Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (6 page)

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Out of Eden bearing gifts

Laughing she got pregnant; crying she delivered
. Ethiopian proverb

So we have a river, but what of the people that inhabited it? Sixty miles from the Nile valley, walking over dunes in the Egyptian desert, I accompanied executives from Oracle, the computer company, there on a company team-building exercise. My role was to reveal the secrets of the desert, but it was the company head of sales who found a hand axe. She didn’t realise its significance. It had been left there maybe 200,000 years ago by one of the earliest dwellers along the Nile valley.

It was an Acheulean hand axe, as much leading technology in 200,000
BC
as an Oracle database was in the twenty-first century. The early Nile dwellers have left behind no bones, no hearths – the desert has destroyed all that. All we have are their tools. And they are scattered everywhere in the desert, proving that the bounty of the Nile extended deep into what are now dry deserted lands. As I explained this, the executive saw my excitement and gave me the hand axe. It
was too good a gift to pass up. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘it’s too heavy for hand luggage.’

In the Book of Genesis we read: ‘And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.’ Was that river the Nile, the main artery of the human race? Down (and up) this artery humankind has spread and developed since the very formation of the River Nile.

As we have seen, the Nile in its current formation is, as rivers go, relatively recent. A proto-Nile that ran into the Tethys Sea – what is now the Mediterranean – existed several million years ago. But it was not until the Ethiopian highlands tilted away from the Red Sea that the Nile could extend backwards out of Egypt. This was around 800,000 years ago.

This new riverine link provided a certain band of hominids with the chance to break free of their isolation. They went on to dominate the world and outlast any other group, outliving
Homo erectus
in the Far East around 50,000 years ago and dominating
Homo neanderthalensis
through interbreeding. Yet
Homo sapiens sapiens
could easily have remained marooned in the Ethiopian highlands. Without the river they might have stayed in their own Eden – perhaps to have perished and become extinct as many earlier hominid groups had done.

The Nile valley was their exit route.

Early
Homo sapiens sapiens
had one advantage over his predecessors
Homo ergaster
,
erectus
and
neanderthalensis
. He was what he still is: a gift giver. Early hominids worked out how to use fire for their own purposes nearly a million years ago – there are fire-baked clays, evidence of controlled fire use dating from this long ago. Even earlier we see tool use that develops into the Acheulean hand axe, a ubiquitous tool that hardly changed its form in 500,000 years. A massive teardrop-shaped piece of stone, the hand axe was ideal for bashing out marrow from the scavenged and hunted long bones of large prey – deer, buffalo, eland, rhinos and giraffe. Marrow was crucial as a foodstuff as it is high in fat. This allows one to digest the protein of the kill. Without fat one can die of malnutrition, however much protein abounds – as survivalist Chris McCandless showed when he died in the Alaskan wilderness despite shooting plenty of lean game. He had no hand axe to bash out the marrow and died only twenty miles from the highway.

So even 500,000 years ago ancient man had worked that one out. He had started funeral rituals – arranging the way the body was laid out
after death – and there is even rudimentary art among Neanderthals. But only
Homo sapiens sapiens
is buried with trade goods from far away, way outside his own living area. Burials in the Pyrenees turn up with obsidian carvings from central Europe. Northern Europeans have Mediterranean beads. These are the descendants of the first
Homo sapiens
who swarmed up the Nile and out of Africa, swapping their goods as they went.

We assume they were trading, but looking at the nearest living equivalent that is still around today – hunter-gatherer groups – it is much more probable that they simply gave these things away. The !Kung tribesmen, a remote group of the so-called San Bushmen of the Kalahari, are gift givers not traders. They also have no leaders. As one put it, ‘We have headmen, every man is a headman over himself!’ This was said as a joke to anthropologist Richard Lee as he studied their highly efficient way of life.

