger on the road

  Robinson Jeffers

  Cassandra

  Y iscuid oet mynud

  Erbin cath paluc

  Pan gogiueirch tud.

  Puy guant cath paluc.

  Nau uegin kinlluc.

  A cuytei in y buyd

  Nau ugein kinran

  The Black Book of Carmarthen, c. 1250

  Cath Paluc

  The setting was unimprovable. Across the fields, Maiden Castl
e, a turretted fortress of living rock, clawed at the sky. Beyond it was the village of Wolf’s Castle–Casblaidd–distinguished as one of only twenty places in which Owain Glyndŵr was born (he died in quite a few as well), and said to be the spot where the last wolf in Wales was killed. Below us a tangled sallow carr smothered the valley.

  ‘This gap in the hedge here: that could be where it came through. Then it came down the bank, sauntered across the road and disappeared into the scrub.’

  I peered into the carr on the other side of the lane. The trees were hooded with ivy. Their mossy trunks sprawled over the ground, or leant on each other, dark-cowled, like drunken friars. Beneath them was an impenetrable thicket of brambles and ferns.

  ‘You wouldn’t see him in there, would you?’

  ‘You have no doubt about what it was?’

  Michael Disney looked around, at the high bank down which it had come, the narrow strip of pitted tarmac, the low, twisted woodland, and shrugged.

  ‘It’s not an issue for me. I saw what I saw and that’s that. People can either believe it or not. I’m not trying to convince anyone.’

  ‘You work for the council’s public protection division. Has anyone accused you of drumming up business?’

  ‘No, it’s not my remit. I’m in trading standards. In fact it’s not really anyone’s remit.’ He smiled slightly, as if picturing the job description. ‘What would be the reason for me to put myself in a situation where I could be ridiculed and mocked? I would get nothing from it at all, except a slight bit of notoriety.’