The Tree Where Man Was Born (17 page)

Like many white men that one comes across in Africa, Myles Turner is a solitary whose job as park warden of the Serengeti keeps him in touch with mankind more than he would like, but one day he got away on a short safari, and was kind enough to take me with him. We would go to the Gol Mountains, in Maasai Land, and from there attempt to reach by Land Rover that part of the Rift Escarpment that stands opposite a remote volcano known to the Maasai as
ol doinyo le eng ai
, the Mountain of the God, called commonly Lengai.

The eighth of February was a day of low still clouds, waxy gray with the weight of rain. On the plain, the herd animals were restless, and the gnu, crazy-tailed, fled to the four winds, maddened by life. At Naabi Hill, the eastern portal of the Serengeti Park, three lionesses lay torpid on a zebra. Vultures nodded in the low acacias, and the hyenas, wet hair matted like
filth on their sagging bellies, dragged themselves, tails tight between their legs, from the rain wallows in the road.

We turned off north toward Loliondo, then east again under Lemuta Hill. Between Lemuta and the Gols is a dry valley, in the rain shadow of the Crater Highlands; here the hollow calls of sand grouse resound in the still air, and an echo of wind from the stoop of a bateleur eagle. Where we had come from and where we were going, a pale green softened the short grass, but in the shadow of the rain, despite massed clouds in all the distances, the flicked hoof of a gazelle raised the soil in a spiral of thin dust.

On the far side of the desert valley is the Gol—the “Hard Country” of the Maasai—a badlands of arid thorny hills and high cold wind. The Gol is crossed by a canyon two miles wide, Ngata Kiti, that climbs gradually in a kind of arch and descends again into the Salei Plain. Ngata Kiti is the eastern range of the migrant herds, and theoretically connects the Serengeti populations with those of the Crater Highlands, but in 1959 this “Eastern Serengeti,” which included Ngorongoro Crater, was returned to the Maasai. In addition, the government attempted to close off Ngata Kiti, where a few nomad Maasai kept a few cattle. Heavy posts linked with seven strands of wire were planted straight across the valley mouth. The wildebeest, faced with this fence, were undetterred; the wire held, but the whole fence went over. “Tried to interfere with what thousands of animals had done for thousands of years,” said Myles, a slight wiry man with weary eyes in a weathered face and a wild shock of sandy red hair. He glared at the old fence line with satisfaction. “It’s marvelous the way those animals smashed it flat. I use the posts for firewood now, out on safari.”

At the mouth of Ngata Kiti is Ol Doinyo Rabi—the Cold Mountain—named for the chill wind that sweeps the Gol in summertime, when the herds have gone west to the woods, and the land is empty. This day there were small companies of wildebeest and zebra, and a secretary bird, that long-limbed aberrant eagle that stalks the open ground, but the true habitants
of the Gol are the gazelles, which are the first to reach Ngata Kiti and the last to leave it. Probably the thin grass is sweet, since this soil has been enriched by the volcanos, but here in the rain shadow it is stunted for lack of water. The vehicle seemed small and lost between the walls of Ngata Kiti, winding slowly up the valley toward Naisera, the Striped Mountain, named for black streaks of blue-green algae that have formed on its granite face. Halfway up, big fig trees burst from ledges and crevasses, the bare roots feeling their way down to sustenance one hundred feet below. Behind Naisera we made camp in a grove of umbrella thorn and wildflowers; I remember a delicate apricot hibiscus. At Naisera there are highland birds: the anteater chat and the bronzy sunbird, crombecs, tits. . . .

Myles’s Land Rover was packed with gear of all descriptions, and a truck carried tents for each of us and two tents for the staff, as well as stoves, stores, and water. Like most British East Africans, Myles is extremely thorough in his safari preparations, and saw nothing strange at all in having seven pairs of hands to help us through a short trip of three days—what was strange to him was my discomfort. Not that I let it bother me for long. While the tents went up, I watched white clouds cross the black thunderhead behind Naisera; lightning came, and a drum of rain on the hard ground across the valley. On the taut skin of Africa rain can be heard two miles away. Bird calls rang against Naisera’s walls, which on the north are painted white by high nests of hawk and raven. At the summit, in the changing light, the swifts and kestrels swooped and curved, and an Egyptian vulture gathered light in its white wings. Then the sky rumbled and the white bird sailed on its shaft of sun into the thunder.

