4 • A child of the Rift
Only two things in this world are innately good: water and one’s mother. Sudanese proverb
Alfred Wegener, a German explorer and scientist, was disbelieved and ridiculed for his continental-drift theory – the theory, put forward in 1912, that the world was fissured, like an infant’s skull, and yet that these fissures were actually fruitful, fructifying with molten magma deep under the sea, expanding, sliding over each other. Wegener was ignored from his untimely death in Greenland in 1930 until the 1950s, a warning shot to those who would propose a theory that looks right but can’t be easily explained.
Wegener, from an early age, noticed what every schoolchild notices: South America fits into the right angle of west Africa; in fact the land mass of the earth all looks as if it was once joined. Wegener searched for evidence of his theory – finding rocks and fossils that matched on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. He provided the evidence but no mechanism and was opposed heatedly by such august organisations as the American Petroleum Society. He sought solace in making expeditions to the frozen north. On his last trip to Greenland conditions were so harsh he had to amputate a team member’s frozen toes with his penknife. Temperatures dropped to 60 degrees below freezing; then Wegener, aged fifty, a heavy smoker who had spent too long in his study, died.
The discovery in the 1960s that the sea floor really did spread as Wegener had speculated, with magma bubbling up along tectonic plate lines, finally brought respectability to a theory that had been derided and lampooned. Scientists agreed that the circulating hot liquid centre of the earth was how the plates, with the continents sitting on top of them, moved. Just as rice in a pan of boiling water will circulate, so the surface of the earth was in constant movement, shoved by the circulating movement of the magma below.
I think it is salutary to note that the current theory about the birth of the Nile – in a valley made by tectonic plates shifting – was, until the 1960s, considered pure poppycock. I think we are all apt, especially non-scientists, to underestimate the transitory nature of scientific ‘truth’. By definition such truth can only be a groping towards better and better explanations. I think we need to maintain a sense of lightness, of the faintly absurd, whenever a theory becomes too heavy, too fundamentally essential. In a few years, it too could be poppycock.
But for the time being we have Wegener and his moving plates. The Red Nile and the Red Sea are two children of the Rift Valley, the tectonic twins. The Rift Valley starts in east Africa and shatters its way north to that other fracture zone – Palestine and the Levant. The Red Sea is one result. The Nile valley is the other.
This combination river, the Red Nile, was born in the extreme violence of tectonic shifts and climate change so huge it makes our present concerns look like a quibble over the thermostat setting. We’re talking aeons of time when whole seas disappeared alternating with floods in a manner that is starkly reminiscent not of hard science but of the chronicles of Ur and the Bible.
But long before the Bible was written, seven million years ago, the Mediterranean evaporated and became just another puddle. In those days Gibraltar was joined to Morocco and the global temperature was so frizzlingly high that most of the water just boiled away leaving behind a giant saltpan and the aforementioned puddle. Because of the current worries over global warming it’s easy to think that the earth has never been very hot before, but, in between ice ages, temperatures have soared to 15 or 20 degrees above current averages. Fancy a day out when it’s 60 degrees? Naturally such high temperatures resulted in some serious evaporation. Add to this tectonic shifts resulting in new land bridges and you have the reason for the Mediterranean’s fickle nature.
With a tiny amount of water in the Mediterranean the sea level was much, much lower. This meant that any river flowing into the Mediterranean had a lot further to fall. This increase in drop speeded rivers up and meant they cut deep canyons as they approached the coast. The Nile in Egypt – it was wholly contained within Egypt then, fed by the rains of the lush plains (it was not yet a desert) – cut a canyon miles deep. Cairo sits on that canyon, now silted up by subsequent Niles. If we could go back seven million years or so we’d see something like the Grand Canyon, spewing into a dried-up sea. At Cairo the canyon would be more than a mile deep, at the delta it would have been an incredible two and a half miles deep. You could comfortably BASE-jump off the top and have a cigarette on the way down. Or two, even.
