The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen

  The dance grows ever more excited, more complex, the greased red faces glistening with sweat. The moran chant in circles and then circles within circles, leaping, twirling, spears and metal arm coils shooting light, and always the chant and whooping, mournful and harmonious, the voice of man crying out to the ascending sky in exaltation and unutterable loss.

  When, in 1885, Count Teleki’s party reached the summit of the mountains at the south end of the lake, then made their way down to the shore, they were as stunned by the wind and sandstorms of this “valley of death”18 as they were by its fierce beauty. At that time, the near-naked Llo-molo were all living on small islands out of fear of stronger tribes, and especially the Turkana, who made frequent raids against the Rendille of Mt. Kulal. One island village still exists and can be seen from shore, but the huts are so low and amorphous that from afar, in the sun and black sand and hard light, they look more like boulders than human habitations. The small bare island, known to the Llo-molo as Lorian, is composed of two small rises with a flat saddle in between, and the huts on the saddle are outlined on the blue mountains of Turkana Land. The Turkana say that there were formerly Llo-Molo on the great South Island, far offshore, but that over the years the fires there had died out one by one.

  With colonial pacification of the nomads, some Llo-molo moved to the mainland at Loiyengalani, the Place of Many Trees, and acquired a few cattle by trading fish to the herdsmen who passed through; the twenty-odd Llo-molo who still cling to Lorian have only goats. The two villages at Loiyengalani, with the remnant huts on Lorian, contain all known Llo-molo, who are scarcely more numerous today than they were in the time of Count Teleki. Their health has improved with the addition to their diet of milk and blood, meat, berries, borassus nuts, and ugali or maize meal, but the Llo-molo, being thought of as inferior, take no wives from outside the tribe, while their own young girls may be sold off to other people for a bride price.

  Nguya, whose brother Nanyaluka will be next chief of the Llo-molo, says that the people who lived on Lorian subsisted entirely upon fish, which are everywhere plentiful; all the tilapia the people need can be netted a few feet away from the legs of the scrawny cattle that browse among the water weeds for want of fodder on the shore. But the fishermen of Loiyengalani go to a sand spit opposite Lorian to catch and dry fish for the village. They plant their spears in the black sand to warn off raiders, and build a fire by spinning a stick in a cleft of softer wood over a tuft of dung, taking turns with this ancient fire drill until the wood dust glows. Then more dung is laid over the spark, and the whole lifted in both hands to the wind, until smoke appears and fire is created.

  Lines, ropes, and nets are woven of the fiber of the doum palm. Gill nets, carried looped over the shoulder, are spiked to the lake bottom with an oryx horn, the free end being loosely overlapped with the next man’s net. This process is repeated according to the number of fishermen, and meanwhile the lower mesh line is treaded into the mud, to keep the fish from fleeing out beneath. Now a boy splashes through the shallows, scaring fish into the net. The tilapia, one or two pounds each, are picked out and carried ashore, where a man squatting on his heels strips off the operculum, then draws the guts gently through the gill cavity, after which he uses the hard operculum to scale the fish. All is done deftly, without haste, and in moments the sparkling meat is rinsed off in the lake. Some of the fish are boiled and eaten, but most are split and spread onto palm matting to dry; every little while the fishermen pause to hone soft-iron knives on the glinting stones.

  One morning a young man of Lorian came to the mainland on a small raft of two palm logs stabilized by log outriggers and propelled by a short pole used like a kayak paddle. On his raft, for trading purposes, he carried a black goat. After renewing his red ocher and having his hair adjusted by the fishermen, he set off with his goat for Loiyengalani.

  In the old days, both crocodile and hippopotamus were taken here, and the Llo-molo harpoon, virtually identical in its design to harpoons still used in the salt waters of the world for ocean fish such as swordfish and tuna, may be a separate invention of these people. A long, straight shaft is carved from the hard root of a thorn tree, then greased and bent straight in the fire and the sun; a barbed harpoon point formerly of bone but now of iron is fastened to the harpoon line, pulling free of the shaft when the quarry has been struck. There is a light harpoon for heavy fish, a heavy one for crocodile, and for hippo the long horn of an oryx; the animal is killed by multiple spearings. For hippo, the Llo-molo must now go north to Allia Bay, where they remain a month or more eating the meat. Sometimes they dry a little to bring back for the women and children. Crocodiles, too, are hunted in the north, although some still occur near Loiyengalani.

