The Tree Where Man Was Born (42 page)

The few Mangati in the region of Gidabembe are at peace with the Hadza, who have nothing worth taking away. “They do not kill us now,” the Hadza say. But the hunters, who are small and peaceable and claim no territory, are neither defenseless nor lacking in courage, and their forbearance has its limits. Not long ago, near Tandusi, to the south, some Hadza caught two Mangati moran in a prized bee tree, and when the Mangati defied a request that they come down, shot them out of it with lance arrows, killing both.

The Mangati, too, pay careful attention to death. An elder’s funeral may last nine months, while a monument of mud, dung, and poles some twelve feet high is erected in stages on the grave; at the end of the final ceremonies, as darkness falls, two ancient men crawl naked to the deserted mound and fasten a magic vine about its base, whispering, “Don’t hurry, wait for us, we will join you soon.” Most women and all children are left to the hyenas, but a female elder of good repute may also be given a small mound on which her wood spoon and clay cooking pot are placed. Toward the end of a brief mourning period, a hole is poked through the clay pot, to signify that her work on earth is done.
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We climb steadily through the early morning, across dry open hillsides without flowers. In a broad pile of dik-dik droppings on the trail is a small hole six inches deep and six across. Though it moves in daylight with the shadows of rock and bush, the tiny antelope returns at night to these rabbity heaps out in the open; here it feels safe from stealing enemies, and waits out the long African dark. Dik-dik (so the Dorobo say) once tripped over the mighty dung pile of an elephant, and has tried ever since to reply in kind by collecting its tiny droppings in one place.
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Man takes advantage of the habit by concealing in a hole a ring of thorns with the points facing inward and down. The dik-dik—meaning “quick-quick” in Swahili—cannot
extract its delicate leg, and is killed by the first predator to come along. Whoever is hunting here is not a Hadza, for the Hadza know nothing of traps or snares of any kind.

Rhinoceros, also sedentary in their habits, follow the same trails to water, dust wallow, and browse, and on a grand scale share this custom of adding to old piles of their own droppings, which are then booted all about, perhaps as a means of marking territory but more likely as an aid to orientation in a beast whose prodigious sniff must compensate for its poor eyesight. Rhino piles are common on this path, together with wallows and the primitive three-toed print. Not far away, one or more of these beasts is listening, flicking its ears separately in the adaptation that accounts in part for its uncanny hearing, and making up its rudimentary mind whether or not to clear the air with a healthy charge.

The ridge is open, with thick trees and granite islands; a squirrel sways among strange star-shaped fruits of a sterculia. Andaranda on his short bent legs, a hyrax swinging from his waist, views all about him with a smile. His bare feet, impervious to burrs and stones, thump steadily against the earth, and his hands, too, are tough as stumps, as they must be in a life so close to bees and thorns and fire. The trail arrives at a water point, Halanogamai, which Mbulu or Mangati have fenced off with thorn brush to keep out wild animals. Enderlein attacks the fence without a word, hurling it into high piles for a bonfire, and the Hadza drag wood to the fire that has nothing to do with the thorn fence, the threat of which to their way of life they have not grasped. Maduru gets a thorn branch stuck to his back, and I pick him free. One day, emerging from beneath the Land Rover, I was picked free by Salibogo, and another day by Gimbe; no African would expect thanks for this basic courtesy, and Maduru did not pause to thank me now.

On the far side of the Sipunga, the track turns north, skirting the heads of narrow gorges; the gorges open out on a broad prospect of the Yaida Plain, pale in the desert sun of summer. All along the rim rise granite monoliths, and at one of these vast
rocks known as Maseiba there lived until a few years ago an old Hadza named Seira and his wife Nyaiga. One day, says Maduru, Seira was out hunting hyrax, and had killed five with his bow, but the sixth fell into a dark crevice which hid a snake. Seira, three times bitten—Maduru slaps his arm, then chest, then side—an home and applied strong snakebite dawa. Feeling better, he lay down to rest. But unlike most hunters, who avoid encumbrance, Seira had two wives, and Nyaiga was very jealous of the second wife, even though she lived at Gidabembe. Nyaiga rubbed arrow poison into Seira’s bites and he shortly died.

The Hadza leave the elephant trail, circling west through windy glades toward high rocks bright with orange, blue-gray, and crusting gray-green lichens. Below, a cleft between two portals forms a window on the Yaida plain, and nestled in the cleft, entirely hidden from the world except from the spot on which we stand, is a small ledge shaded by a grove of three commiphora. The myrrh trees stand in heraldic triangle, and set against their scaly trunks are three shelters so well camouflaged by cut branches that the trees appear to grow out of a thicket. In seasons when the commiphora is in leaf, the shelters would not be visible at all.

