The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen

  I built a fire and broiled the fresh beef I had brought for three, to keep it from going bad, and baked a potato in the coals, and fried tomatoes, and drank another beer, all the while keeping an eye out for bad lions. I also made tea and boiled two eggs for breakfast, to dispense with fire-making in the dawn. As yet I had no energy to think about tomorrow, much less attempt makeshift repairs; the cool of first light would be time enough for that. Moving slowly so as not to stir the heat, I brushed my teeth and rigged my bed roll and climbed out on the car roof, staring away over Lake Natron. I was careful to be quiet: the night has ears, as the Maasai say.

  From the Crater Highlands rose the Southern Cross; the Pleiades, which the Maasai associate with rains, had waned in early June. July is the time of wind and quarrels, and now, in August, the grass was dry and dead. In August, September, and October, called the Months of Hunger, the people pin grass to their clothes in hope of rain, for grass is sign of prosperity and peace, but not until the Pleiades returned, and the southeast monsoon, would the white clouds come that bring the precious water. (The Mbugwe of the southern flats of Lake Manyara resort to rainmakers, and formerly, in time of drought, so it is said, would sacrifice an unblemished black bull, then an unblemished black man, and finally the rainmaker himself.)5

  The light in my small camp under Shombole was the one light left in all the world. Staring up at the black cone that filled the night sky to the east, I knew I would never climb it. There was a long hard day ahead with nothing certain at the end of it, and I had no heart for the climb alone, especially here in this sullen realm that had held me at such a distance. The ascent of Lengai and the descent into Embagai Crater had both been failures, and the great volcanoes of the Crater Highlands had remained lost in the clouds. At Natron, my friends had failed to come and my transport had broken down, and tomorrow I would make a slow retreat. And perhaps this came from the pursuit of some fleeting sense of Africa, seeking to fix in time the timeless, to memorize the immemorial, instead of moving gently, in awareness, letting the sign, like the crimson bird, become manifest where it would.

  From where I watched, a sentinel in the still summer, there rose and fell the night highlands of two countries, from the Loita down the length of the Ngurumans to the Sonjo scarps that overlook Lake Natron. In the Loita, so the Maasai say, lives Enenauner, a hairy giant, one side flesh, the other stone, who devours mortal men lost in the forests; Enenauner carries a great club, and is heard tokking on trees as it moves along.6 A far hyena summoned the night feeders, and flamingos in crescents moved north across a crescent moon toward Naivasha and Nakuru. Down out of the heavens came their calls, a remote electric sound, as if in this place, in such immensities of silence, one had heard heat lightning.

  Toward midnight, in the Sonjo Hills, there leapt up two sudden fires. Perhaps this was sign of the harvest festival, Mbarimbari, for these were not the grass fires that leap along the night horizons in the dry season; the twin flames shone like leopard’s eyes from the black hills. At this time of year God comes to the Sonjo from Ol Doinyo Lengai, and a few of their ancient enemies, the Maasai, bring goats to be slaughtered at Mbarimbari, where they howl to Ngai for rain and children.

  The Sonjo, isolated from the world, know that it is coming to an end. Quarrels and warfare will increase, and eventually the sky will be obscured by a horde of birds, then insect clouds, and finally a shroud of dust. Two suns will rise from the horizons, one in the east, one in the west, as a signal to man that the end of the world is near. At the ultimate noon, when the two suns meet at the top of the sky, the earth will shrivel like a leaf, and all will die.

  X

  AT GIDABEMBE

  The Abatwa are very much smaller people than all small people; they go under the grass and sleep in anthills; they go in the mist; they live in the up country in the rocks. . . . Their village is where they kill game; they consume the whole of it, and go away. . . .

  —AN ANONYMOUS ZULU1

  Hamana nale kui,

  Nale kui.

  Here we go round,

  Go round.

  —A HADZA DANCE2

  One winter day in 1969, returning to Seronera from Arusha, Myles Turner flew around the south side of the Crater Highlands, which lay hidden in its black tumulus of clouds. The light plane skirted Lake Manyara and the dusty flats of the witch-ridden Mbugwe, then crossed Mbulu Land, on the Kainam Plateau. Soon it passed over a great silent valley. “That’s the Yaida,” Turner told me. “That’s where those Bushman people are, the Watindiga.” Down there in that arid and inhospitable stillness, cut off from a changing Africa by the ramparts of the Rift, last bands of the Old People turned their heads toward the hard silver bird that crossed their sky. There was no smoke, no village to be seen, nor any sign of man.

