Somewhere East of Eden

by Michael McKeown

  Gradually the river widened to a stretch where it was nearly a mile wide. Everywhere small pods of hippos snorted contentedly like elderly club members in a sauna. Appearances can be misleading however. Hippos are responsible for the greatest number of human deaths by wild animals throughout Africa in any given year, a fact that was never far from my mind. As if to illustrate this, there was a sudden plopping noise close to my side of the boat and a portly, rounded grey-pink face surfaced no more than a few feet away, floating on the surface like a disembodied head. It remained there appraising us with bulging eyes and I prayed to the Zambezi river god that it wasn’t one of those rogue hippos who had developed a taste for capsizing canoes, rather in the manner of man-eating lions developing a taste for human flesh. As if to confirm the possibility the hippo opened its prodigious jaws and gave a contented yawn.

  No-one else seemed to have noticed and I was about to draw their attention with a nonchalantly phrased remark like, “How close do hippos normally come to the boat?” when with ominous urgency, it suddenly submerged. I held my breath. The animal was probably right now underneath us, deliberating on exactly the right moment to capsize the boat. Tangling with two tons of enraged hippo in the Zambezi’s murky depths was definitely not on my want-to-do-list and with my luck I would end up swimming straight into its cavernous mouth.

  Only then, just as I was to alert the others of our imminent doom, the hippo resurfaced a few metres upstream with an immense and self-satisfied sigh. Giving silent thanks to Nyaminyami, the serpent-tailed river god, I turned my attention to a small herd of elephants browsing on the Zambian side of the river and a question that has increasingly intrigued me, namely the extent of animals’ thoughts and emotions. To what degree are some of them sentient creatures possessing conscious awareness and the capacity to feel joy and grief, anger and sadness? Or are they, as many people, especially scientists, maintain incapable of emotion? In which case, how do they explain the reaction of Christian the lion when he was re-united a year and a half later with the two young men who had bought him as a cub from Harrods in the early 1960s, raised him in London and then returned him to the wild at George Adamson’s camp in Kora in the far north of Kenya. Well over 100 million people have watched the You Tube video clip which shows the now fully-grown Christian approaching the two men cautiously down a boulder strewn hillside before suddenly launching himself at them, standing up on his back feet and nuzzling their faces. If that is not a full-frontal, super-charged display of raw, stark emotion then I have no idea what is.

  It so happened that I had recently re-read Milan Kundera’s modern classic, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In a passage towards the end of the book, Tereza is sitting on a tree stump in the Czech countryside with her dog Karenin, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and as she sits there stroking the dog’s head she reflects on how fractured our relationship has been with our fellow species over the millennia. True human goodness in all its purity and freedom, she concludes, can only come to the fore when its recipient has no power. Man’s true test, its fundamental test, consists of those who are its mercy: animals. And in this respect man has suffered a fundamental debacle. And there in three concise but comprehensive sentences is all you need to know about Homo Sapiens and his attitude to life on earth.

  Random snapshots from those days in the valley are etched in my memory like bright scattered jewels. One from a night-time game drive in open mopane woodlands interspersed with dense jesse bush, the track edge glittering with night eyes – jackals, mongoose, ground squirrels and little bat-eared foxes. Adam, whose laser-like vision never failed to astonish me, spotted what he later described as ‘a sudden spark of eyes,’ away to his left. We reversed and drove forward slowly into what looked nigh impenetrable thorn scrub. Suddenly, we found ourselves within about ten metres of a magnificently maned five-year old lion. He regarded us impassively through golden, unblinking eyes with that flat, unwavering lion stare that passes right through you, establishing from the outset his droit du seigneur status. At moments like this one can feel the stirrings of dim genetic memories reaching back to a time when the world was considerably less sanitised and safe and man was not the supreme being he believes himself to be now.

  Before long the lioness appeared. Lithe and supple, she moved back and forward with fluid grace between the lion and a huge mahogany tree, almost as though waiting for some command from her lord and master. I suppose we must have watched for about three or four minutes before we slowly backed away. But it was THRILLING – there is no other word; the intense African night scents of moonflower and crushed wild sage, the cold, impassive stars, the sudden urgent cry of a night jar and these two magnificent animals hunting in their natural element.

  On our return, we came upon a female hippo following one of the well-worn hippo highways on her nightly foraging for grass. She lumbered along in front of us for a while at a stately 15 k. P.h, seemingly unperturbed by our presence, her pendulous buttocks wobbling majestically in the moonlight before suddenly veering down a pre-determined pathway that led to the river. “Wave goodnight to your girl-friend,” Adam called out cheerfully to Haus, who smiled dubiously and raised a hand in farewell.

  Later that night lying under my king-sized mosquito net I listened to the hyenas and, from across the river, the trumpeting of elephants. In ten days, I would be flying back to London and the notion had begun to worry me. I recollected Hemingway’s thoughts on this very theme. “All I wanted to do now was to go back to Africa. We had not left it yet but when I woke up at night, I would lie listening, homesick for it already.”

