The Tree Where Man Was Born (38 page)

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.
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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.

Gidabembe, the Hadza say, has been one of their camps for a long time, longer than the oldest of them can remember. It is used mainly in the dry season, when large animals are more easily killed, and people gather into larger groups to be in the vicinity of the good hunters. The main encampment lies uphill from the cave, on a knoll overlooking the river, where four small hearths with thornbush walls are grouped among the stones. Two are backed by upright granite and a third by a fallen tree; no roofs are constructed in this season, for there is no rain. The people are invisible to the outside world, which at Gidabembe is no farther than the glint of a tin duka on the slope of the Kainam Plateau, high on the far side of the valley. Their fires are small and their voices quiet, and they are so circumspect in all their habits that no scent of human habitation is detectable, although they do not bother about the droppings of baboons, which appropriate these rocks when man is absent; the baobab seeds in the baboon droppings are sometimes gleaned for man’s own use.
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Only a rare infant’s cry betrays the presence of human beings, for the children play quietly, without squalling. One is among them very suddenly, a community of small people speaking prettily in soft click-speech in
the light airs of afternoon. Far below the shelter of the rocks is green forest and the brown wind-sparkled river that in July is already running dry.

Soft voices in leaf-filtered sun, and a child humming, and a warm wind off the highlands that twitches the dry trees and blows color into the embers at the hearth. The earth behind the fire has been softened with a digging stick. Here, at dark, covered only with the thin rags worn in the day, the family lies down together on the small mat of kongoni hide or hay. From the thorn walls hang gourds and arrow packets and bird skins for arrow vanes, and by one hearth is an iron pot, black and thin as a leaf cinder. In these simple arrangements is a ceremonial sense of order in which everything is in place, for the ceremony here is life itself, yet these shelters last no longer than the whims of their inhabitants, who may move tomorrow to another place, nearby or far. In the rains, especially, they scatter, for game and water are widespread. Somewhere they draw a few sticks over their heads, with grass matted on top, though they are casual about the rain when food is plentiful. In the dry season, many will return to Gidabembe, by the river, for Gidabembe is permanent, although all but the oldest of its people come and go. The hunter, who must travel light, limits his family to parents and children, and the people move in ever-changing groups, with little sense of tribe. The Hadza have no chiefs, no villages, no political system; their independence is their very breath. Giga speaks of an old man who wandered off last year and was thought lost. Three months later he turned up again, well rested from the stress of human company.

In the day the men and boys remain separate from the women. The men carry a fire drill among their arrows, and wherever Hadza tarry for more than a few minutes, and tarrying occupies much of their life, a small fire will be built. One hearth overlooks the river. Here in the broken sunlight, in the odor of wood smoke, the men and boys squat on their heels, shoulder to shoulder in a warm circle around the fire. With Dafi is his son Kahunda, and Saidi the son of Chandalua, who is still hunting in the land called T’ua; both are beautiful children
whose eyes are not yet red from fire smoke, nor their teeth broken and brown. Dafi and Ginawi butcher zebra with deft twists of their crude knives; at Dafi’s side is an ancient sharpening stone, glinting with soft iron shavings and concave with many seasons of hard use. Knives and metal arrow points come mostly from other tribes, but sometimes they are hammered cold from soft iron acquired in trade for skins and honey. Sheaths are fashioned from two flat bits of wood bound round with hide and sinew. Until recently, a male Hadza wore the pelt of a genet cat,
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bound on by the hide thong that holds his knife, but now almost all wear small cloth skirts. Each carries a hide pouch with shoulder strap containing scraps of skin and tendon, tobacco leaves and hemp, a disc of baobab wood, lucocuko, used in gambling, a hunk of vine tuber which, when chewed, serves as a glue for binding arrow vanes, some rag-wrapped hornet larvae medicine or dawa, useful for chest pain, and snakebite dawa, of ingredients known only to a few, which is used in trade with the Mbulu and Mangati, spare arrowheads and scraps of metal, a chisel tool made from a nail, a pipe carved from a soft stone in the river. This pipe, one of the few Hadza objects that is not obtained in barter, is no more than a tube, and the tobacco or bangi will fall from it unless it is held vertical. Both men and women, staring at the sky, smoke the stone pipe with gusty sucks accompanied by harsh ritual coughing, which is followed in turn by a soft ecstatic sigh.

Dafi and Ginawi eat zebra skin after burning off the hair, and put aside strips of the thick hide to be used for the soles of sandals, which most though not all of the hunters have adopted. They are joined by a Hadza with oriental eyes, high cheekbones, and a light skin with a yellow cast, who brings to mind a legend
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—not entirely without evidence to support it—that long ago Indonesians penetrated inland from the coast; the Tatoga of this region say that their ancestors came originally from beyond the sea. This man has been to Yaida Chini, and is sorry that Enderlein does not recall his name. “Zali,” he says. “It is bad of you to forget. I have told it to you at Yaida Chini.”

Certain other sallow Hadza might be Bushmen but for the lack of wrinkles and steatopygous buttocks, and Enderlein says that in their attitudes and ways, the Hadza seem identical to the click-speakers of the Kalahari, whom he has read all about. Bushmanoid peoples once inhabited East Africa, and it is tempting to suppose that the two groups were related long ago. On the other hand, certain Negroid groups such as the Bergdama of southwest Africa have adopted the Bushman culture, and even the Zulu have adopted a click-speech from these Twa or Abatwa, whose old hunting lands they have appropriated. The Bushmen themselves have Negroid attributes that they may not have always possessed—it is not known what their ancestors looked like.

But the yellow-brown Hadza look not at all like Giga, and most of the tribe are of mixed appearance, despite the striking heavy-browed appearance of such individuals as Giga, and Andaranda who killed the zebra, and a man named Kargo who, in size, is a true pygmy, and the large-headed girl at Yaida Chini who was the first Hadza that I ever saw, and one identified on sight, it must be said, by my Isanzu passenger, who had never seen her in his life.