The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen

  Of the Maasai, President Nyerere has remarked quite rightly that the government cannot afford to keep part of its people as a human zoo for tourists, and the same could be said about the Hadza: the time of the hunter is past, and will never return. Yet to judge from wild peoples I have seen in South America and New Guinea, the Hadza would be better left alone until a choice that they can make naturally is provided, for this people is acknowledged by all who have met them to be healthy and happy, with no history of epidemic or famine, and able to satisfy all needs in a few hours of each day. Modern medicine, motor transport, radios, and even shoes may be crucial to the poor man, whose wants are endless, self-perpetuating, whose every acquisition means that he cannot afford something else. The wants of the primitive are few, since he does not envy what he knows nothing of. Poverty and the inferior status that await the acculturated Hadza is no alternative to bush life and the serenity of the old ways, and to take this from him by exposing him to a “progress” he cannot share is to abuse his innocence and do him harm.

  But Enderlein is accused of wishing to keep this people in the Stone Age “as the Americans wish for the Maasai,” and told not to give game work to idle Hadza, since the government is committed to a national program of agriculture. Tsetse control is to be resumed, and the people sent out to girdle and kill the “useless” tsetse-harboring acacias that keep the valley from turning to a desert, and ever more outsiders are encouraged to settle the Yaida even though two crops out of three are lost to drought, even though the land is blowing away under the sharp hoofs of the cattle.

  Enderlein showed me the hard bare flats in the grasslands that spread west to the hills called Giyeda Barakh. “Ten years ago,” he said, “the people walked a long way around the grove where my camp is now, there were so many rhino, and they still speak of the great herds of eland and elephant moving through. Ten years from now, this whole valley will be a desert.” He spoke sadly of his abandoned projects, of all the potential of the Yaida, of the rock paintings and other mysteries of this region that is still so unexplored—he has never found time to go down into Isanzu Land, where there are caves containing great log drums too enormous to be moved. According to the Isanzu, the drums had been built in an older time, by an older people; one thinks of the oracle drums of the great Bantu kingdoms of the lake country. The Isanzu are superstitious about the drums and keep them hidden.

  Enderlein is a handsome Swede with a young officer’s moustache and a mouth broken on one side by a fist of long ago. Though tall and strong, his eyes are restless, he looks haunted and tired; the solitude and frustration of his work are wearing him down. Either he commits more time that will probably be wasted, or he abandons three years of hard lonely work and all hope, as he sees it, for the Yaida. “I think it’s the loveliest place in Africa. And its almost an ecological unit, too, much more so than the Serengeti—almost all its animals are non-migratory, or would be if they’d let them get to water. I hate to give up, but I’m thirty-one now, and I’m getting nowhere; I just can’t waste my life here.”

  The greatest present threat to the Yaida Valley is the cattle of the Barabaig, a pastoral people from the region of Mt. Hanang and the Barabaig Plain, fifty miles to the southeast. On Saba Saba, there were numbers of lean Barabaig in the settlement, drinking pombe with their traditional antagonists, the Isanzu. They are a tall, handsome people whose dress and customs resemble those of the Maasai, and on the basis of language, they are usually linked to the Nandi, who are thought to have displaced them from the region of Mt. Elgon, on the Kenya-Uganda border, about two hundred and fifty years ago. But little is known of the Barabaig, who appear to have a strong Hamitic mix; their own tradition is that they are related to the Mbulu, and that both groups came south from the shores of Lake Natron. Such names as Barabaig, Hanang, and Giyeda Barakh evoke the northern deserts, as do such habits as the cutting of trophies from the bodies of human enemies, a custom of the Danakil of Ethiopia. In any case, they display all the simplehearted ferocity of the desert nomads, and to the Maasai are known as Il-man’ati, “the Enemy,” a name reserved for a worthy foe whose warriors, unlike those of the Bantu, are entitled to extend a handful of grass to the Maasai in a plea for mercy. The Mangati, as they are generally known, were once scattered by attacks of the Maasai, but more recently have withstood Maasai encroachment from the west of Lake Eyasi, and have matched them raid for raid; it is their faith that ten Barabaig will overwhelm twenty Maasai. Being farther from the reach of the authorities, their moran have retained the custom of killing a lion in sign of manhood, or a man, for that matter, and what are known as “Barabaig spear-blooding murders” have made them a great source of chagrin to government and neighbors alike. Those murdered are “enemies of the people”7—the real or potential thieves of Barabaig cattle, a very broad category which includes all lions and strangers, as well as the mothers of thieves as yet unborn. One night not long ago in Yaida Chini, a young Hadza girl was pierced through the lungs by a spear hurled from behind. Since the hard-drinking Mangati are the only ones with spears and the wish to use them, it is thought here that the girl was fleeing a Mangati admirer who was unable to resist a running target. The dying girl was discovered by Enderlein’s cook who, interpreting her gasps as evidence of helpless drunkenness, took speedy advantage of his opportunity and raped her; it is hard to imagine the poor creature’s last conclusions on the nature of her fellow man. The cook, himself drunk, got covered with blood, in which condition he was apprehended, and since no one has spoken up for him, he may stay in jail indefinitely, and perhaps be hung, for a crime of which nobody thinks him guilty.