  I knew I could never have enough of the valley or the river and by the time we left I had resolved to return. There were many lovely stretches to explore and perhaps I would purchase a banana shaped dug-out canoe from one of the fishermen and simply drift down the river, stuck like a fly in amber, until the end of time.

  But for how long would all this wild, tumbling beauty remain untouched by the moguls behind the mining and oil cartels? For over three decades now it has been threatened by hydroelectric power projects as well as exploration for uranium, oil and, more recently, diamonds. Ultimately, as has been amply demonstrated, economics will always prevail over nature and beauty. And if there are those who disagree and believe as Camus wrote in his Carnets that ‘no person can live outside of beauty’, then they are blowing bubbles in the air.

  Increasingly on this trip I had been made aware of the Chinese footprint on Africa which north to south and east to west, grows larger by the day. China’s hunger for sustainable resources – metals, copper, iron ore, bauxite and platinum – appears boundless, as can be seen in the scale of its investment in the continent’s rich mineral resources. Whether this proves to be of long term benefits to Africa and its people remains to be seen. Some Western economic observers and ‘think tanks’ believe that Chinese participation in Africa will result in greater development and resulting opportunities for Africans. Maybe. But the key word here surely is participation and many believe the Chinese have embarked on a mission to plunder resources every bit as rapacious as the 19th century colonialists.

  A few months earlier, I had read in The Economist that China was considering tackling its domestic industrial pollution problems by relocating some of its own highest polluting facilities such as steel, cement and tanneries to countries in Africa. Whilst this would be welcome news for African jobs, the effect on the environment in is quite another matter. Protection of the environment has never been high on the priority list for African governments and such environmental laws that exist can easily be by-passed by foreign companies investing and operating there. Since the Chinese are widely regarded as being fifteen or twenty years behind the West in adopting twenty-first century environmental practices, the prospect is depressing to say the least.

  On our way back to Harare we stopped for fuel at Chirundu, a small nondescript border town marking the crossing over the Zambezi to Zambia. In the main street baboons were e
verywhere. They strolled along the main street hobnobbing with one another and mingling with bystanders in the marketplace with a kind off-hand connivance, almost as if they were part of the community. Baboons, with their Machiavellian flair for guile are supreme opportunists and I felt it would not be long before some unwary customer was mugged and their shopping bag snatched. It happened so frequently Hans assured me with a dead-pan expression, that the police had given up detaining them.

  I watched intrigued as a couple of villainous looking males, stopped outside a Chinese take away decorated with vivid red pagodas. After a cursory inspection, the larger of the two ducked his head sharply and, as if at some covert signal, they moved quickly forward taking up positions on either side of the entrance. The flick-knives may have been absent but their criminal intentions were clear. After a minute or so a small, hard-eyed Chinese man wearing a baseball cap appeared and flapped a none too clean tea cloth at them. The baboons regarded him impassively and after shouting at them repeatedly the man retreated inside. The baboons waited. Opportunity would knock. All they had to do was to be patient. And they were good at that.

  And then, I clambered into the land-cruiser and we began the long drive home, away from the wild, remote valley with its timeless river framed by mahoganies, jacalberry, tamarind, fig and tall, feathery topped fever trees, into the confused and turbulent world of the 21st century.

  ACROSS THE SPECIES BARRIER

  The voice of the natural world would be: “Could you please give us space and leave us alone to get along with our own lives in our own ways, because we actually know.

  - Jane Goodall

  My friend’s call was as brief as it was unexpected. He had to fly to London at short notice and was unable to attend a talk by Jane Goodall at the Sarova Hotel in Nairobi, the following evening. Was I interested in using his ticket? Is the Pope a Catholic? Do Italians like opera and pasta?

  That evening, seated in the middle of the packed auditorium waiting for her appearance I reflected on a remarkable life that had earned her both scientific acclaim and worldwide recognition for raising our awareness of the uniquely human behaviour of chimpanzees. Chimpanzees, in case we are in danger of forgetting, are our closest relatives, creatures with whom we share 98% of our D.N.A. and, as her studies have demonstrated, their behaviour – kind and selfless at times, warlike and aggressive at others – is deeply rooted in our own evolutionary past.

  As a child growing up in England, Jane had always dreamed of working with animals in the wild. A voracious reader, she devoured anything she could lay her hands on to do with animals and Africa. She was twenty-two and on holiday at a friend’s farm in Kenya when she was introduced to the celebrated anthropologist Dr Louis Leakey at the Natural History Museum.“Somehow,” she recalled later, “he must have sensed that my interest was not just a passing phase but deeply rooted, for he hired me as his assistant secretary.”Leakey, for his part, recognised her as someone with a mind uncluttered and unbiased by scientific theory and prejudice whilst possessing an instinctive rapport with animals. It was the beginning of a remarkable partnership, one which was to lead her to the shores of Lake Tanganyika and the study of a group of chimpanzees living in the rugged, mountainous terrain in the Gombe Reserve.

