The Tree Where Man Was Born (11 page)

Ahead, volcanic cones rose from the sand haze like peaks out of low clouds; the day was overcast with heavy heat. Larks and ground squirrels, camel flies and ticks; the camel fly is so flat and rubbery that it flies off after a hard slap. Occasional dry
dongas support bunch grass and the nests of weavers; in this landscape, the red rump of the white-headed buffalo weaver is the only color. Though animals other than snakes are not a problem here, a lone traveler had made a small thorn shelter at the side of the road, to ward off the great emptiness. Round lava boulders, shined by manganese and iron oxides, and burnished by wind and sand, looked greased in the dry light—a country of dragons.

To the north, the Huri Mountains rose and fell away again into Ethiopia. We took a poor track westward. In the wall of an old river bed was a cave of swifts and small brown bats where man had lived, and from the dust of the cave floor I dug an ancient digging stick with a hacked point. Not far away, on the bare rock of a ridge, were tattered habitations of dung and straw where silhouettes of goats and man came together in a knot to watch us pass. Here where nothing grows, these primitive Gabbra subsist on blood and milk, in a way that cannot be very different from the way of the first pastoralists who came here many centuries ago.

The Gabbra mission at the Maikona oasis is a litter of huts patched with tin and paper, on a barren ground stalked by rooks and curs. Here children gnaw on the thin bitter skins of borassus palm nuts from the foul oasis. The nuts lie mixed with withered livestock turds around the huts, and they will be here when man has gone; such nuts are found in Old Stone Age sites that are fifty-five thousand years old. The people go barefoot on the stones, rags blowing, and they are idle, all but the smith, who pumped his fires with twin bellows made of goat skin: from scavenged car springs and an angle iron, he was beating a lean spear. As in all the Galla tribes, the smith has been despised and feared since the advent of the Iron Age brought this strange element to man, yet he seemed more cheerful than the aristocratic idlers who stared away over the desert.

Maikona lies at the south end of a black lava field that stretches north a hundred miles into Ethiopia; the lava ends in an abrupt wall where the wave of stone, thirty feet high, came to a stop. The lava flow forms the north wall of an ancient lake
bed called the Chalbi Desert, a vast reach of ash and dead white soda that gives off the heat waves of mirage: for fifty miles, brown columns of dust pursued our caravan westward. Gazelle in quest of salt moved slow as ghosts across white fields of alkali, and a jackal overtaken by the heat lay with sick calm in the ash and watched men pass. The sun turned orange in a tawny sky, then luminous in the strange way of desert suns; it melted the Bura Galadi Hills on the horizon.

At dark, in the northwest corner of the desert, the cars reached the oasis at North Horr, where a police post protects the Gabbra of the region from shifta and from bands of nomad raiders out of Ethiopia. The women here have strong desert faces in black shrouds, metal arm coils and cobra-head bracelets, piled trading beads hand-fashioned from aluminum, ancient amulets; one necklace has a Victoria coin, worn thin by intent hands across a century of desert cooking fires. Perhaps it had come from the Sudan, snatched from the torn pockets of dead English at Khartoum.

Children come, with fireflies in their tight hair; the lights dance through the blowing palms. Far from the world, they play at being airplanes, which they know only from the lights that pass over in the dark, north out of Africa. Tonight there were no airplanes, but an earth satellite of unknown origin arched over the Southern Cross, followed toward midnight by a shooting star that died in a shower of ethereal blue light over the High Semien, in Ethiopia.

I slept under the desert stars, content to be somewhere called North Horr, between the Chalbi Desert and the Bura Galadi Hills: the lean sinister names evoked medieval legends, desert bandits, and the fierce grotesque old Coptic kingdoms of Abyssinia.

By morning the wind was blowing up in sandstorms. Flights of sand grouse, seeking water, hurtled back and forth over the cracking palms, and a train of camels etched a slow crack into the desert to the south.

Beyond North Horr, the track is too poor for the truck, which
lacks four-wheel drive; it would meet us some days hence at the El Molo village, Loiyengalani, near the south end of Lake Rudolf. The eight white people in the party, with the Kamba cook, Kimunginye, would travel light in the two Land Rovers, since the plan was to arrive that night at Richard Leakey’s archeological camp at Koobi Fora, some one hundred ten miles beyond North Horr. We carried our own food and bedding, and Richard, who expected us, would furnish the gasoline and water that would carry us back south again to Loiyengalani.

In the gravel beds of a dead river one car, towing a small trailer, had to be unhitched and pushed: beyond the river, the track made by Leakey’s annual caravan was indistinct. The region is less hostile than the deserts farther east, and less monotonous. Dry river beds intersect broad dry grass plains broken here and there by sand dunes, brimstone outcrops, and ridges of dark volcanic rock scattered with bits of chert and gypsum, and the animals are tame and common, for there is no one here to hunt them. But farther on all creatures vanish, and the arid plain under a gray blowing sky seems more oppressive than bare desert, as if life had been here and had gone. In this wind is the echo of cataclysm: this is how the world will look when man brings all life to an end.

The land east of Lake Rudolf appears to have been a main migration route of early peoples, for here and there upon the landscape are strange stone heaps four or five feet high, ten feet across, encircled at the base by a ring of larger stones that gives them form. Some of these cairns or graves, most common near the water points to which the old track winds, have been identified as Galla. Others, like the tracks themselves, may be thousands of years old, growing gently in size from pebbles cast on them out of respect by passing nomads. In such silence one still hears the echo of those pebbles, tinkling to rest on the side of the mute heap.