Life on the banks of the Nile seven million years ago would include giant crocodiles sixty feet in length, long-extinct ancestors of the lion replete with huge teeth and bigger appetites, giant turtles and perhaps a few primates.
The Mediterranean eventually recovered – much to the pleasure of all future holidaymakers. The land bridge between Gibraltar and Morocco that had corked up the Med and allowed the evaporation was overwhelmed by rising Atlantic sea levels. This was about five million years ago. Sea levels continued to rise in a dramatic way. The canyon river was flooded hundreds of miles upstream. The entire River Nile became a huge bay, a gulf, over seven miles wide at Aswan, 525 miles upstream.
Then it became dry again, very, very dry. I know this is all getting a rather Old Testament feel, but this is really what happened according to the best science we have available. Two million years ago the entire Nile river dried up and became a dusty valley, a wadi; all was desert, all was sand.
Then 800,000 years ago the earth began to move, or rather its surface began to shift in a different way; slowly the Ethiopian plate lifted up and tilted towards the Nile and away from the Red Sea. So instead of water running into the Red Sea it started to drain into the Nile. Remember, up to this point the Nile had been confined to Egypt, but now, with the favourable tilt of Ethiopia, and its new rivers feeding the Nile, the great river stopped being a dry valley and was extended backwards into Africa as a living waterway.
Meanwhile, in central Africa, water flooded from what would become the Congo basin and the future Nile basin in Sudan to create the Sudd – the world’s biggest dead end. The rivers all turned inward and had nowhere to exit, no route to the sea. So they simply water-logged an area bigger than France, creating the world’s largest marsh. Imagine putting on your wellies in Boulogne and squelching all the way to Marseilles, with a few muddy swims in between. That was the Sudd.
The name Sudd comes from the Arabic for ‘barrier’ – and it would remain a barrier until the ice, during the maximum period of glaciation, some 15,000 years ago, began to recede. In this last ice age the mountains of central Africa such as the Ruwenzori would have been snow white all year round. They would have looked to ancient man like something alien and glowing in the morning sun. Perhaps their mythical name, Mountains of the Moon, dates from some ancient story preserved from this time.
New rivers formed to take the melting snows away. The new mountain rivers, enhanced by glacial water, were like a giant dam burst, pumping through the Sudd swamp and connecting it up with the Ethiopian rivers of the Nile.
At this point the Nile started at Lake Tanganyika, flowed through Lake Albert and finished up at the sea in what would become Egypt. Further tectonic activity shut off Tanganyika, leaving the start of the Nile in the area of Lake Edward and Lake Albert.
This was the Nile, almost as we now know it. Finally Lake Victoria – some 12,500 years ago – rose sufficiently high to overwhelm the rocky slabs at its northern end. The lake overflowed and broke through to the Albert Nile drainage, to create the modern Nile. This period was extremely wet – vast torrents unblocked the Nile of sand dunes and reeds making a huge, wide, dangerous river, a river to be feared and avoided.
This wet phase – from 12,500 BC until 4000 BC – meant people lived in the desert in preference to living beside the river (the desert was still much more hospitable, much more like savannah as late as 2450 BC during the Fifth Dynasty of ancient Egypt). Desert remains, hundreds of miles from the Nile, indicate wells and rain-fed lakes in country that is now complet
ely desiccated, pure sand and rock.
These desert dwellers fled the rolling plains as they dried up, and found that the raging river had become quieter, more manageable. They brought with them their desert iconography: pyramids that mimicked star dunes, sphinxes that looked like wind-formed yardangs or ‘mud lions’. They found they could manage the river’s yearly flood, and invented irrigation methods still in use today. Civilisation grew and the world’s first nation state formed along the banks of this river. The taming of the Red Nile had begun.
Along with the settlement of the Nile came the stories – myths about its origin, stories about its source which have a semblance of truth about them even now. The stories fed into the traditional tales of Africa, Egypt and even Greece. As they were passed down orally and then set down in texts, the Nile became the first river of ancient literature.