  Leakey was an acknowledged world authority on palaeoanthropology who, together with his wife Mary, had recently discovered humanity’s earliest ancestor Homo Habilis, over two-million years old, during their excavation in the Olduvai Gorge. Increasingly he had come to believe that a study of great apes in their natural habitat was the key to understanding human evolution. And despite her lack of scientific training, he was in no doubt that Jane possessed the right blend of empathy, patience, observation and determination to succeed. For the young girl raised on Kipling’s Jungle Book, Jock of the Bushveld and Tarzan it was the fulfilment of all her early dreams. From the start, she set out to accustom the chimpanzees to her presence so that that slowly they came to accept this ‘strange white ape’ almost as one of their own. Instead of numbering the chimpanzees she was studying, she gave them names such as Fifi and David Greybeard, a procedure which was met with withering criticisms from the academic establishment who considered numbering essential to any well managed research project, since it removed the researcher from the potential for emotional attachment towards the animal being studied. Ironically however, it was Jane’s lack of scientific training that underscored her research, leading her to observe things that a more rigorous scientific doctrine would have overlooked. She came to know the chimps as individuals with their own distinct and unique personalities, moods, feelings and emotions; animals who exchanged hugs, kisses, pats on the back and even tickled each other.

  “It isn’t only human beings who have personality, who are capable of emotion, like pleasure, joy, uncertainty, sadness, anger and fear.” she noted. Later her meticulously observed field research was to shed light on a darker side to their outwardly peaceful and affectionate behaviour, one that confirmed how the aggressive and warlike behaviour of humans is deeply rooted in our primate ancestors. They could, she discovered, be tender and compassionate, capable of close and enduring attachments but also scheming, deceiving and with a capacity for violent aggression in a way that paralleled human behaviour. “At first, I thought they were nicer than us,” she once remarked wryly. “But they’re not. They can be just as awful.” In short, our nearest relatives exhibited the same traits as we have.

  Exactly on time the theatre lights dimmed and the familiar Botticelli-like face and silver-grey hair caught up in a pony-tail emerged on to the stage. She spoke extempore without once referring to notes as though the years spent in the valleys, forests and lakeshore at Gombe were indelibly etched on her mind. For Jane, chimpanzees were the link that spans the supposedly unbridgeable divide between humans and animals. Until then, it was widely believed that only humans could construct and use tools. This cherished belief was to be turned on its head however when towards the end of her first year in Gombe, Jane observed David Greybeard, one of her long-standing favourites, striping leaves from a twig and carefully pushing it into a termite mound to extract and eat the insects. Greybeard was certainly not the first chimpanzee to perform this feat but he was the first to do it in front of a human who could recognise the implications. Although animals had been observed using objects as tools in the past, it was the first instance of an animal being seen modifying an object for a practical purpose. Her discovery was to prompt Louis Leakey’s famous remark, now part of anthropological legend: “Now we must redefine man, redefine tool or accept chimpanzees as human.”

  Living alone among chimpanzees was to make her understand that chimps, like humans, could be kind, loving and selfless as well as angry and confrontational. She also found evidence of mental traits in chimpanzees such as reasoned thought, abstraction, symbolic representation, and even the concept of self, all previously thought to be uniquely human abilities. “We now know that chimpanzees have many qualities that we once thought were unique to us,” she wrote. We thought that only we could reason and that only we could solve problems. Now we know differently. Their family life, social hierarchies, their loyalties and vendettas, their care of children and the old all have relevance to the human condition. Yes, we have outstripped them but we can still learn from them and try to understand what we may have lost along the way.”

  Mankind was not the separate, unique species he prided himself on being and during her talk Jane related the story of Old Man who together with three females had been rescued from a US military research laboratory. There they had been locked in separate underground cells during which radiation, anti-HIV tests and other bio-medical experiments had been conducted on them. Their new home was on an artificially created island at a zoo in Florida. A young and relatively experienced keeper, Mark, was appointed to look after them but was warned against setting foot on the island since, because of their treatment in the research unit, they were disturbed and unpredictable, and there was every
chance they would attack him. During the next few months Mark found himself increasingly drawn to his new charges. He noticed how when arrived in his boat with their food that they became so excited that they would dance and kiss and hug one another. He saw how gentle and caring Old Man was with his infant son and gradually he came to get closer and closer at feeding time until one day he held out a banana and Old Man took it from his hand. The relationship developed to a point when Old Man allowed him to groom him and play with him. The females were more suspicious but made no special fuss at his now regular appearance on their island.Almost a year after his first contact with the chimpanzees Mark slipped and fell on his face, startling the infant who panicked and screamed. At once the mother raced to its defence. She leaped upon the prostrate Mark and bit him savagely in the neck. The other two females joined in, one biting an arm and the other his leg. At that stage, he believed himself finished. Enter the Old Man. He rushed to the defence of this, his first human friend and whilst Mark dragged himself to the boat he kept the screeching, overwrought females at bay.

  When Mark came out of hospital he told Jane. “You know, there is absolutely no question but Old Man saved me.”