We descend quietly, watched from hiding by the inhabitants. This place is Sangwe, Maduru whispers, and eight Hadza live here. They are very shy and hide behind the huts, though they have recognized Maduru, and been greeted. All three huts are roofed and lined with grass. The wall of one sustains the next, and the tight interiors are spare and orderly as new bird nests. As at Gidabembe, there is no scent of human waste and no notice taken of the seedy feces of baboons. Between the huts and the ledge rim where the cleft falls away into the canyon is a place scarcely large enough for the cooking fire, and beside the fire, on a kongoni hide, lies a strongly built young Hadza with a twisted eye and a stiff right hand bent back toward his wrist by the burnt hide. Healed flesh on his deformed left foot is a bare pink, but the crust on a hand-sized wound over his heel is oozing. This is Magawa, in whose wild eyes I see the
choking struggle in the fire, and the thrashing on his rock of pain in the weeks afterward, under the far, unforgiving eye of the sun god, Haine.

Magawa says that he fled the clinic at Mbulu because he could not live so far from Sangwe, and like Mutu, he has no wish to go to Yaida Chini even though here he must remain a helpless cripple. Maduru decides to go to Yaida Chini in Magawa’s place, and instead of remaining behind at Sangwe, he comes with us. The others watch Maduru go, and Magandula would say that in time they, too, will depart, leaving Magawa to the lions.

Nangai and Maduru know of a great rock with red paintings, which in this land may be thousands of years old; more recent drawings, usually abstract, are done in white and gray. Earlier this morning, off the trail, we found a large cave almost hidden in the thicket that had overgrown its mouth; Maduru had not known about this cave, which is occupied at present by bats and hornets but also contains an ancient hearth and vertical red stripes. The Hadza have no special curiosity about red markings, since every tree and boulder in this land which gives them life has its own portent and significations.

We descend the ridge, moving southeast along Sipunga. Maduru points out the holes of bees into which he has wedged stones. If the entrance to a hive must be enlarged to reach the honey, and if stones are handy, one or more may be stuck into the hole until the entrance is reduced again to the size approved by bees. “We put stones here,” Salibogo says, “so that the honey will come back.” Stones stuck in trees are one of the few signs of the presence of Hadza, who unlike the Mbulu and Mangati are invisible in their environment; they have no idea of wilderness, for they are part of it. At the foot of a ravine a bird comes to the trees with urgent trilling, then flies off again, pursued by Salibogo and Andaranda, who are trilling urgently themselves. This bird is the black-throated honey guide, which has evolved the astonishing habit of leading honey badger and man to the hives of bees and feasting upon the leavings of the raid; if no
honey is left for the honey guide, Africans say, it will lead the next man to a snake or lion. But this bird is soon back again, still trilling, having left the Hadza far away under the hill.

Southeastward, under the soaring rock, we follow in the noble paths of elephant. Maduru points at an overhanging wall, like a wave of granite on the yellow sky: Darashagan. A hot climb brings us out at last onto a ledge under the overhang, well hidden by the tops of trees that rise from the slopes below; the ledge looks south down the whole length of the Yaida Valley. There is a hearth here, still in use, and on the wall behind the hearth, sheltered by the overhang, are strong paintings in a faded red of a buffalo and a giraffe. We stand before them in a line, in respectful silence. One day another man, all nerves and blood and hope just like ourselves, drew these emblems of existence with a sharpened bird bone spatula, a twist of fur, a feather, and others squatted here to watch, much as the Hadza are squatting now. The Mbulu and Barabaig have no tradition of rock painting, whereas the Bushmen, before they became fugitives, made paintings very similar to these. The only other red paintings in this country are found in the region of Kondoa-Irangi, in the land of the click-speaking Sandawe.

Andaranda makes a fire and broils hyrax and a guinea fowl. When we have eaten, he picks grewia leaves, and the Hadza trim the leaves and roll tobacco from their pouches. I try Nangai’s uncultivated weed, and the Hadza giggle at my coughs. Of the drawings they say shyly, “How can we know?” Pressed, they ascribe them to the Old People or to Mungu (God), searching our faces in the hope of learning which one we prefer: our need to
understand
makes them uncomfortable. For people who must live from day to day, past and future have small relevance, and their grasp of it is fleeting; they live in the moment, a very precious gift that we have lost.

Lying back against these ancient rocks of Africa, I am content. The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without ever
having discovered what it was. In the ash of the old hearth, ant lions have countersunk their traps and wait in the loose dust for their prey; far overhead a falcon—and today I do not really care whether it is a peregrine or lanner—sails out over the rim of rock and on across the valley. The day is beautiful, my belly full, and returning to the cave this afternoon will be returning home. For the first time, I am in Africa among Africans. We understand almost nothing of one another, yet we are sharing the same water flask, our fingers touching in the common bowl. At Halanogamai there is a spring, and at Darashagan are red rock paintings—that is all.