The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen

  Overnight, the friendly Sudanese became bitterly hostile. Guards and villagers gathered in swarms, their pointing and muttering interspersed with shouts and gestures. We could not understand what was being said, but it seemed clear that our crime was being white—so far as we knew, there were no members of our race closer than Juba, a hundred miles away—and that our fate was being decided. (Numbers of whites were killed that year in Africa; a thousand died in Angola alone.1) Until now, the people of Nimule had been gentle and hospitable. The schoolmaster had offered us his hut, and even his own cot, and when our food ran out, the border guards shared their calabash of green murk and tripes into which three dirty white hands and seven or eight black ones dipped gray mucilaginous hunks of manioc, a low vegetable that, like maize, was brought to Africa from the Americas at the time of the Atlantic slave trade.

  After a day and night of dread, peremptorily, we were summoned once more to eat from the communal bowl. Doubtless the schoolteacher had interceded for us, though he had been at pains to seem as hostile as the rest. I knew we must accept the food to avoid discourtesy, and the South African agreed; bravely he gagged down his tripe, retiring immediately behind a hut to puke it up again. But my countryman refused to feed, declaring that if he ate he would die anyway; he ignored our pleas and curses. The Africans took baleful note, and muttered, but did nothing; like the tribesmen on the truck south from Khartoum, they feared this hairy avatar, who sat inscrutable behind dark glasses, making strange ceremonial dipping motions with his hand.

  In Uganda, parting company with my companions, I made my way southwest to Murchison Falls, where the upper Nile, descending from the high plateaus of the central continent, bursts through a narrow gorge. From there I went to Queen Elizabeth National Park, across Lake Edward from the Congo, which has a prospect of the Mountains of the Moon, and from there to Kampala, north of Lake Victoria. This wet and fertile country of the central lakes is a great kingdom of the Bantu peoples, who form the mass of the population throughout east, central, and south Africa. The Bantu—their own word for “people,” used by scholars to describe a language family rather than an ethnic group—are made up of many tribes in many countries, most of them tillers of the soil. Banana fronds and smoke-plumed villages fill a landscape of wild sunlit colors set against purple clouds. Graceful people in white shirts and bright kangas walk everywhere along red roads to flowering markets, and the umbrella, jitney bus, and bicycle are ubiquitous—an African of Kenya tells2 of seeing a Ugandan with a whole stove mounted on his bicycle, upon which he prepared and cooked and ate his meal while pedaling along.

  For all its life, there is something about this domesticated country of rank greens and imminent rain that I found oppressive. In East Africa, most of the limited land suited to agriculture lies in the weather of great lakes and mountains, in country of heavy humid leaves and bruised thick skies, and the small farms or shambas, each with its corn patch, thatch hut, and roosters, differ little from those to be seen in tropics all around the world—this was not the East Africa of my imaginings, a remote region shut away until a century ago by deserts and mountains of north Africa, the rain forests of the Congo, the gray thorn nyika and unnavigable rivers of the Indian Ocean coast, a land of wild beasts, silence, and immensities where man was a lone herdsman with a spear or a small aborigine with bow and arrow. Also I felt ambivalent among the Bantu, or at least among acculturated Bantu, whose adoption of western dress and aspirations had been accompanied almost everywhere by rejection of western rule. Patrice Lumumba, whose murder had involved us so abruptly in the chaos of anti-colonialism, had been a Bantu, and these people share much with the black American or West Indian whose ancestors were transported out of Africa in Anglo-Saxon ships, and whose anger and unrest and hope lashes the white conscience in the cities of the West. The Bantu is the new African who is met with in Kampala and Nairobi, in streets and offices, shops, customs, roadsides, markets. I shook his hand, said, “Jambo, Bwana!” and smiled warmly. In shirt and tie, speaking good English, he seemed deceptively familiar, and only several journeys later did I see that in my ignorance and lack of curiosity I had failed to perceive him at all. Yet it is these people, not the gentle hunters, the fierce herdsmen, whose history is the most remarkable on the southern continent, these Bantu-speakers who overcame the stupefying obstacles of tropical climate and disease, tribal warfare and wild animals, to move and expand and found cities and kingdoms far in the interior of what the western world, until a century ago, had dismissed as Darkest Africa.