  This morning the head of a very large crocodile—“Mkubwa sana mamba!”—is spotted in the water off the point, a mile away. Through binoculars the surfaced snout and eyes can scarcely be made out; the fishermen cannot have seen the crocodile, only a rock that has no place along a shore that has been memorized for generations. The brute sinks slowly out of sight, to reappear some minutes later farther off; it raises the whole length of its long ridged tail clear of the water before sinking away again. Everywhere else, including the Omo River, this Nile crocodile is very dangerous to man, but here it seems to be quite inoffensive. Lake Rudolf crocodiles can leap clear out of the water, and have no difficulty catching fish; mostly they hunt at night, in the lake shallows. But they also have an excellent sense of smell, and will travel a long way overland for carrion. It is said19 that these ancient animals are unable to resist the call im-im-im, of a weird nasality attained by closing off one nostril of the caller, but I found no chance to put this predilection to the test.

  Sometimes tilapia and Nile perch are taken with the spear, in clear water off the black stone shore south of the settlement. The fish schools are shadows in the water, and the men stalk them along shore, moving ever more quietly until they are poised, spear shaft balanced in the left hand, butt cupped in the right, line dangling in a neat coil, the harpoon point with its hard glitter in the sun like the bill of a taut heron. Nguya and his brothers squat, knees cocked, black wet legs gleaming, until they are balanced, centered, and in time with all around them; the earth is poised, all breathe as one and hurl at the same moment. Later, Ngwinye, fishing alone, pierces a one-pound fish at least fifteen feet from shore. The stalk, the squat, the wait and rise and throw is a dance more stirring than the spear dance of the moran, which had been taken from another culture. Here was the Llo-molo hunter, the aboriginal man of Africa whose old ways fade among the colors of the people who came after; it was only a glimpse, for I was here too late. Today the three fishers wore mission shorts who only a few years ago had worn fish skins or gone naked.

  Hundreds of feet above the lake is a strange old rock with two parallel lines of thirteen holes in its flat surface, carved for the ancient pebble game called bao: the land beneath the rock, eroding, is tilting it gradually into a gully. Forms of bao are still played by primitive people all over Africa, for the game comes down out of the Stone Age. Each stone represents an animal, and each hole a stock corral or boma; the point of the game, like the point of pastoral life, is to acquire more stock than one’s opponent.20 The bao rock may have lain beside a vanished stream, but more likely it lay by the old shore of the lake, which was markedly higher even in the time of Count Teleki. The gaming rock, perhaps thousands of years old, passed the time of those dim figures whose passage here is marked by the silent cairns.

  On the old shore there is no sign of life, no bird, only gray shell and dusty rock and small concretions that hold fossils. All is dead but for a solitary toothbrush bush, mswaki, drawing a magic green from the spent stone. Then out of the emptiness flies a hare with a gaunt jackal in pursuit. The animals whisk back and forth and circle rises; the hare dives into the lone bush, the jackal close behind. A rigid silence is pierced by a small shriek. Soon the jackal reappears, hare in its jaws, and reverting to its furtive
gait, makes off with its quarry down a gully. The rocks are still.

  Inland, black boulders climb to far-off ridges that rise in turn to the Kulal Mountains, in Rendille Land. The Kulal is forested, but between the forest and the lake is desert; the only soft note in this landscape is the voice of the crested lark. Down the desert hills, early one morning, came herds of sheep and goats, like far white specks, and by midday the herds were watering at the lake shore, attended by four lithe girls bare to the waist, in red bead necklaces and golden bracelets. Leather pouches swung from their slim shoulders and in the wind their skirts wound gracefully around long legs. These Rendille were wild creatures from the eastern deserts, and when approached they ran.