Trade is so central to our own ideas of what is essentially human that we may assume gift giving as an aberrant or naive proto-behaviour. Yet hunter-gatherers – such as the !Kung – as well as those early
Homo sapiens
had no need of trade nor any incentive to practise it, living as they did in groups of around thirty members, which is the ideal size for a hunting unit. Though the so-called Dunbar number is often repeated as marking the ideal size of a human community (150 members), this is a theoretical construct derived from extrapolations from primate studies. The lower figure of thirty better reflects the requirements of feeding a group who have no recourse to farming. Early hunter-gatherer man carried only twenty-five pounds of worldly goods when he moved, which he did periodically to find new game. We can assume that a great river, replete with game living off its bounty, would have worked as a natural magnet, pulling these hunter-gatherers ever further north. They had no need to trade – their twenty-five-pound bundle contained all they needed – but they would certainly have given goods away as gifts. When you are on the move you want as light a bundle as possible; there is no benefit in excess baggage.

!Kung women give birth roughly every four years. They suckle their young for that long, which acts as a natural prophylactic, a necessary one since it is hard to move and carry two infants at a time. But it is also an ecological solution. Only with the coming of agriculture can man turn his womenfolk into the breeding machine that for so long was seen as the natural state. Hunter-gatherer women, as opposed to
the women of pastoral nomads and nomadic agriculturists, have a great deal of equality with men. This is not mere romance – it stems from the importance of their role in both gathering food and shouldering the burden of moving around.

The !Kung do not trade because all they carry are a few tools and perhaps a musical instrument. The necessity of movement means they cannot develop the greed that is an everyday part of the settler’s life. Is it possible, then, that in that first breakout from Eden early man really did fall from grace? The !Kung settle their differences through talk, not through war – just as the Penan hunter-gatherers of Borneo are reported to do, as do the other endangered and scattered survivors of
Homo sapiens
who stuck to the original plan and weren’t tempted by the lure of grain and grazing animals. It seems to me that to have no leaders is better expressed as having no followers. It is the followers who cause all the problems, and early man had solved this before he took that river out of Eden.

The details are also correct. The Nile now splits into two main branches in the Egyptian delta. A thousand years ago there were three branches. In prehistory there were four, just as it states in Genesis.

It is tempting to want to turn the clock back. But the whole gist of the story of the Fall, the first Nile story if you like, is about the impossibility of doing just that. Adam and Eve are kicked out and can never return. Early man left Eden and found a river that drew him north to the rest of the world. But this river would later encourage agriculture and the plenty required to start trade. Change happens. But
Homo sapiens
vanquished
Homo erectus
,
neanderthalensis
and
heidelbergensis
before he ever began to trade.

Naturally there is great controversy over what traits made
Homo sapiens
the hominid winner. Gift giving is actually more advanced than trade. Chimpanzees and bonobos trade in as much as they gain advantages through exchanging goods and services. Gift giving requires the ability to empathise and imagine what another might want. It is also the start of selflessness. Surely the first stage in being human is when we realise that being connected to others means more than the selfish survival of a lone individual, which is the condition of any animal.

We no longer live in groups of thirty, nor do we hunt and gather for a living, have babies every four years and walk great distances to find new sources of berry and nut. We are civilised now, thanks to the Nile,
yet one of our highest qualities is the one that remains: generosity, gift giving. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus famously wrote that ‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile.’ Perhaps, despite the temptations provided by the Nile, the escape route from Eden, we retain the ability to give.

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River gods

The baboon, because he cannot see his bald behind, laughs greatly at the defects of others
. Sudanese saying

I was at the ‘other’ source of the White Nile: in Jinja, at the Nile’s exit from Lake Victoria. It was here that Mahatma Gandhi had some of his ashes scattered (as well as in several Indian rivers and a shrine in Los Angeles). That is the magic of the source – Jinja being the generally accepted start of the Nile in travel guides and the like (the whole Kagera thing being too complicated for a fleeting Fodor reference). By some peculiar circularity Gandhi has helped publicise Jinja as a source of the Nile – fame helping fame. In Jinja there is also a Buddhist temple, a mosque and several churches. Religion provides its own narrative about ultimate beginnings, and like calling like perhaps feels at home with other sources that have, over time, achieved mystical qualities. Or at least the power to bewitch.

