In Praise of Savagery (20 page)

‘Actually,’ said Andy, ‘if it’s all the same with you, we’ll give the goat a miss. Just for today.’

The seed of a mesquite tree took root, once, in the desert by the shores of Lake Turkana. Sensing water deep beneath the sand and rocks, it sent down its long tap-root low into the ground to where, a hundred feet or more below, this water was to be found. Slowly, slowly, over the years, the tree began to grow; not tall, for this was not a place for tall trees, but it sent up its branches towards the sky and it spread down its roots all around. And as it grew, and as its roots forced their way further into the earth, so they turned over and turned up some of the things that lay beneath. And presently there appeared, at the base of the tree’s trunk, some small splinters of bone, too old and too dry for the scavengers to pay any attention to; and so they lay there, for day after day, for month after month and for year after year, until, one day, a man found them and picked them up. They were odd, these bones, and hard and stone-like, and not at all like the bones of any animal that he had seen.

And it happened that these bones, eventually, found their way into the hands of an anthropologist.

Four years later, after an extraordinarily protracted and painstaking excavation, this anthroplogist and his companions managed to recover and to reconstruct, from the ground beneath
the mesquite tree, the skeleton of an 11- or 12-year-old boy, almost entire. He was five foot three, this boy, when he died, and was likely to have reached six feet or thereabouts had he lived, or so they calculated. And he had died one and a half million years before.

A decade later, in the Samburu Hills just outside Maralal, twenty fossil fragments were discovered—mainly scraps and shards of teeth and jawbones, they were, but they were older by far than the Lake Turkana boy, and were the remains, perhaps, of mankind’s oldest and most distant ancestors.

And over the years we scattered and spread far and wide over the face of the earth.

Ten thousand years ago, when the ice-sheets retreated, we left our caves made a life for ourselves as hunters and foragers in the plains and the forests. And that suited us just fine: it suited us fine for a long while. But little by little, over time, things began to change.

In the open lands, in Africa, the hunters of wild sheep and goats gradually became herders and pastoralists, as the Samburu and Rendille are today, and went from following their quarry’s migrations between their seasonal pastures to leading them there and protecting them from other predators with their spears and bows, and increasing the size of their flocks.

Further north, a wave of settlers from the Near East crossed the sea and landed on the Greek coast. These people were not hunters and gatherers; nor were they pastoralists and herders. They were the first farmers, and they brought with them tools and techniques for clearing and transforming the land, and for the sowing and reaping of crops.

They lived a hard life, these farmers, and one of constant, grinding labour, in which they would work for months on end with little immediate reward; and their manner of living was
unenvied by the indigenous hunters, and mostly ignored, for nigh on a thousand years.

Little by little, however, the farmers’ settlements began to spread northwards and westwards across Europe’s plains and the river-valleys, and so successful were they that their methods, in time, came to be imitated by my ancestors and by Wilfred Thesiger’s, and perhaps by yours; and they all, in time, came to spend their days tilling the land with stone hoes.

In return for giving up a life of comparative leisure for one of hard manual work, the settled farmers were both rewarded and penalised.

They were rewarded, on the one hand, by conditions that led, in time, to civilisation, to the world’s great empires, and, ultimately, to the Industrial Revolution and to the world we live in today.

And on the other hand, and more immediately and tangibly, they were penalised with a decline in both the quality and quantity of their lives over those of their hunting ancestors by every observable measure.

For the average person, the shift to settled farming brought with it a lower material income, a dramatic loss of leisure-time and a marked reduction in physical health, compared with their hunter-gatherer and pastoralist cousins, as measured both through stature and through life-expectancy. And this was not just for a transitional period of a few years or a few hundred or even a few thousand, but for more or less the whole of recorded history, right up until the dawn of the nineteenth century.

In 1800, the daily wage of an English farm-labourer would buy eleven pounds of wheat. He probably would have had other things to spend it on, mind; but if it was wheat that he wanted, then that was how much of it he would have got. But in ancient Babylon, in 1800 BCE, the daily wage of a farm-labourer would have bought fifteen pounds of wheat. And in classical Athens it would have
bought twice as much. The English farm-labourer would have eaten other things besides wheat, though. With the wages from his ten-hours-a-day, 300-days-a-year job, he would have been able to afford, in a typical day, some hunks of bread and a little cheese to go with it, with perhaps some bacon-fat as well, and he would have washed it all down with some cups of weak tea, and also some beer. All of this, put together, would have given him about 1,500 calories-worth of nourishment. Whereas the daily food intake of the average hunter-gatherer, working just three hours a day, both then and now, and in all the tens of thousands of years before the first farmers arrived in Europe, was and is around 2,300 calories, and it is far more varied and far richer in protein besides.

So by farming the land instead of foraging and hunting in it or leading their herds across it to their seasonal pastures, people became poorer in terms of what they could afford to feed themselves, and this despite them working so much harder and so much longer.

And besides this, the new manner of living changed both the culture and the composition of the people. Because the qualities and attitudes that make you good and successful at lounging about for days painting yourself with war-paint, and then seeing off a leopard that’s prowling around your camp or grabbing your spear and launching yourself off after a wild pig at half a second’s notice, and then feasting until you’re too fat to move, are not at all the same as the qualities and attitudes that make you good and successful at ploughing a field with a stick and scattering the good seed on the land, and then feeding and watering and weeding it day after day, and keeping the birds off, and weeding some more, all in anticipation of a harvest that could be half a year away or more—if the weather holds and if the rains don’t fail. In that sort of life, the farming life, you tend to get a higher proportion of serious, duty-driven individuals with a strong work-ethic, who go
in for deferred gratification and who are well suited to performing simple, repetitive tasks for hours, days, weeks and months on end.