  The Rendille men resemble the Samburu in dress and comportment, but here they mix little with other tribes, perhaps because these despised folk eat fish. A Galla people, they wander the near-desert between Mt. Kulal and Marsabit, and others live between Lorian Swamp and the border of Somaliland. Probably they came originally from Somalia, driven out by the Somali expansion that seventy years ago carried all the way west to Mt. Kenya. The Rendille are desert nomads, and mostly they herd camels instead of cattle: when a man dies, the Rendille say, his brother mourns him with one eye and counts his camels with the other.21

  Chewing hard twigs of mswaki, the Rendille stand like herons on one leg to contemplate our ways. One man presents himself before me: “Kabala Rendille,” he announces: I am of the Rendille. This is all the Swahili that he knows. He has a thorn encased in a foot that is swollen hard, and looks on with a cold smile as Eliot Porter tries in vain to remove it with a pocket knife. “He wouldn’t flinch if you cut his foot in half,” Adrian said, with that headshake, part condescension, part respect, that white East Africans reserve for the nomad’s stoicism and endurance.

  Days on this shore, though very hot, are bearable because the heat is dry, and because the wind is never still for more than a few hours. Each evening it comes howling down out of the Kulal Mountains to crash into the palms. Mounting in wild fits until after midnight, it causes the ballooning tents to lunge on their doubled moorings, and banishes all hope of sleep. Toward dawn, the winds abate, and by mid-morning may subside in vague light airs, or die with the same suddenness with which they came. The desert waits. Soon the palm fronds twitch again, and by mid-afternoon the wind is gathering toward the tumult of the night. In other seasons, said to be far worse, man takes shelter from the sandstorms in his hut, waiting dully for the months to pass.

  June had turned into July; one morning we headed south. The winds and days were much the same, yet the lake has turned from a clear blue to jade, and we turned a last time to observe it from the southern mountains. From above, the inland sea is seen at its most beautiful, flowing north between two ramparts of dark mountains into the lost centuries of Abyssinia: on the desert horizon, in a desert light, the lake falls off the world into the sky. And seeing such splendor as he saw it, one regrets that Teleki named so strange a place after a Hapsburg princeling.* Before Teleki it was a lake of legend called “Samburu,”22 but a better name still might be Anam, Great Water, a name used by the Turkana.

  There is no road around the south end of the lake, only the foot trails of the few Turkana who pick their way over the lava flows to Loiyengalani. A bad track climbs out of the Rift and heads for South Horr across a region of black boulders, cairns, and strange stone circles in the sand, tracing the way of the ancient nomads toward Baragoi, and Maralal on the Laikipia Plateau, and the high savannas of East Africa.

  IV

  SIRINGET

  The Dorobo know the spoor of all the animals, and they like to see the animals. The animals are not bad, for we and they all dwell in the forest together. The intelligence of animals is not like that of people, but it is not very different, for animals also are intelligent. All animals of the forest are alike, though we eat some and not others, because we the Dorobo and they the animals all live side by side in the forest.

  —AN ANONYMOUS DOROBO1

  One winter dawn of 1961, looking westward from the Olbalbal Escarpment, I saw the first rays of morning sun fall on the Serengeti Plain, in the country that was still known then as Tanganyika. Eight years later, when I stood in the same place, in Tanzania, the mighty landscape had not stirred. No road was visible, nor any sign of man, only a vast westward prospect spreading away to the clouds of Lake Victoria. Off to the north rose the Gol Mountains, in Maasai Land; in the near distance, scattered trees converged in the dark shadow of Olduvai Gorge. Beyond the shadow, spreading away in a haze of sand and golden grass, sun rays and cloud shadow, lay lion-colored plains that have changed little in millions of years.

  Occupation by man’s ancestors of the Olduvai region at the edge of the great grassland has probably been continuous or nearly so since hominid creatures first emerged from the forests of central Africa. Like the modern baboon, man’s ancestors were primarily vegetarians that turned to small game and carrion when berries and roots were scarce, and evolved gradually as scavengers and hunters when the stones used for splitting hides and seeds and bones were flaked into hand-axes and missiles. The earliest hominid found at Olduvai is the man-ape Australopithecus, heavy of brow and small of brain; he is thought to have been slight and swift, with an arm fit for slinging rocks and sticks.

