The Tree Where Man Was Born (41 page)

Mugunga draws on Yaida’s bow, then picks the stronger bow of Salibogo. The Hadza faces fill with joy; they respect the rifle but they trust the bow. Then Mugunga vanishes once more, and the silence deepens. Leaves stir and are still.

The birdsong ceases as the buffalo crashes free, but there is no shout, no rifle shot, only more silence. When the hunters reappear, Enderlein says, “I thought the arrow might bring him out where I could get a shot at him, but Mugunga waited a split second too long, and the bloody brute pushed off, out the far side.” Even so we will track this buffalo; Peter keeps the gun. The Hadza move on, bush by bush, glade by glade, checking bent grass, earth, and twigs, darting through copses where one would have thought so large an animal could not have gone. To watch such tracking is a pleasure, but this is taut work, for the buffalo is listening, it has not taken flight. Somewhere in the silent trees, the dark animal is standing still, or circling to come up behind. Wherever it is, it is too close.

In the growing heat, our nerves go dead, and we are pushing stupidly ahead, inattentive, not alert, when the spoor dies, too, and we cut away from the river in search of another animal. But the sun is climbing, and the big animals will have taken to the shade. The chance of catching one still grazing in the open is now small.

In a swampy place the Hadza fall on a tomato bush. The small fruits are warm red, intensely flavored, and we eat what we can and tie the rest into a rag to bring back to Gidabembe. Not that the hunters feel obliged to do this: men and women seek and eat food separately and quickly, to avoid the bad manners of refusing it to others, and occasional sharing between the sexes is a matter of whim. Farther on, Yaida and Salibogo locate honey in a tree, and again the hunt for buffalo is abandoned. Usually a grass torch is stuck into the hole to smoke out
the bees, but the Hadza are more casual than most Africans about bee stings, and Yaida is wringing one stung hand while feeding himself with the other. The honeycomb is eaten quickly, wax, larvae, and all. The Hadza also eat hyena, cats, and jackals, though they draw the line at frogs and reptiles, and not every man will eat a vulture.

Hyena prints, and spoor of waterbuck. Nangai kicks at buffalo manure to see its freshness, and it is plain that we have passed the dark silent animals close by. Mugunga, frustrated, shoots a lance arrow at a dik-dik half-hidden by low, intervening branches—he leans into the shot on his left foot as he shoots—and the arrow drives hard into a sapling by the dik-dik’s neck. He turns to look at us, shaking his head. We circle slowly toward the Udahaya, striking it at midday far downriver. The hunt is over, and we walk barefoot in the water, shooting doves and hyrax with the .22 as we return upstream. Peter is brooding, but I am still excited by the hunt, and glad to be free of the dense bush, and so I celebrate this moment of my life, the sparkle of gold mica on my brown feet, a pair of pied kingfishers that racket from dead limb to limb, the sweet scent of the white-flowered vernonia, swarming with bees that make honey for the Hadza. And the Hadza seem happy, too: their time is now. Though there will not be nearly enough to go around, it awes them to see the doves fall to our gun. They are used to failure in the hunt, which these days occurs often, and in the future must occur more often still.

A visitor to Gidabembe comes from a small camp in the Sipunga Hills, where he helps take care of a young invalid, apparently an epileptic. Last year this boy was badly burned when he fell into a fire, and was led across the hills to the clinic in Mbulu, but after two days he ran away, back to Sipunga. This spring, left alone in camp, he fell again into the fire and was burned so drastically that he can no longer move.

Magandula has borrowed a wood comb from Giga; perched on a rock, he combs his head for a long time without discernible
results. According to Magandula, it is only the influence of civilization that prevents the
Sipunganebe
from deserting the man burned, and the Hadza cheerfully agree: among nomadic hunter-gatherers, who cannot afford responsibility for others, such desertion is quite common. Only last year, Yaida says, a man in fever was abandoned in the mountains: “We left him his bow, but he could not live; surely he was eaten by lions.” Magandula, scrubbing his shoes, becomes excited and speaks shrilly: “To live in the bush is bad! Hasn’t the government taught us to live in houses? I want nothing to do with the bush!” In recent years the government has made of the Hadza a symbol of primitive apathy to their countrymen, who are exhorted to increase their numbers and work hard on their shambas—“Don’t rot in the bush like the Watindiga!” And tillers from Mbulu come sometimes to Yaida Chini and jeer at them: “How can people be so primitive!”—just as the people of Arusha might speak of the poor peasants of Mbulu, or the people of Dar es Salaam of the provincial folk met in Arusha.

Four naked children have clambered up into a grewia bush and hunch there in the branches, knees under their chins, munching sweet berries while they watch us. Despite big bellies and thin legs, which are lost early, Hadza children are clear-eyed and energetic, and like their parents, they are cheerful. Somewhere it has been suggested that hunter-gatherers seem happier than farmers, and of necessity more versatile and alert than people who live mostly in a rut. But their good spirits may come also from their varied diet, which is far healthier than the ugali and pombe fare of the shamba dwellers they are told to emulate.

Magandula watches the white man watching the small dark naked bodies in the branches. “
Kama nyani
,” he jeers, with terrific ambivalence, for Magandula is in pain—“Just like baboons!” He searches our faces for the affirmation that he feared was there before he spoke. “Look at old Mutu, and that old woman!” he bursts out again, pointing. “Life is too hard here!” And the old woman herself, coming home one day with her rag
sack, speaks of berries with disdain. “Ugali is better,” she declares, to show her acquaintance with maize meal paste, although ugali is woefully poor in both taste and nutrition.