5 • Out of Eden bearing gifts
Laughing she got pregnant; crying she delivered. Ethiopian proverb
So we have a river, but what of the people that inhabited it? Sixty miles from the Nile valley, walking over dunes in the Egyptian desert, I accompanied executives from Oracle, the computer company, there on a company team-building exercise. My role was to reveal the secrets of the desert, but it was the company head of sales who found a hand axe. She didn’t realise its significance. It had been left there maybe 200,000 years ago by one of the earliest dwellers along the Nile valley.
It was an Acheulean hand axe, as much leading technology in 200,000 BC as an Oracle database was in the twenty-first century. The early Nile dwellers have left behind no bones, no hearths – the desert has destroyed all that. All we have are their tools. And they are scattered everywhere in the desert, proving that the bounty of the Nile extended deep into what are now dry deserted lands. As I explained this, the executive saw my excitement and gave me the hand axe. It was too good a gift to pass up. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘it’s too heavy for hand luggage.’
In the Book of Genesis we read: ‘And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.’ Was that river the Nile, the main artery of the human race? Down (and up) this artery humankind has spread and developed since the very formation of the River Nile.
As we have seen, the Nile in its current formation is, as rivers go, relatively recent. A proto-Nile that ran into the Tethys Sea – what is now the Mediterranean – existed several million years ago. But it was not until the Ethiopian highlands tilted away from the Red Sea that the Nile could extend backwards out of Egypt. This was around 800,000 years ago.
This new riverine link provided a certain band of hominids with the chance to break free of their isolation. They went on to dominate the world and outlast any other group, outliving Homo erectus in the Far East around 50,000 years ago and dominating Homo neanderthalensis through interbreeding. Yet Homo sapiens sapiens could easily have remained marooned in the Ethiopian highlands. Without the river they might have stayed in their own Eden – perhaps to have perished and become extinct as many earlier hominid groups had done.
The Nile valley was their exit route.
Early Homo sapiens sapiens had one advantage over his predecessors Homo ergaster, erectus and neanderthalensis. He was what he still is: a gift giver. Early hominids worked out how to use fire for their own purposes nearly a million years ago – there are fire-baked clays, evidence of controlled fire use dating from this long ago. Even earlier we see tool use that develops into the Acheulean hand axe, a ubiquitous tool that hardly changed its form in 500,000 years. A massive teardrop-shaped piece of stone, the hand axe was ideal for bashing out marrow from the scavenged and hunted long bones of large prey – deer, buffalo, eland, rhinos and giraffe. Marrow was crucial as a foodstuff as it is high in fat. This allows one to digest the protein of the kill. Without fat one can die of malnutrition, however much protein abounds – as survivalist Chris McCandless showed when he died in the Alaskan wilderness despite shooting plenty of lean game. He had no hand axe to bash out the marrow and died only twenty miles from the highway.
So even 500,000 years ago ancient man had worked that one out. He had started funeral rituals – arranging the way the body was laid out after death – and there is even rudimentary art among Neanderthals. But only Homo sapiens sapiens is buried with trade goods from far away, way outside his own living area. Burials in the Pyrenees turn up with obsidian carvings from central Europe. Northern Europeans have Mediterranean beads. These are the descendants of the first Homo sapiens who swarmed up the Nile and out of Africa, swapping their goods as they went.
We assume they were trading, but looking at the nearest living equivalent that is still around today – hunter-gatherer groups – it is much more probable that they simply gave these things away. The !Kung tribesmen, a remote group of the so-called San Bushmen of the Kalahari, are gift givers not traders. They also have no leaders. As one put it, ‘We have headmen, every man is a headman over himself!’ This was said as a joke to anthropologist Richard Lee as he studied their highly efficient way of life.