But I was here to worship nature rather than investigate religion. I had just been river rafting, a fun thing to do on any river, and here, at the Bujagali Falls, is some of the best rafting around (as well as bungee jumping, quad biking etc).

Now it gets complicated – all these waterfalls and dams, some of which got renamed when a new regime took over. The gist of it is: originally the Nile flopped out of Lake Victoria over some rock slabs. This was named the Ripon Falls after Lord Ripon, a patron of John Hanning Speke, the first European to see the spectacle. Just below the Ripon Falls were some more – the Owen Falls – and about four miles further on some more: the Bujagali Falls. Actually they are more like wild bouldery river rapids than falls in the Niagara sense of the word. At the Owen Falls they built a dam in the 1950s that flooded the Ripon Falls. There used to be a plaque there commemorating their discovery by Speke. Now it’s under water.

For many years they have been planning to build another dam which will flood the Bujagali Falls – over which I had just slithered and shot in a sixteen-foot Avon rubber raft. As you read this it will already be too late to do the same thing. Amazingly, the planning has stopped and the building has started. Work on the dam started in late 2011.

In a way, what with all the religious possibilities in town, it seemed right that I was here to mourn the passing of the Bujagali Falls, which will be submerged by the new dam, some two miles from the Owen Falls dam. Yep, the river hasn’t really started and we’ve already stopped it. Twice.

So. More submergence. Dams drown things. The Aswan high dam drowned Nubia, making a hundred thousand people homeless. Fewer will be affected by the Bujagali dam, and of course Uganda does need the electricity. Why, one asks, in a place with immense amounts of sunshine do they need to dicker with the river? Dams, like nuclear power stations, are big business. You can get a mighty big kickback on a dam contract. Solar power doesn’t have quite the same remunerative effect on a government minister.

The Bujagali Falls are of religious significance quite apart from the interest shown by Hindus and Buddhists and New Agers. Ja Ja Nabamba Budhagali (irreverently one is reminded of the water people of whom Jar Jar Binks in
Star Wars
is a member) is a ninety-five-year-old man, and their thirty-ninth guardian. He has announced that he is royally pissed off by the dam as it will flood the graves of his thirty-eight ancestors and all the islands where he gets his healing herbs.

I had wanted to meet Ja Ja Budhagali but it wasn’t possible. He was busy, or out looking for a new place to get herbs. Some people told me he was ninety-seven, others ninety-five and one ‘over eighty’. At first I had thought that I should find instances of river worship as a key part of this book, that worship was the natural relationship of humans to a river: be it for the life-giving flood or a life-enhancing thrill sport. But I was beginning to see that, though we do worship rivers, the river itself is about change. The water is always changing, the course sometimes changes and man throws in his own changes just for good measure. And in the lifetime of the human race (which all agree is piffling compared to the lifetime of say cockroaches or crocs) the Nile has emerged, has
become
, so to speak. Changed, certainly, out of all recognition. The skill was in knowing when to let go and when to hang on. Kind of like in rafting. For a long time Ja Ja Budhagali wouldn’t say if the river
spirits would stay after the dam was built, but now he says they will, even if their traditional home is under water with everything else. In 1994, it was Ja Ja Budhagali who cleared the falls of bodies washed down from the Rwandan genocide.

Right now the Bujagali Falls look wonderful. They sound good too, a constant motorway roar, not white noise but whitewater noise. The falls are a series of massive steps over which the muscular river bounds, the lucent bulge of blue water waiting to be broken, shattered into whitewater. You can raft the lot, though it’s tricky. You can even swim the lot – if you’re brave and have a twenty-five-litre jerry can. For $3 a young Ugandan will ride all the main rapids clinging to a yellow plastic jerry can, though one boy was drowned in 2011. If you want to see it done, go on to YouTube and check it out.