  In January, 1961—perhaps during the days that I spent at Nimule—Patrice Lumumba wrote a last letter to his wife.

  I am writing these words not knowing whether they will reach you, when they will reach you, and whether I shall still be alive when you read them. . . . History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations. . . . Africa will write her own history, and to the north and south of the Sahara, it will be a glorious and dignified history. . . . Do not weep for me, my dear wife. . . . Long live the Congo! Long live Africa!3

  The earliest record4 of East Africa, from an Alexandrian trading voyage of the first century A.D., makes no mention of any black men, and it is probable that none were there; east and south Africa were still the province of Bushmanoid hunter-gatherers and the Caucasoid herdsmen who were drifting down the continent along the grassy high plateaus of the interior. Derived from the Caucasoids, it appears, were the “Azanians” found along the coast of “Zinj”—tall bearded men, “red” in color, a piratical tribe of fishers who traded tortoise shell, soft ivory, and aromatic gums for iron blades and beads and cloth. Perhaps by this time the Azanians had mixed with those early Indonesians who brought the outrigger canoe and the marimba to the Indian Ocean coast and were to colonize Madagascar. Then, in the first centuries of the Christian era, waves of black peoples appeared out of the interior, bearing iron tools and weapons of their own.

  The knowledge of iron that had spread from Meröe on the Nile, traveling to West Africa, perhaps, by way of old trade routes to Lake Chad, then south and east again through equatorial forest that metal tools and domestic plants had made less formidable, had encouraged a surge in population. Among the peoples set in motion were the ancestors of the Bantu-speakers, who are thought to derive from Negroid stocks in the Cameroon Highlands region of the Niger River. Wherever they came from, it appears that the great Bantu increase that impelled a geographic spread took place in middle Africa, in the Katanga region between the headwaters of the Congo and Zambezi, where an advanced and very wealthy civilization that mined and traded in copper had developed at Lake Kisale by the eighth century. By that time, Bantu peoples had occupied both coasts and settled the fertile lands around Lake Victoria, and within a few centuries, with remarkably small divergence in the Bantu tongue, they had spread throughout the subcontinent as far south as the Cape, then north again into present-day East Africa, and along the coast to the Juba River and Somalia. From the Caucasoids, perhaps, they acquired the Ethiopian millets and domestic animals that permitted them to settle the dry countries of south Africa, where many became herdsmen. On the southeast coast, they had access to such tropical Asian crops as the banana, yam, and taro, the coconut and mango. The implement of Bantu prosperity was the iron blade, in ax and hoe and spear, which insured their dominance and the adoption of their language almost everywhere. Older Negroid stocks found living along the rivers as well as certain herdsmen and hunter-gatherers were absorbed—hence the variety of Bantu physical types, which are mostly lighter and less prognathous than the Negroids of West Africa. Even today, as far south as Natal, non-Negroid features are discernible in certain Zulu who interbred with the Xam Bushmen, and adopted a Khoisan language, whereas the Pygmies of the Congo and the pygmoid Twa of the central lakes are clearly of the Old People in origin, despite their adoption of Bantu speech.

  In most of East Africa, the Middle Stone Age gave way abruptly to
the Iron Age, without that intervening stage of New Stone Age settlement that came about elsewhere with the domestication of plants and animals. Yet here and there the remains of Neolithic earthworks, terraces, dams, wells, and irrigation ditches have been found, together with stone “hut circles” or pit dwellings dug into wet hill regions suitable for farming. These are thought to be the work of northern peoples, the Caucasoid “Proto-Hamites,” precursors of the modern Hamites of north Kenya and Ethiopia. The great kingdoms of the interior—the mining civilization at Katanga, the stone city of Great Zimbabwe in Rhodesia, the lake kingdoms of Uganda and Ruanda-Urundi—were all Bantu domains, but Zimbabwe, at least, may have been influenced in its construction by the northerners, who are known to have worked in stone.