Trade is so central to our own ideas of what is essentially human that we may assume gift giving as an aberrant or naive proto-behaviour. Yet hunter-gatherers – such as the !Kung – as well as those early Homo sapiens had no need of trade nor any incentive to practise it, living as they did in groups of around thirty members, which is the ideal size for a hunting unit. Though the so-called Dunbar number is often repeated as marking the ideal size of a human community (150 members), this is a theoretical construct derived from extrapolations from primate studies. The lower figure of thirty better reflects the requirements of feeding a group who have no recourse to farming. Early hunter-gatherer man carried only twenty-five pounds of worldly goods when he moved, which he did periodically to find new game. We can assume that a great river, replete with game living off its bounty, would have worked as a natural magnet, pulling these hunter-gatherers ever further north. They had no need to trade – their twenty-five-pound bundle contained all they needed – but they would certainly have given goods away as gifts. When you are on the move you want as light a bundle as possible; there is no benefit in excess baggage.
!Kung women give birth roughly every four years. They suckle their young for that long, which acts as a natural prophylactic, a necessary one since it is hard to move and carry two infants at a time. But it is also an ecological solution. Only with the coming of agriculture can man turn his womenfolk into the breeding machine that for so long was seen as the natural state. Hunter-gatherer women, as opposed to the women of pastoral nomads and nomadic agriculturists, have a great deal of equality with men. This is not mere romance – it stems from the importance of their role in both gathering food and shouldering the burden of moving around.
The !Kung do not trade because all they carry are a few tools and perhaps a musical instrument. The necessity of movement means they cannot develop the greed that is an everyday part of the settler’s life. Is it possible, then, that in that first breakout from Eden early man really did fall from grace? The !Kung settle their differences through talk, not through war – just as the Penan hunter-gatherers of Borneo are reported to do, as do the other endangered and scattered survivors of Homo sapiens who stuck to the original plan and weren’t tempted by the lure of grain and grazing animals. It seems to me that to have no leaders is better expressed as having no followers. It is the followers who cause all the problems, and early man had solved this before he took that river out of Eden.
The details are also correct. The Nile now splits into two main branches in the Egyptian delta. A thousand years ago there were three branches. In prehistory there were four, just as it states in Genesis.
It is tempting to want to turn the clock back. But the whole gist of the story of the Fall, the first Nile story if you like, is about the impossibility of doing just that. Adam and Eve are kicked out and can never return. Early man left Eden and found a river that drew him north to the rest of the world. But this river
would later encourage agriculture and the plenty required to start trade. Change happens. But Homo sapiens vanquished Homo erectus, neanderthalensis and heidelbergensis before he ever began to trade.
Naturally there is great controversy over what traits made Homo sapiens the hominid winner. Gift giving is actually more advanced than trade. Chimpanzees and bonobos trade in as much as they gain advantages through exchanging goods and services. Gift giving requires the ability to empathise and imagine what another might want. It is also the start of selflessness. Surely the first stage in being human is when we realise that being connected to others means more than the selfish survival of a lone individual, which is the condition of any animal.
We no longer live in groups of thirty, nor do we hunt and gather for a living, have babies every four years and walk great distances to find new sources of berry and nut. We are civilised now, thanks to the Nile, yet one of our highest qualities is the one that remains: generosity, gift giving. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus famously wrote that ‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile.’ Perhaps, despite the temptations provided by the Nile, the escape route from Eden, we retain the ability to give.
6 • River gods
The baboon, because he cannot see his bald behind, laughs greatly at the defects of others. Sudanese saying
I was at the ‘other’ source of the White Nile: in Jinja, at the Nile’s exit from Lake Victoria. It was here that Mahatma Gandhi had some of his ashes scattered (as well as in several Indian rivers and a shrine in Los Angeles). That is the magic of the source – Jinja being the generally accepted start of the Nile in travel guides and the like (the whole Kagera thing being too complicated for a fleeting Fodor reference). By some peculiar circularity Gandhi has helped publicise Jinja as a source of the Nile – fame helping fame. In Jinja there is also a Buddhist temple, a mosque and several churches. Religion provides its own narrative about ultimate beginnings, and like calling like perhaps feels at home with other sources that have, over time, achieved mystical qualities. Or at least the power to bewitch.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 4