  Later that winter, at Ndala, Douglas-Hamilton had suggested a safari to Tindiga Land, where his friend Peter Enderlein had lived alone for several years, and was in touch with wild Tindiga still living in the bush. But Iain was never able to get away, and a year had passed before I crossed paths with Enderlein in Arusha, and arranged to visit his Yaida Chini game post in the summer. In July of 1970 I picked up Aaron Msindai, a young Isanzu from the Mweka College of Wildlife Management at Moshi, who had been assigned to Yaida Chini. We loaded Aaron’s kit into the back of the Land Rover—a rifle and an iron bed, clothes, lantern, fuel, food for a month—and headed west, spending that night at Manyara, and at seven the next morning climbing the Rift wall into the clouds of the Crater Highlands. In the dense mist, trees shifted evilly, and slow cowled figures with long staves, dark faces hidden in the gloom, moved past the ghostly fields of maize and wheat. These are the agricultural Mbulu of the so-called Irakw cluster, a group still unclassified in the ethnographic surveys, whose archaic language, related to Hamitic, suggests that they have been here in the Highlands a very long time, perhaps well before the Iron Age. Like the Hamitic tribes, the Mbulu practice circumcision and clitoridectomy, but they lack the age-set system and other customs of modern Hamites such as the Galla. Doubtless they have mingled with the waves of Bantu and Nilotic peoples who came later, but many retain a Caucasoid cast of feature: the volatile narrow faces of the men, especially, are the faces that one sees in Ethiopia. The Mbulu live in pits dug into hillsides and covered over with roofs of mud and dung; in former days these pit dwellings or tembes, like low mounds in the tall grass, are said to have hidden the people from the Maasai. Today the tembes give way gradually to tin-roofed huts.

  At Karatu, a track turns south onto the fertile Kainam Plateau that forms a southern spur of the Crater Highlands. Off the main road, the Mbulu are not used to cars—in the fifty miles between Karatu and Mbulu, I met no other vehicle—and the old run disjointedly along the red sides of the road, while the young jump behind the rocks and bushes. Today was Saba Saba (Seven Seven Day, commemorating the founding of TANU, the Tanganyika African National Union Party, on the seventh day of the seventh month, 1954), and near Mbulu, the track was filled with people streaming along toward the settlement. All were hooded against wind and rain, and from behind, in their blowing shrouds, they evoked the migration of those ancestors of many centuries ago who came down out of the north into a land of Stone Age hunters, the Twa, the Small People, most of whom, like the pit-dwelling Gumba found by the Kikuyu, have vanished into the earth.

  From Mbulu a rough track heads west, dropping eventually off the Kainam Plateau into the Yaida Valley. It passes a fresh lake called Tlavi, edged by papyrus and typha, a rare pretty place of swallows and blowing reeds in a landscape of sloping grain fields, meadows, and soft sheltering hills that shut away the emptiness of Africa. The lake turned slowly in the lifting mists, a prism for the first rays of sun to pierce the morning clouds on the Crater Highlands. Beyond Tlavi the road rises into sun and sky and wanders along the westward scarp where highland clouds are parting; below lie the pale plains of a still valley, fifty miles long and ten across, like a world forgotten in the desert mountains. A rough rock trac
k winding downhill is crossed by two klipspringer, yellow and gray; they bound away through low combretum woodland. Under the rim, out of the southeast wind, the air is hot. A horde of flies pours through the air vents, and Aaron strikes at them. He hisses, “Tsetse!”

  In the wake of tsetse control programs that ended a few years ago, the Mbulu, already pressed for space due to population increase, overgrazing, and crude farming practices that have badly eroded the Kainam Plateau, began to move down into the Yaida Valley, while the Bantu Isanzu seeped in from the south. From the south also came fierce Barabaig herdsmen, and all of these people compete with the Tindiga and wild animals for the limited water. At the same time, the government, embarrassed that a Stone Age group should exist in the new Africa, has attempted to settle the hunters in two villages, one at Yaida Chini, the other farther west at an American Lutheran mission station called Munguli. Some three hundred now live in the settlements, and a few hundred more are still hiding in the bush.