The storm arrived in early afternoon. I lay content beneath the raining canvas, head propped upon my kit, and gazed through the tent flap down past Naisera into the dry valley below Lemuta where no rain fell. In the thunder, wildebeest were running. When the rain eased, I crossed the grove to a cave in Naisera’s wall that had a small boma of thorn brush at the
mouth, and a neat dry hearth. In a similar cave in the Moru Kopjes, shields, elephants, and abstract lines are painted on the walls in the colors that are seen on Maasai shields; the white and yellow come from clays, the black from ash of a wild caper, and the red ocher is clay mixed with juice from the wild nightshade. Presumably the artists were a band of young warriors, il-moran, who wander for several years as lovers, cattle thieves, and meat-eaters before settling down to a wife, responsibilities, and a diet based on milk and cattle blood. According to Leite, a young Maasai ranger, this cave in the Gol Mountains was also a place of meat-eating, which is forbidden in the villages, and which no woman is allowed to watch. Those women who see it are flogged, he told Myles, who nodded in approval. Leite is tall and brown, with a stretched ear lobe looped into a knot; he gazed about him with an open smile, happy to be here in Maasai Land.

Leite’s people were part of the last wave of lean herdsmen to descend upon East Africa from the north. Perhaps five centuries ago the present-day Nandi tribes invaded western Kenya, driving earlier herdsmen known as the Tatog south from the region of Mt. Elgon; the Maasai tribes were farther to the east, in the grasslands and surrounding plateaus of the Rift Valley, and they, too, appear to have displaced an earlier people, known to the Dorobo as the Mokwan,
¹
who had long hair and enormous herds of long-horned cattle, and who may be the same herdsmen as the Mwoko, recorded by the Meru Bantu of Mt. Kenya.

In regard to the coming of the Maasai, the Dorobo say
²
that a Dorobo hunter at the Narok River saw great companies of people coming down out of the north, and hid; he was caught by the Maasai, and guided them to water for their cattle. The Maasai are thought to have reached Nakuru and the Ngong Hills near Nairobi in the seventeenth century, and their heaven-born first laibon or medicine man was found as a youth in the Ngong at a time thought to have been about 1640. Subsequently they continued south along the Rift, and in the vicinity of the Crater Highlands held great battles with a people that
their tradition calls
il Adoru
³
—conceivably the Barabaig, a tribe of the Tatog so fierce that they are known to present-day Maasai as
il Ma-’nati
or “Mangati,” the Enemy, a name reserved, so it is said, for a worthy foe.

Otherwise, the Maasai met with small resistance. By the nineteenth century, they had driven the Galla tribes northeast across the Tana, and Maasai Land extended east and west one hundred and fifty miles and five hundred miles north and south, from the region of Maralal on the Laikipia Plateau to the south end of the Maasai Steppe in Tanzania. Their raids, which spread from Ikuria Land on Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean coast, were feared by Bantu, Arab, and European alike, so much so that Maasai Land remained unexplored until less than a century ago. Avoided by the great slave routes and trails of exploration into the interior, it was the last terra incognita in East Africa.