  On the east coast, the Azanians soon vanished among the eastern Mediterraneans and the Asians—Persians, Indians, Chinese—whose brown sails, on the winds of the monsoon, were drawn like kites to a growing trade in tortoise shell, gold, ivory, amber, leopard skins, myrrh, frankincense, and slaves. Traditionally the Bajun fishers that one sees today at Lamu, on the Kenya coast, are descended in part from the Persians. By the tenth century Moslem Arabs were dominant, and long before medieval times the trading forts that have since become the small cities of the coast had been established. Meanwhile, the Bantu were beset by waves of Nilotic and Hamitic peoples moving south, and their political systems disrupted everywhere by feverish tribal wars set loose by the slave trade, which was intensified, in the sixteenth century, by the arrival on the east coast of Portuguese navigators, first among the Europeans. Though they established trade with the people of the Zimbabwe region, the Portuguese knew nothing of the interior. The slaving caravans not run by local tribes—for the tribes were encouraged to prey upon one another—were managed by Arabs or Swahili Bantu, a coastal people that intermixed with the Arabs (could the Swahili have derived from the Azanians?) and whose tongue, with its elements of Arabic, was to become the trading language of East Africa.

  In south Africa, at the Cape, the Dutch East India Company established a supply port for its fleet in the seventeenth century, and later the Dutch South Africans known as the Boers, trekking inland, helped to set off a great northward expansion of Ngoni Zulu, who were to overrun Zimbabwe and settle finally in the region of Lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika. Elsewhere the Europeans had no territorial ambitions nor even curiosity about the hinterland, with its fierce heat, tsetse fly, beasts, spears, disease, and pillage. Such missionary-explorers as David Livingstone who penetrated into central Africa in the mid-nineteenth century were astonished to find elaborate civilizations based on concepts that apparently had filtered southward by way of Meröe and the Sudanic civilizations, and certain baroque and cruel customs of these kingdoms laid a firm base for the belief in African barbarism that has been used ever since to excuse the more refined atrocities of the pale peoples from the north, but much of this despotism arose out of the anarchy brought by the slave trade and the advent of firearms. It may be that at the time of the white man’s coming the great Bantu kingdoms were already in decline, leaving few traces of the past, for in the tropics, a city of thatch and timber—not necessarily more primitive than one of stone—would subside into the earth with the turn of seasons.

  In the late nineteenth century, for political reasons having little to do with Africa, the nations of Europe had embarked on colonial conquest. Less than twenty-five years after Speke and Grant had discovered the Nile headwaters, in 1864, East Africa had been divided into British and German spheres of influence, and by the turn of the century, a railroad had been built from Mombasa, on the Kenya coast, into Uganda. In the next decades, plantations of cotton, coffee, tea, pyrethrum, sisal, and pineapple drew more and more white settlers to East Africa, and modern medicine, like the iron hoe two thousand years before, brought on a renewed increase in the African population. Now, however, there was nowhere left for these Africans to go.

  The Kikuyu of Kenya who occupied the highland forests when the first Europeans appeared in the late nineteenth century had not been there for more than a few centuries. Tradition and the evidence agree that they came from Juba Land, north of the Tana River, toward the coast, having been displaced in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries by invasions of Galla nomads from the Horn of Africa, who had been displaced in their turn by waves of Somali crossing the Red Sea from Arabia. At the headwaters of the Tana on Mt. Kenya and the Aberdares, the Kikuyu came upon a small, pit-dwelling people known as the Gumba who presently vanished into hiding places underground and failed to reappear. Broken pots of a people presumed to be Gumba have been found high in the Aberdares, on the cold moors to which the remnant aborigines retreated. Jomo Kenyatta, who in the Thirties won a degree in anthropology as a student of the eminent Malinowski, at the University of London, suggests that these Old People absorbed the first Kikuyu wanderers into the region, and made hunters of them, and that the resultant race was that hunting tribe of obscure origin whose remnants are known today as the Dorobo: “There is strong reason to support the latter theory, for soon after the Gumba had disappeared as a race, there came into being another race of hunters known as the Ndorobo or Aathi, who seemed to have grown like mushrooms in the forests. Unlike their predecessors they were not short in stature, but something between the Gumba and the Gikuyu.” In any case, the Kikuyu interbred extensively with other peoples, for at the turn of the century, at least, certain Kikuyu clans claimed blood relationship with tribes as various as the Maasai, Kamba, and Dorobo, as well as the Chagga of Kilimanjaro.5 *