Magandula’s emotion is disturbing because he is angry without provocation, therefore afraid, therefore fanatic. And what can Magandula be afraid of? Unless he fears that he has lost touch with his origins, his clans, the earth and the old ways, with no real hope or promise from the new.

As if to bear witness for Magandula, old Mutu comes tottering to his hearth and sinks down in a heap against a stone. He no longer bothers with his bow and arrows, which rot in the bush behind his head; the sad old broken arrows with their tattered vanes are the home of spiders. Mutu is back from begging maize at an Mbulu shamba, and complains as ever of his feet, which are leprously cracked and horned up to the ankle bone. To my touch, his afflicted flesh feels rubbery and dead. Once Mutu walked as far east as Mbulu, where he came by his disease. “Things like this”—and he flicks his ruined flesh, contemptuous, lip curling around a villainous old mouthful of snag teeth—“you don’t find in the bush.” In proof of his corruption by the world, Mutu begs cynically for two shillingi—the only Hadza that ever begged at all—and is happy to accept a dove instead. Despite his misery and decrepitude, he has no wish to visit the dispensary at Yaida Chini, and waves away the offer of a ride. Already he has his stone pipe lit, tucking a red cinder into it with his bare fingers, and now he lies back laughing at some ancient joke, coughing ecstatically after the custom of his people.

Twig-legged Mutu is big-bellied as a baby, lying there in the sunlight in his swaddling. He rails at life with unholy satisfaction, and so do the two old women whose hearths adjoin his own at the base of the great tilted rock with the rounded top that might be the gravestone of God. All three worn-out souls are of separate families, and fiercely maintain their family hearths as symbols of the independence which is so vital to the Hadza, although not one has relatives at Gidabembe who might look after him. Yet Mutu has maize and berries for his supper,
and so do his two neighbors. And it was Mutu who explained the greatest mystery of life at Gidabembe: how it was, when times were hard, that a scorned people were able to beg maize and tobacco from the Mbulu, who were few and poor here, and living themselves at a subsistence level.

The Hadza claim to perform certain services for the Mbulu, helping them to dig their shambas, tend their stock, and cultivate during the wet season; also, the Mbulu come to them for honey and dawa. But these infrequent services cannot account for the munificence of the Mbulu, and it seems clear from the quantity of maize obtained that the Hadza are not begging, but go to the shambas with every expectation of reward.

For the Mbulu, death is a great disaster, and the evil effects or pollutions that they fear the most are those associated with dead bodies. In former days, bodies were left to the hyenas, as with the Maasai, but nowadays, according to Mutu, who is borne out in every particular by Giga and Nangai, the dead person is buried quickly, after which a Hadza is summoned who is of the same sex as the dead. The Hadza shaves the head of the bereaved, who then strips himself naked and presents to the Hadza his clothes and all belongings of the dead person except money, which is not thought of as polluted, and also four debes (the debe or four-gallon kerosene can is the standard container in the bush) of maize. He or she then copulates with the Hadza, who thereby inherits the disaster, and will die eventually of this act. “He may count his years,” cries Magandula, who writhes at Mutu’s words but does not deny them, “but it will catch him before long.” Mutu is emphatic about his facts, pounding his old hand on the earth to simulate copulation. When he is finished he averts his gaze, shrugging his shoulders. Such was the penalty that his people paid for being poor; there was nothing to be done about it. But Nangai and Magandula say they would not perform such a service; it is only for these wild Hadza, who are so poor that they have no choice. (Perhaps the game scouts spread the word that there were wild Hadza at Gidabembe, for not long after our departure Enderlein sent evil news: “The people there were rounded up and taken to Yaida Chini, arriving
in time for a measles epidemic in which nine Hadza children died.”)

Listening politely to the shouts of Magandula, the hunters do not protest. They accept the scorn of their fellow man as a part of Hadza life. On the other hand, they prefer to remain in the bush. “I have got used to it,” says Chandalua, who is Yaida’s older brother and the father of the boy Saidi. With Dafi, he lives ordinarily in the Giyeda Barakh, on the far side of the Yaida, overlooking Lake Eyasi: Giyeda Barakh, known in their click-speech as
Hani’abi
, “the rocks,” will be a last stronghold of the Hadza. Chandalua’s gentle face has the transparence of infinity. Sitting on his warm stone notching an arrow shaft, he smiles approvingly on Magandula, who still scrubs fiercely at his shoes.

A stony path of rhino, man, and elephant leads up into Sipunga, and ascending it one morning, we met four lean Mangati entering the valley armed with spears and poisoned arrows. The arrows are illegal, since only the Hadza are permitted to hunt here without restraint, but rather than kill their scraggy beasts, the meat-eating Mangati poach wherever possible.

Both groups stop at a little distance, regarding each other without pleasure. The tall sandaled Mangati, cowled and scarified with half-circles of raised welts about the eyes, are handsome remote men, with a hard cast to their gaze. They look like legendary desert bandits, and their spears have a honed shine. But our party is the stronger, with two white men and the armed game scout Nangai, as well as Salibogo, Andaranda, and Maduru; we have two rifles and three bows. When Nangai steps forward and takes hold of the poisoned arrows, the Mangati leader abandons his bad smile. He refuses to let go, and his companions, scowling, shift their feet. The youngest, a very beautiful cold-faced morani, not yet twenty, makes contemptuous remarks to Andaranda, who steps past him on his pigeon-toed bare feet and continues up the trail. To save face for both sides, it is decided that the shafts will not be taken, only the
arrowheads, and the two groups part in silence, looking back over their shoulders until the others are out of sight.