Linguistically the Maasai are closest to the Bari of the Sudan,
⁴
and the many customs that they share with other tribes of Nilotic origin include male nudity, the shaving of females, the extraction of two middle teeth from the lower jaw, the one-legged heron stance, the belief that the souls of important men turn into snakes, and the copious use of spit in benediction. Like the Nuer, the Maasai believe that all cattle on earth belong to them, and that taking cattle from others is their right. Originally it was God’s intent to give all cattle to the Dorobo, but the great Maasai ancestor Le-eyo tricked the Dorobo, and God into the bargain, receiving the cattle in their place. Hence the Dorobo must live by hunting and gathering, which the Maasai despise. Eland and buffalo may be eaten by Maasai, since these are thought of as wild cattle, but no other animal, or fish or fowl, is ever hunted except for decorative or ceremonial purposes—ostrich head plumes, monkey-skin anklets, ivory earplugs, and the great helmets of lion mane that once identified a proven warrior. (An exception, the rhino, is poached for its horn, which is bought from the Maasai by Asian traders and sold in the East as an aphrodisiac; this commerce is at least as old as the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
, an account of a trading voyage to the
east coast in the first century A.D. In a six-month period of 1961, the Leakeys found over fifty speared rhino in the Olduvai region alone, each stripped of a horn that may be worth a few shillings a pound to the Maasai but far more to the trader. A recent increase in the trade has threatened the black rhino with extinction, all to no purpose, since despite its shape and dynamic angle, the horn—not true horn at all, but hard-packed hair—can do nothing to spur the love-bent oriental, who may pay as much as two hundred dollars per pound to ingest it as a powder.)

Like the Dinka, the Maasai have a moon legend of the origin of death, which was formerly unknown among mankind, and is still thought of as unnatural: Naiteru, a deity residing on Mt. Kenya, instructed the patriarch Le-eyo that if a child of the tribe should die, he must cast away the body with the words, “Man dies, and returns again; the moon dies and remains away.” But since the first child to die was not his own, Le-eyo did not bother to obey, and ever since then, man has died and the moon has been reborn. Eventually Le-eyo called his sons to his own deathbed to ask what they wished as an inheritance. The greedy elder son, who became the ancestor of all Bantu, wanted part of everything on earth; the younger said he would be content with some small remembrance of his father. This modesty was rewarded with great cattle wealth, whereas the Bantu son was given a little bit of everything, and ever since has been eking out his days with his wretched agriculture.

Within the tribes, certain Maasai became smiths, and fashioned the spear blades and the short sword known as the simi; as in Hamitic tribes, such people were inferior. When the white man appeared in the late nineteenth century, he was called l’Ojuju, the Hairy One, and lacking cattle, was despised with all the rest.

At the time this was written by Karl Peters, whose perfidious treaties with unsuspecting chiefs laid the groundwork for Germany’s seizure of Tanganyika, the power of the Maasai was already waning due to drought and disease and a growing resistance from such victims as the Nandi and the Kamba, as well as incessant war between their own marauding tribes; cheered on by their women, they staged great civil wars on the open plain, one consequence of which was the utter disruption of the Laikipiak Maasai, whose lands were taken over by the Samburu. In 1869, the Samburu had infected the Maasai with cholera, which raged through the tribe in epidemic, and just before the Europeans appeared in force in the 1880s, they were swept by smallpox, and their beasts struck down by waves of rinderpest, or pleuro-pneumonia, a cattle plague from Asia that also affects certain antelope (rinderpest is thought to have eliminated the greater kudu from wide areas of its former range). Kikuyu and Kamba herds, in Kenya, were also afflicted, bearing out an old Kikuyu prophecy that great famine and disaster would precede the fatal coming of pale strangers. Like the Kamba, the Maasai believe that a comet foretells the coming of disaster, and they say that a comet crossed the sky just before the appearance of l’Ojuju: the great laibon Mbatien had also prophesied the advent of the white man in a vision brought on by honey wine. On his deathbed, Mbatien bequeathed his title and attainments to his son Lenana, much to the annoyance of the elder son Sendeyo, who had reason to believe that Lenana had cheated him out of his heritage. Once again the Maasai split into hostile factions more or less separated by the boundary between what had become, in 1895, British and German East Africa. But after twelve years of rinderpest, smallpox, famine, and German harassment in the region of Kilimanjaro, Sendeyo forgave Lenana, and the Maasai were reunited. Already Lenana had made peace with the British; so
weakened were the Maasai, in fact, that they needed European protection from their enemies. Because of their great misfortunes, made so much worse by their delight in fighting one another, they were unable to resist the Hairy Ones—unlike the Nandi, farther west, who were not pacified until 1905, and the Turkana, in the north, who held out for another twenty years. The Maasai wanted very much to fight against the Germans in World War I, which brought Tanganyika under British administration, but the British thought it unwise to give them arms.