African prehistory is an edifice of probabilities, and its dates are continually set back as new archeological sites emerge: it is now thought that Caucasoid wanderers came south into East Africa at least as early as ten thousand years ago, perhaps much
earlier,
¹⁰
when all men on earth were still hunters and gatherers. These “Kenya Capsians” or “Proto-Hamites” whose remains have been found near the Rift Valley lakes used obsidian tools for working wood, bone, and hides, and were among the first peoples known to have possessed the bow and arrow, but essentially they were sedentary fishermen, like their contemporaries, the Negroid fishermen of Khartoum. Strangely, although one group was clearly Negroid and the other Caucasoid, both had the same barbed bone harpoons and curved arrowheads called lunates, made open pottery incised with wavy lines, and removed the two central incisors from the lower jaw, as all peoples of Nilotic origin, including the Samburu and Maasai, do to this day. A later people living near Lake Elmenteita
¹¹
used two-edged stone blades and more symmetrical lunates, and made fine pottery before the Egyptians had learned to do so, but there is still no real evidence of a Neolithic culture based on domestic plants and animals before 1000 B.C., at least a millennium after the red cattle people of the rock paintings had left their traces in the Sahara.

South of the Sahara, Neolithic civilization was confined to certain hillsides of East Africa, and the evidence suggests that its peoples brought their animals and cereals out of southwest Ethiopia. Although the stone bowls and pestles that symbolize their culture might have been used for the grinding of red ocher and wild cereals, the Proto-Hamites surely had domestic grains as well. Meanwhile related peoples, discovering that they could live on milk and blood, were moving into a nomadic cattle culture of the sort still seen today: a Greco-Roman account of 200 B.C. tells of herdsmen south of the Sahara who worshipped their cattle, fed on blood and milk, practiced circumcision, and buried their dead in a contracted position “to the accompaniment of laughter.”
¹²
(The “worship” of the cattle by the herdsmen, then as now, is better understood as deep affection—expressed in odes and lullabies, pet names and the like—for a life-giving force that is seen as the people’s special gift from God; in the same way, the Pygmies sing to the forest and the Bushmen to the desert that gives them sustenance, not in worship but in gratitude.)
The nomad herdsmen, like the Bedouin Arabs who would later sweep across the northern continent, were the true barbarians of Africa, preying on others and ravaging the land. Very likely they obtained their animals and spears from the tillers they came to despise, but the prestige attached to the ownership of the precious animals that came south under their sticks was everywhere extended to their customs, which still survive in the great cattle kingdoms from the Sudan south into Tanzania, and are imitated by many tilling tribes as well.

The descendants of these “Proto-Hamites” have persisted into recent times. The Meru (Bantu) of Mt. Kenya have a tradition of a cattle people called the Mwoko with whom they warred only a few centuries ago, and who buried their dead in a contracted position under stone cairns, as the Galla do today. Farther south, the Gogo (Bantu) know of cattle keepers who preceded the Maasai onto the steppes of Tanzania.
¹³
This people dug wells and built reservoirs, carved holes in the rocks for the game of bao, built clay-lined huts that were fired like pottery and were red and white in color, suggesting the use of clays: probably red ocher can account for the color of the mysterious Azanians and the “red people” of the Saharan rock paintings, as well.

Ruins left by the Neolithic tillers are found almost invariably in hill country suitable to terracing and irrigation, and eventually these hills were surrounded and absorbed by the successive waves of Bantu-speakers who came after. Then, in the late Middle Ages, the black pastoral Nilotes came down out of the Sudan, while to the eastward, the so-called “Nilo-Hamites”—the Karomojong tribes, the Nandi peoples, the Maasai—swept southward from a region beyond Lake Rudolf. Traditionally, these people have been considered hybrid between the Nilotes and the Hamites, but some of their words are neither Nilotic nor Hamitic, and recently it has been suggested
¹⁴
that their Hamitic strain, at least, derives from a separate ancestral stock entirely. The term “Nilo-Hamitic” might be useful in distinguishing these brown, thin-featured herders from the darker Nilotes farther west, but even here it is not
dependable: the Turkana, a tribe of the Karomojong, are coarse-featured and black. In Africa, after millenniums of human migrations, random physical traits are poor evidence of racial origin, and language is not always very much better. Most of these people are more Nilote than not in both language and customs, but the southernmost tribes, the Nandi and Maasai, have such distinctive Hamite practices as circumcision and clitoridectomy in initiation rites, the age-grade system of young warriors, despised clans of blacksmiths, and a taboo against fish. Conceivably all these practices were acquired from the Galla, who are known to have wandered the region north of Lake Rudolf in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but more likely they are the heritage of earlier Hamites absorbed in the southward migrations, who may be responsible for the lighter skin as well. These vanished peoples left their traces in the terracing and irrigation techniques of the Negroids, both Bantu and Nilote, who cultivate those hillsides where their remains have been found, and who have adopted—in these regions but nowhere else—all the Hamite customs noted above.
¹⁵
The Galla tribes are the only modern Hamites in East Africa, but four hundred miles to the south, in the region of the Crater Highlands of Tanzania, peoples persist whose origins appear to be Hamitic. If so, they derive not from the Galla but from older stocks that have been isolated for many centuries, perhaps since the time of the earliest invaders out of the north.