  From the beginning, the aboriginal hunters, small and few, and the primitive herdsmen, who drifted with the seasons and remained isolated in their own customs, were more agreeable to Europeans than the Bantu cultivators, who were not only ambitious but occupied the most desirable land. A prejudice that still continues was set down as early as 1883, in the region of what is now Nairobi:

  At Ngongo we had reached the southern boundary of the country of Kikuyu, the natives of which have the reputation of being the most troublesome and intractable in this region. No caravan has yet been able to penetrate into the heart of the country, so dense are the forests, and so murderous and thievish are its inhabitants. They are anxious for coast ornaments and cloth, and yet defeat their own desires by their utter inability to resist stealing, or the fun of planting a poisoned arrow in the traders. These things they can do with impunity, sheltered as they are by their forests, which are impenetrable to all but themselves.6

  But within a few years another explorer had perceived that this tribe “was destined to play an important part in the future of East Africa,”7 and the young engineer who became famous for killing the man-eaters of Tsavo, two great maneless lions that terrorized the railroad construction crews for months, considered the Kikuyu intelligent and industrious.8 So did an official of the Imperial British East Africa Company—later Lord Lugard, greatest of all African administrators—who had to fight them at what is now the Nairobi suburb of Dagoretti. “Kikuyu promised to be the most progressive station between the coast and the lake,” Lugard wrote in The Rise of Our East African Empire. “The natives were very friendly, and even enlisted as porters to go to the coast, but these good relations received a disastrous check. Owing largely to the want of discipline in the passing caravans, whose men robbed the crops and otherwise made themselves troublesome, the people became estranged, and presently murdered several porters.” The East Africa Company, obsessed with the promise of Uganda, was inefficient and undercapitalized in Kenya, and its agents ravaged the villages of both the Kamba and Kikuyu in an effort to make the Machakos and Dagoretti stations self-supporting. As the British Commissioner at Zanzibar had written to his wife in 1893, “By refusing to pay for things, by raiding, looting, swashbuckling, and shooting natives, the Company have turned the whole country against the white man.”9

  In the first years of the twentieth century the Maasai herdsmen still engaged in cattle raids across the country, and Arab-Swahili caravans conti
nued a murderous slaving trade throughout the hinterlands. In western Kenya the Nandi fought the railroad, tearing up rails and spearing Europeans. A railroad trader named John Boyes, “King of the Kikuyu,” was the only white settler in the region of Nairobi, which as late as 1907 was little more than a tent city and rail depot called Mile 326, near the swampy springs known to the Maasai as N’erobi, “place of cold waters,” at the south end of the fertile Kikuyu hills. These hills, well watered and free of tsetse fly, already supported a prosperous Kikuyu population, and to help justify the immense expense of the Uganda railroad, land schemes were developed to encourage settlement by Britons. Plagued by strange soils and a violent climate, dangerous animals, sullen natives, and disease, these first settlers earned every bit of the progress they had made by World War I, and not unnaturally, they tended to resist the League of Nations mandate, reaffirmed by the British government in 1923, that African economic welfare and advancement took precedence over their own. As their control of the colonial legislature increased, so did their resistance to the historical and moral truth behind “the sacred trust of civilization” that their development of Africa was supposed to represent: hadn’t they already done enough, in bringing “the native” medicines and peace? (And it is true that white rule was accompanied by an enforced peace among the tribes, without which transition to the modern world, not to speak of independence, would have been impossible.) The coming of white women to the colonies had led to a strict separation of the races, and meanwhile, the British government, proceeding stolidly with the “betterment of the native,” succeeded mainly in increasing his population and dissatisfaction. In the Nairobi region, the numerous and accessible Kikuyu were encouraged to emulate the white man in his values and religion, to serve him and advance his commerce as apprentice Europeans, but their reward was increasing servitude and contempt. The hunter or herdsman, off in the bush, might be considered picturesque—at the least, he retained a certain dignity—whereas the mission African, ill-smelling in his single set of cast-off clothes, was a parody of the white man. Judged by values that were not his own, he was much patronized and derided, even as his own resentment grew.