  In the early Pleistocene, perhaps three million years ago, crocodiles floated in the shallow lake at Olduvai where Australopithecus left his remains, and ever since, in response to variations in the radiation of the sun, or cyclical variations of the earth’s axis, that lake has died and come again and died many times over in the long rhythms of rain and drought that characterized the Ice Age. In Africa, where these oscillations were less violent than on other continents, many great animals still survive, but tool-users such as Homo erectus and his contemporaries, who were large creatures themselves, hunted mastodonts, gorilla-sized baboons, wild saber-tusked pigs the size of hippopotami, and wild sheep as large as buffalo, as well as such animals as the white rhinoceros, once common on these plains. Possibly the white rhino, which is twice the weight of the black, is a giant form that has persisted into the present; although confined to the west bank of the Nile in the south Sudan and adjacent regions of Uganda and the Congo, it was once more common than its relative throughout the continent.

  In the Pleistocene, the volcanoes of the Crater Highlands were still forming, and campsites of the early men who stared at the smoke-filled sky have been located beneath layers of volcanic tuff. The west foothills of the highlands, under Lemagrut Volcano, are steps made by tilting and faulting of the earth’s surface that only took place some fifty thousand years ago, in the time when the Rift Valley was created. In this wet period of the Middle Stone Age, the use of fire had already spread throughout the continent, and remains found recently at the Omo River in Ethiopia together with a smooth-browed skull found earlier at Kanjera, in west Kenya, are evidence that modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens) existed at the time of these great tectonic movements, sharing the earth with more primitive men whose end he doubtless helped to bring about. Man the hunter had long since lost his body hair and developed sweat glands to dispel the tropic heat, and no doubt he also produced pigmentation to protect his bare skin from the tropic sun. In the next millenniums, while the heavy-browed Homo sapiens Rhodesiensis subsided slowly into the earth, his smooth-browed cousin modified his tools and developed language, learned to daub himself with ferruginous red clay, and suffered the first stirrings of religious consciousness, represented by the burial of his dead. Homo sapiens sapiens, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla are the sole survivors among the host of African apes, man-apes, and men that once competed for existence, and the gorilla, like the white rhinoceros, may soon follow the defeated ones into oblivion.

  Little is known of man’s evolution between the bone shards of a generalized Homo who used hand-axes a half-million years ago and the Kanjera skull of fifty thousand years ago, and there is a like absence of prehistory between Kanjera Man a
nd the remains of the Negroid fishermen of Khartoum and their contemporaries, the so-called Proto-Hamites, who were the earliest invaders of East Africa from the north, some seventy centuries ago, and whose remains are the most recent found at Olduvai. Furthermore, no line of descent between these men and today’s Africans has been clearly established, although many authorities see Bushmanoid characters in the Kanjera skull, and at least one2 has suggested that the Irakw peoples of the south part of these highlands, who speak in a strange archaic tongue, may actually derive from Proto-Hamite hunters rather than from the Neolithic herdsmen and tillers who came after. In any case, hunter-gatherers have wandered this region since man evolved. The Bushmen have retreated into inhospitable parts of southern Africa, and such groups as the Gumba are entirely gone, but Dorobo hunters still turn up in the vicinity of Loliondo, trading honey and ivory to the Maasai whose ways they have adopted, and in the arid hills near Lake Eyasi to the south, where Rhodesioid Man left his remains, a few bands of Old People still persist, living much like Stone Age Man of forty thousand years ago.

  The vast open space known to the Maasai as “siringet” is bordered in the east by the crater Highlands, in the west by hills and a broken woodland that thickens as it nears the rain belt of Lake Victoria. Northward beyond Loliondo, in Maasai Land, it touches the Loita Hills and the plateaus of the Maasai Mara, in Kenya; to the south, it dies away in the arid thorn scrub west of Lake Eyasi. This eastern region of the plain lies in the rain shadow of the Crater Highlands, and is very dry. In winter, Serengeti days are made by the prevailing southeast winds, which lose their precipitation when they strike the east wall of the Highlands; even regional storms that come up over Oldeani and Endulen, on the south slope of the volcanic massif, fade at the Olbalbal Plains—hence the near-desert dust, black rock, and thorn of Olduvai Gorge, which is dry almost all the year. From Olduvai, the plain stretches west for thirty miles across short-grass prairie and long-grass plain to the riverain forests of the Seronera River, where weather from Lake Victoria becomes a factor.