  Last September a Yaida Chini game scout, accompanied by three unarmed companions, caught some Barabaig with a dead giraffe and was unwise enough to attempt an arrest. Outraged, the moran pursued the four for three miles or more, trapping them finally in a cave, where they laid siege all night. In the morning, as the game scout came to the end of his ammunition, the warriors departed. Shortly afterwards they lost one of their number to an elephant that they had actually attacked with spears, but they were never arrested. This age-set of moran has stalked the Yaida for several years, passing through on poaching raids and raids into Maasai Land. “Their habit of killing people and cutting ears, nose, fingers, etc., off the bodies might sound exotic and interesting to somebody faraway from Mangati Land,” Enderlein wrote in September, 1969, in a plea for help from the Game Department, “but for my Game Scouts and myself who have to live here and move around where these people are to be found this habit is rather disturbing. Our number is quite small already, and before it is reduced any further we would like to ask for assistance to deal with this dangerous situation.”

  At sunset the hot wind died, and the dust settled in the stillness; the western hills above Lake Eyasi glowed in a dusty desert sun. In Enderlein’s grove the yellow-wing bats hung from the thorns in silhouette, flitted off one by one to meet the dark, while to roosts in the fat figs by the river came companies of storks and vultures, sacred ibis, a solitary pelican, sailing onto the high branches with thick wing thumps, hollow bill clack, and guttural weird protest.

  At dark, the yard filled with drunken people, come to invite the white man to a party. In rural villages of East Africa, pombe-drinking consumes half the people’s time and money, and the less sophisticated they are, the more hopeless they become. In his concern for the Hadza, Enderlein is trying to get the Mbulu district council to restrict the sale of pombe in this settlement: “We have seven pombe parties at Yaida Chini every week, and the men do their very best to attend all of them.” But he knows perfectly well that a restriction is of small value, since anyone can brew the stuff at home.

  In an Isanzu hut, we squatted on stools in the dim light and drank from a communal calabash of pombe, which at its best has a woody astringent taste and at its worst beggars description. Y-supports held up the roof beams of the flat-topped hut, and the walls were made of grass and mud caked over with dried dung. The smoke and soft
voices, the hunched dark forms catching the ember light on gleaming foreheads, the eyes, the warmth, the slow hands at the hearth protected all there against the emptiness and the cold stars, night sorcery and the hyena riders. Later, the Isanzu danced to four big drums of hide and wood played by swift hands and a tin disc beaten in two-stroke rhythm with a stick, while a chanting old man was answered by fierce chorus. Here, well east of the African lakes, was the echo of the Congo and West Africa. The pounding went on and on and on, and the dry valley quaked with sound like a beaten hide, and faraway on the Giyeda Barakh the night sky glowed in a flame twenty miles long, as if the whole country would go up in fire.

  Toward midnight, in a sudden silence of the drums, the yelling Africans cursed the white men, the Wazungu, who had gone to bed. One man threw something at the house that banged on the wall and fell to the veranda.