Or, to be technical about this for a moment, you get a lot of the sort of people who inherit genes for what neuroscientists call a ‘strong response inhibition mechanism in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex’, which is something that makes them better at being conscientious, organised, disciplined and self-controlled, and not so good at being spontaneous or acting on impulse. The sort of people, in fact, who at another time might be content to spend their whole lives sorting cheques into account-number order, or else training all hours to be good at a sport that they don’t actually enjoy, because it’s wrong to quit things.

But apart from turning out the puritans and pedants of the future, one thing that settled farming did do very well indeed was to vastly increase the number of people that the land could support, and wherever farming took hold the population exploded. This meant that eventually, by sheer weight of numbers, the new people swallowed up the old and the new way of living replaced the old way altogether.

And from there it was not such a big step to the cotton mills.

That’s progress for you, though. And that’s civilisation.

‘I had no desire to go back to civilisation,’ he had said, ‘and wished I was just starting out from the Awash Station with the whole Awash River still before me to explore.’

There are some that see life as a matter of departures—a process of moving on and leaving behind, of exploration and discovery.

And there are others that see it all as one long, circuitous return-trip, the aim of which, always, is to get back home; and in so doing to regain what was lost and what left behind, and so to arrive, once more, at the place where you know that you belong, among the people whom you recognise, at last, as your own people, and there to become what you really are and always were.

And I cannot for the life of me say which of the two it was that had the upper hand in the life of the man.

There were departures, to be sure, and more departures than most.

He was not long back in England. A while in The Milebrook, his mother’s home on the Welsh borders, and the village with its post office and its pub and its church and church hall, and the river that ran shallow on its stony bed through the green valley beside; and then it was down to London, by steam-train, and the lectures at the Royal Geographical Society, and the
unfinished language-course at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Then he went to the Sudan, first as a colonial administrator, an Assistant District Commissioner in Darfur, and then as a junior officer, or Bimbashi, in the Defence Force.

War followed and he left the Sudan to fight against the Italians in Abyssinia; then to Syria, to fight with the Druze Legion against the Vichy French; and from there to the Western Desert with the newly formed SAS, to fight the Germans, and rising there to the rank of major.

In the years that followed the war, others returned to their homes, picked up the pieces of interrupted careers and marriages, re-entered, as best they could, the half-gone childhoods of children who had more than half-forgotten what they had ever looked like.

But for him there were more departures still.

To Arabia, there to live and travel with the Bedouin.

To Iraq, there to spend some seven years, on and off, in the reed longhouses of the Marsh Arabs.

And the books he wrote about those years and the photographs he took, and the acclaim that followed.

And after, to Kurdistan, to Afghanistan, to the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, to Morocco. To more fighting, still, on the side of the Royalists and against the communists in the Yemeni civil war.

Then four expeditions, through the borderlands of Uganda, the Sudan and Kenya. During which he made a crossing of the deserts of the Northern Frontier District, climbing Mount Kulal and exploring the shores of Lake Turkana.

In all these places he saw, and recorded in his writings, the last days of ancient worlds and ways of life that were themselves in the process of departing from the world; and which, today, are mostly all gone. Long gone.

These were, indeed, departures.

And yet, running through them all like the waters of a river moving ever onwards through the changing landscape of his life there was also a constant longing for what had once been; a yearning to return to the life of ancient and savage nobility that he had once seen, in earlier days, in the sun-scorched land of his birth, and also, at another time, in pale moonlight glinting on spear-points in a clearing in a wood on the borders of the forbidden kingdom of Aussa.

And now these times were all gone and he had washed up here, where I was, in the little town of Maralal, with his three adopted ‘sons’, and with their people; who, much of the time called him, simply, The Old Man, Up There.

We were sitting outside Mr Bhola’s garage in Maralal watching the world go by and drawing figures in the dirt with our sticks when we heard the roar of the engine and the grating of the gears and saw the Land Cruiser coming towards us. It came at speed, jolting and bumping over the potholes of the town street, and it sent up a cloud of dust in its wake, and scattered the people in its path; and there was a figure in the passenger-seat, turning to gesticulate at the driver and then looking towards where we sat and pointing; and then the car screeched to a halt before us and Wilfred Thesiger stepped out. Or rather, he half-stepped out, but he hadn’t yet done with what he was saying.

‘How often do I have to tell you, Kibiriti?’ he said, ‘How often?’

Kibiriti grinned and shrugged and said nothing.

‘You’ll kill us all one day. You see if you don’t.’

And then he turned towards where we stood, lined up like an honour-guard, having hastily jumped to our feet and wiped the dust from our hands on our shorts.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you survived.’

He had on the same tweed jacket that he had worn when I had met him in Tite Street, despite the heat, and a green canvas hat
with a soft brim, of the kind worn by fishermen; and he carried a carved walking-stick of dark wood.

We rose to our feet and shook hands with him, awkwardly, formally.

Andy had a battered paperback copy of
Arabian Sands
in his left hand when he stepped forward, and Thesiger spotted it.

‘Well, what do you think of it?’ he said, nodding towards the book.

And Andy, overawed, stammered something about it having been excellent, although he hadn’t quite finished it yet; at which Thesiger grunted with satisfaction.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, what about a drink?’

And without waiting for an answer he strode purposefully across the road towards a tin-roofed shack with a tin Coca-Cola sign outside, and we scuttled along after him.

The shop-owner spotted him just before he crossed the threshold, and hastily switched off the transistor radio, from which a Michael Jackson tune had been blaring.

‘Here,’ said Thesiger, putting both hands on the counter before him and springing up upon it so that he was sitting facing us, ‘three bottles of Coca-Cola for my young guests.’