  Today, Tindiga, Mbulu, Isanzu, and Barabaig are all present at Yaida Chini, which may be the one place in East Africa where its four basic language families (Khoisan or click-speech, Hamitic, Bantu, and Nilotic) come together. Yaida Chini is a small dusty settlement strewn along under the line of giant figs by the Yaida River, and a group of Africans celebrating Saba Saba at the pombe bar milled out to greet the Land Rover as it rumbled down out of the hills. These people were mostly Isanzu, barefoot and ragtag in European shirts and pants, but to one side stood a dark thick-set pygmoid girl, and Aaron said, “Tindiga.” The girl had a large head with prognathous jaw and large antelope eyes in thick black skin, and by western standards she was very ugly. Unlike the yellow-eyed peasants, who offered shouts as evidence of sophistication, she came up softly and stared seriously, mouth closed, like a shy animal. “Tindiga have a very hard tongue,” Aaron told me, ignoring his pombe-drunk people. “My tongue is not the same as theirs, but when I speak, they know.” It is Aaron’s tribe, the Isanzu, that has assimilated most of the southern Tindiga, and few are left who do not have an Isanzu parent; even “Tindiga” is an Isanzu name for a people whose true name is Hadza or Hadzapi.

  Because of tsetse and the scarcity of water, the Hadza once had the Yaida to themselves, and scarcely anything was known of them before 1924, when a district officer of what had become, after World War I, the Tanganyika Territory, reported on a people who hid from Europeans and were even less affected than the Bushmen by the world beyond: . . . “a wild man, a creature of the bush, and as far as I can see he is incapable of becoming anything else. Certainly he does not desire to become anything else, for nothing will tempt him to leave his wilderness or to abandon his mode of living. He asks nothing from the rest of us but to be left alone. He interferes with no one, and does his best to insure that no one shall interfere with him.”3 A few years later, the Hadza were inspected by an authority on the Bushmen, who stated in the peremptory tones of colonial scholarship that “there must have been some connection between this black ape-like tribe and the small delicately built yellow man,”4 whose habits, thoughts, and language structure seemed so similar.

  This second authority, Miss Bleek, agrees with the first one, Mr. Bagshawe, that the typical tribesman was very black, short, thick-set, ugly, and ill-smelling, with prognathous jaw and large splay feet. The blackness and the cast of jaw were most pronounced in the “purest” specimens, for even in Bleek’s day, many Hadza in the south part of their range had an Isanzu parent. She does not comment on Bagshawe’s contention that the Hadza is “intensely stupid and naturally deceitful” as well as “lazy,” that he “does not understand why he should be investigated . . . it is more than probable that he will lie.” Yet Bagshawe feels constrained to note that the Hadza “worries but little about the future and not at all about the past,” that he is “happy and envies no man.” Bagshawe’s perplexed tone is echoed by Bleek, who observed that this unprepossessing people often danced in simple pleasure: “Hamana nale kui,” they sang. “Nale kui.”

  Here we go round,

  Go round.

  The early descriptions of the Hadza bring to mind the small men with large bows and strange speech who were driven high onto Mt. Kilimanjaro by the Chagga, and also the “people of small stature and hideous features,” as L. S. B. Leakey describes5 the Gumba aborigines found by the Kikuyu in the Kenya Highlands. But in the years since they were first reported, the Hadza have mixed increasingly with the Isanzu, who may eventually absorb them as Bantu tribes have been absorbing hunter-gatherers for two millenniums. A recent student, Dr. James Woodburn, does not believe that a characteristic physical type is distinguishable any longer, nor does he accept Miss Bleek’s assumption of a linguistic link between these people and the Bushmen (although the link between the click-speaking Sandawe, an acculturated tribe of south Tanzania, and the pastoral Bushman relatives known as the Hottentots is clearly established). On no evidence whatsoever, one is tempted to speculate that the Hadza may represent a relict group of pre-Bantu Negroids of the Stone Age, although there is no proof that the Hadza are a Stone Age remnant, or a remnant at all—very probably, they are as numerous as they ever were. They may even be regressive rather than primitive, a group cast out long ago from a more complex civilization, though their many affinities with the Bushmen make this unlikely. Probably we shall never come much closer to the truth than the people’s own account of Hadza origins:

  Man, say the Hadza, descended to earth on the neck of a giraffe, but more often they say that he climbed down from a baobab. The Hadza themselves came into being in this way: a giant ancestor named Hohole lived at Dungiko with his wife Tsikaio, in a great hall under the rocks where Haine, who is God, the Sun, was not able to follow. Hohole was a hunter of elephants, which were killed with one blow of his stick and stuck into his belt. Sometimes he walked one hundred miles and returned to the cave by evening with six elephants. One day while hunting, Hohole was bitten by a cobra in his little toe. The mighty Hohole died. Tsikaio, finding him, stayed there five days feeding on his leg, until she felt strong enough to carry the body to Masako. There she left it to be devoured by birds. Soon Tsikaio left the cave and went to live in a great baobab. After six days in the baobab, she gave birth to Konzere, and the children of Tsikaio and Konzere are the Hadza.6 “The Hadza,” as the people say, “is us.”

  At the west end of the settlement, downriver, Peter Enderlein has built a house. At the sound of the motor, he came out on his veranda, a tall bare-legged man in shorts, boots wide apart, hands stuck in his hip pockets. We went immediately on an inspection of the ostrich pens, where he is raising an experimental flock for plumes and skins and meat. (In the wild, there is a heavy loss of eggs and chicks to predators of all descriptions, including lions, which are fond of playing with the eggs.) With their omnivorous habits and adaptations to arid country, ostrich could be domesticated in the Yaida, where tsetse and a shortage of surface water—the annual rainfall is less than twenty inches—are serious obstacles to agriculture and livestock. Enderlein, who is employed to investigate the valley’s resources, would like to try game ranching here, but he has received little support for this scheme or any other, and for the moment must content himself with shooting the animals instead. Fresh meat is sold cheaply to the local people, or dried for sale elsewhere as biltong; the valuable common animal is the zebra, and the sale of zebra hides to wholesalers is the game post’s main source of income.

  Pending approval of his projects, Enderlein spends most of his time supplying food for the impounded Hadza, who are not supposed to leave the settlement, much less revert to their old lives in the bush. But hunters have always made the transition to agriculture with the greatest reluctance (the Ik of the north Uganda hills are an exception), and as a rule, the people will consume immediately any livestock or maize seed that is given them, and beat their hoe blades into arrowheads. Neither the dry climate nor their temperament lends itself to tilling, and in consequence they do little but drink pombe. This enforced idle
ness and dependence will certainly lead to their utter disintegration. Until they can come to agriculture of their own accord, Enderlein is trying to persuade the government to establish the Yaida Valley as a game reserve in which Hadza would be hired as trackers, game scouts, and hunters in a game-cropping scheme like the one that gave work to the Ariangulo elephant hunters in the region of Tsavo. Meanwhile, settlement by outsiders would be concentrated instead of scattered at random over the landscape, destroying thousands of square miles of wildlife habitat for the sake of a few shambas that cut off the water points. The Yaida has the last important population of greater kudu in north Tanzania, in addition to all the usual trophy animals, and as a game reserve, would receive income from game-cropping and hunting fees, which at present, due to lack of roads, are negligible. There are old rock paintings in the hills, many still doubtless undiscovered, and Eyasi Man, the Rhodesioid contemporary of the Neanderthalers, was dug up near Mangola in 1935 by a German named Kohl-Larsen, who also found an Australopithecine here in 1939, two decades before the better publicized Australopithecus was turned up by the Leakeys at Olduvai Gorge. All that is needed to encourage tourists is a good track into the north end of the valley from the main road across the Crater Highlands.

  Although he has submitted to the government a careful analysis of game numbers and potential in the valley and an imaginative program of resource management, and although Tanzania’s astute president Julius Nyerere is said to agree that the Hadza might come more readily to civilization through game-cropping than agriculture, Enderlein’s plans have been regularly aborted by the district politicians, who have replaced European civil servants almost everywhere, and who take care not to approve or disapprove any project of a white man lest they expose themselves to the ambitions of their peers. As in other new African nations, the government endorses the principle of conservation, since conservation seems important to those western countries which are helping it in other ways. But most educated Africans care little about wild animals, which are vectors of the tsetse fly, a threat to crops and human life, and a competitor of livestock, and are also identified emotionally with the white man, white hunters, white tourists, and a primitive past which the new Africans wish to forget. As for the Hadzapi, they are the last tribe in Tanzania that is not administered and taxed, and the sooner they vanish, the better. Like the Twa, Bushman, and Dorobo, the small hunters are looked down upon by their own countrymen, and most of those who come into the settlement soon flee back to their former life of dignity and independence.