  In the morning, Enderlein is exhausted. Lately he has had great trouble sleeping; his eyes twitch, and he does everything with violence. Carving a bird, he seizes the whole carcass in his hand and slings the pieces onto plates. Hunting on the plains, he yanks his car too hard, too fast, and he seems careless with his rifle though he is not. Catching himself, or realizing he has been perceived, he mutters sheepishly, “I haven’t taken care of myself; I’ve let everything go. Perhaps I have bilharzia.” He shrugs, indifferent. “When I came out here, I was so keen, but now I am not. The people I try to work with do not care, so I cannot care indefinitely. They let everything go.” He nodded his head toward the kitchen. “Last night Mfupi was drunk, and didn’t bother to close the gate to the duck pen, and a honey badger got all my birds but two. I ask him to set some rice aside for our safari, and he cooks my entire supply. We need two camp cots, but all twelve cots assigned to Yaida Chini are now missing. A cot that will last fifteen years is ruined in three months—the rest have been lost, or perhaps sold in Mbulu.” He shrugged again. “It’s the same with everything—the land, the animals. Nobody cares, and all of it is going to go.” He went outside and stood on his veranda, boots spread, hands in hip pockets, glaring at an African sky shrouded in fire clouds of smoke and blowing dust. In this valley, the only land that goes unburned is land too overgrazed to carry fire.

  We head north under the Yaida Escarpment. Like all mornings in the dry season, this day is born in a dusty sun and restless wind, a desert wind, or so it seems, so vast and empty is the plain from which it comes. There is an old safari track, grown over, but the Land Rover makes its own way through acacia savanna where a slender-tailed mongoose, dark and lustrous, slips like a swift fish through the fading grass. At mid-morning the lower Udahaya is crossed, a slow stream dying in the plain. Slowly we wind toward the south Sipunga Hills.

  Somewhere in the Sipunga, perhaps thirty miles north of Yaida Chini, small bands of Hadza hide from the resettlement program, living as they have always lived, by hunting and gathering, a people without pottery or gardens or domestic animals other than the random dog. Probably they will hide from us, as well, unless they see that we are with Hadza whom they trust. Magandula is a game scout and the prestige of his bunduki, or rifle, entitles him to two porters, Gimbe and Giga. Magandula is loud and opinionated; Gimbe and Giga are quiet. Magandula and Gimbe have Isanzu fathers, but Giga, smaller and older, is pure Hadza, black, with heavy jaw and swollen cheekbones and flat nose in a head too big for a small thick body which will never attain five feet in height. Until recently Giga has been living in the bush—he is one of a number of Hadza who drift back and forth between the old life and the new—and as if in sign of his transitional state he is wearing a sandal on his right foot but not on his left. Magandula, on the other hand, is an outspoken convert to the new Africa, and wears bright red socks in black street shoes with broken points.

  In early afternoon, under Sipunga, Giga speaks. Off among black wrinkled trunks and silvered thorns he has glimpsed a shift of shadows, and now Magandula is speaking, too: “Tindiga!” he says in tones of triumph, choosing the Isanzu name.

  There is more than one, it is a hunting party, crouching low in the golden grass to peer under the limbs; the black of their skin is the old black of acacia bark in shadow. Giga is smiling at them, and they do not run; they have seen Giga, and they have a fresh-killed zebra. Enderlein is grinning freely for the first time since I have known him. “Oh, we are lucky!” he says twice; he had not thought we would find the hunters this first day.

  A striped hock shines in the fork of a tree; the rest rides on the hunters’ shoulders. There are ten Hadza, seven with bows and three young boys, and all are smiling. Each boy has glistening raw meat slung over his shoulders and wrapped around him, and one wears the striped hide outward, in a vest. Except for beads at neck and waist, the boys are naked. The men wear loin-cloths faded to an olive-earth color that blends with the tawny grass; the rags are bound at the waist by a hide thong, and some have simple necklaces of red-and-yellow berry-colored beads. All wear crude sheath knives in the center of the back, and one has a guinea fowl feather in his hair.

  Shy, they await in a half-circle, much less tall than their bows. “Tsifiaqua!” they murmur, and our people say, “Tsifiaqua mtana,” and then the hunters say, “M-taa-na!” for warm emphasis, smiling wholeheartedly. (Tsifiaqua is “afternoon” as in “good afternoon,” and mtana is “nice” as in “nice day,” and tsifiaqua m-taa-na, as the hunters say it, may mean, “Oh beautiful day!”) I am smiling wholeheartedly too, and so is Enderlein; my smile seems to travel right around my head. The encounter in the sunny wood is much too simple, too beautiful to be real, yet it is more real than anything I have known in a long time. I feel a warm flood of relief, as if I had been away all my life and had come home again—I want to embrace them all. And so both groups stand face to face, admiring each other in the sunlight, and then hands are taken all around, each man being greeted separately by all the rest. They are happy we are to visit them and delighted to pile the zebra meat into the Land Rover, for the day is hot and dry and from here to where these Hadza live, behind the Sipunga Hills, is perhaps six miles of stony walking. The eldest, Mzee Dafi, rides, and others run ahead and alongside, and others stay behind to hunt again. The runners keep pace with the car as it barges across the stones and thorn scrub and on across the south end of Sipunga through the ancestral Hadza land called T’ua. Soon Giga kicks off his remaining sandal and runs barefoot with the rest, and then Magandula, in red socks and shiny shoes, is running, too. Gimbe, a young mission boy from Munguli, sits quietly; he is not yet home.

  There is no track, only an intermittent path, and here and there Enderlein heaves rocks out of the way to let us pass. Peter is happy, and he works with exuberance, casting away his pent-up angers. So glad are the hunters of our coming that they hurl rocks, too, but since most of them, Giga included, have no idea what they accomplish, they struggle with rocks that are far off the route, out of pure good will. On the sky rise twin hills walled with soaring monoliths, quite unlike anything I have ever seen; the hills overlook the upper Udahaya Valley, between the Sipunga and the Mbulu Escarpment. Seeing the hills the hunters cry out, leaping rocks, and the swiftest is he with the guinea fowl feather, Salibogo.

  Behind the twin portals, on a hillside, rise groves of monumental granites. Approaching this place across a meadow of pink baobabs, Dafi whispers, “Gidabembe.” Still there is no sign of habitation. But bright green in the sun are two fresh gourds set out to dry on a rock shelf; the placement of the gourds gives man away. A yellow dog, the first and last such animal we saw in Hadza Land, walks stiff and silent from the bush under a tilted monolith, and from the shadows of the stone a thin smoke rises into the dry sunlight, and a crone the color of dry brush appears among the leaves. In the shadows she stands like a dead stick, observing.

  At the next grove of rocks, a stone has toppled in such a way that its flat face, some fifteen feet by fifteen in dimension, is held clear of the ground by the debris of its own fall, forming an open-sided shelter five feet high; similar rock shelters at
Magosi, in Uganda, have been inhabited since the Middle Stone Age.8 Small trees at the cave’s twin mouths filter the sunlight, and at the hearth is a cracked gourd, a rag, a dik-dik skin, a bone, all now abandoned, for except in time of heaviest rains, the Hadza live beneath the sky. With hand brooms of grass and twigs, Gimbe and Magandula and the hunters brush loose dust from the cave floor, while squat Giga pushes three hearthstones together and with fingertips and breath draws grass wisps into a fire and places a black pot on the points of stone to boil. Outside, an old woman has appeared, bent under a morning’s harvest of orange grewia berries, which are dry and sweet and taste like nuts; offering these, she is given a strip of the zebra meat spread out across a stone. Our people take meat for ourselves, and so do others who come quietly into the glade, for the Hadza have no agonies of ownership. Soon the wild horse is gone. On sharpened sticks Gimbe skewers the red meat, laying two sticks across the fire; the rest he places in the trees to dry for biltong. Our arrival at Gidabembe is celebrated with a feast of tea and zebra, ugali and the fire-colored berries.