The Tree Where Man Was Born (2 page)

—P
ETER
M
ATTHIESSEN

Peter Matthiessen’s writing is a triumph of lucid evocative prose, superbly crafted. His love for and deep understanding of East Africa informs his narrative, capturing the magic of its changing landscapes. He shares all the emotions that Africa can evoke in the traveler—frustration, anger, and sadness; excitement and fear; wonder and tranquillity. He writes of hair-raising experiences with all the stoic resignation of the African—yet these stories are extraordinarily exciting, and compel admiration just because they are so understated. In
The Tree Where Man Was Born
the strands of adventure are interwoven with the researches of an historian, the musings of a philosopher, the romance and melody of a poet.

He also has a deep curiosity about the natural world. He describes wide endless plains in the grip of draught, stretching on and on to a shimmering horizon, uncertain in the heat haze; volcanic mountains rising, dark and formidable, into the low, shrouding clouds; soft alpine meadows glorious with flowers and fragrance and the calling of birds. He writes, from experience, of the dread excitement, the tension, of walking through bush country where buffalos, elephants, or rhinos are close but invisible in the dense thickets from which, at any moment, they may charge. And, with equal attention to detail, of a small dung beetle rolling its tiny ball of ordure over ground made soft by rain. His eye for the landscape on a grand scale is matched by his perception of the smallest details of nature.

Matthiessen touches on the great seismic events that shaped this ancient land. And, too, on the wave after wave of different tribes that have migrated across Africa, moving relentlessly from the coasts to settle in the heartland—movements that have shaped the distribution of Africa’s people today. He talks of the Old People and the Little People—the first people—living much like their Stone Age ancestors, and of the advent of the herders and the farmers, who took the most fertile places for themselves, driving the hunter-gatherers into the most inaccessible, inhospitable places of desert and mountain. He tells of fierce warrior tribes who claimed vast areas of land for their herds of cattle and defended these stolen territories. And, finally, of the White Man who could sometimes defeat even the great Masai and Somali warriors with his guns. Eventually, of course, most of Africa was brought under colonial rule and new masters drew new boundaries, created new nations, and set about trying to change ancient and sometimes cruel cultures. It is a history that is complex, tragic, and often violent. And it is against this historical background that Matthiessen introduces the Africans he meets during his travels, those who had embraced the new ways of their one-time masters, those who clung desperately to their own cultures, and those, infinitely sad, who were caught between old and new, not knowing where their future lay.

Matthiessen describes the East Africa that I knew in the 1960s, on the brink of change, the last days of the world of the great white hunter, of Karen Blixen and
Out of Africa
, when animals still roamed on the outskirts of Nairobi. When he first arrived in East Africa in February of 1961, Matthiessen knew that he was witnessing an era that was passing, as did we all. And throughout this book, even as he describes the present in which he finds himself and looks back in history to understand the events that had led to that present, he also points to the inevitable future—the acceleration of change brought about by the ending of colonial rule, expanding human populations, vanishing cultures, and the spread of modern ways. And so, determined to experience as much as possible of the old ways
before it was too late, Matthiessen set off to travel, mostly in his old Land Rover but also on foot, to remote and hard-to-reach places. The beauty or the desolation of the landscapes he passed through, and the many species of animals he encountered, were all noted and are described in such a vivid and immediate way it is as if we were beside him, looking through his eyes. The Africans whom he met—whether helpful, arrogant, or hostile—are portrayed with respect and are presented here often with admiration, sometimes with sadness, and never with condescension.

My own first lessons of the old ways were from my mentor Louis Leakey, who brought to life for me an even more ancient past, described by Matthiessen, when the African plains saw the emergence of the first ape-men, the australopithecines, ancestors of all the tribes of humans that followed. I was able to spend three glorious months in a completely wild Olduvai Gorge, marked by no trail and still a habitat for many rhinos and lions. The only people we saw were a few Masai morani, dressed with the old-style blankets dyed with red earth and not the bright colors one sees today.

The australopithecines of East Africa were forerunners of the Old People, small aboriginal hunter-gatherers who lived in much the same way as their Stone Age ancestors and who once peopled the Great Rift Valley. Those few that are still left have been driven into the most inaccessible and inhospitable places—such as the arid tsetse fly–haunted land of Tanzania’s Yaida Valley and the Kalahari Desert of South Africa. There was a time when I desperately wanted to spend time with these Little People who lived in harmony with nature, but my destiny took me in another direction and I traveled to the forest haunts of more distant cousins yet—the chimpanzee tribes of southwestern Tanzania.

Matthiessen, however, in his quest to understand the old ways, did spend magical time with the Hadza, the Little People of Tanzania. So vivid is his account of this experience that I can almost believe that I, too, sat listening to their soft deep voices as they spoke, in their strange click language, around their
hearth fire at night. Indeed, this part of the book contains some of the most powerful and haunting writing of all as Matthiessen describes the freedom and dignity of the Hadza in their wild bush habitat. But he talks, also, of the government’s efforts to force these people into unaccustomed and unwelcomed agricultural practices and fixed settlements.

What makes
The Tree Where Man Was Born
so special is that it remains as relevant now as it was when it was first published in 1972. The book sets the scene that enables us to understand so many of the changes that have taken place since that time—many of which are predicted in his writing. For those setting out to visit Africa for the first time, and those who know Africa today but are not familiar with its past history, this book is invaluable, for it provides the background that makes living or traveling in Africa so much more meaningful. And although some of the wild places and wild people of which Matthiessen writes have, indeed, vanished from the rich tapestry of African life, the old Africa is still very much alive. There is still much to discover, much to learn, and much to enchant.

The traveler of today can still trek to wild places and know the thrill of close encounters with elephants and buffalos, lions and leopards. There are still areas where those with the stamina and courage required—and the money to get there—can climb dangerous mountains, explore wild and turbulent rivers, experience remote unlogged forests. The Hadza, the Little People, are no longer forced to practice agriculture and live in settlements—that attempt was finally abandoned, the mistake admitted. They have, it is true, lost 30 percent of their original homeland, but they are free to live their traditional lives in the bush that they love. And across Africa the old myths and beliefs of the past, though hidden by yet more layers of “civilization,” are not gone away. Under the cloak of darkness the old belief in witchcraft lives on, strong as ever, though usually guiltily concealed, not admitted to the passing tourist.

Yes, the ancient mystery of this vast continent still reaches into the unwary traveler’s mind, claiming yet another conquest, another who has thrilled to the magic of Africa and feels compelled
to return. At the end of this superb book, Peter Matthiessen, as he lies content under the stars of the African night, writes of “the unreasonable feeling” that he had found what he was searching for “without ever having discovered what it was.” This is what people mean, perhaps, when they say Africa has got under their skin, into their blood. It is, after all, known as the “cradle of mankind,” where we all began.

J
ANE
G
OODALL
, P
H
D, DBE

Founder—The Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace

www.janegoodall.org

The wild creatures I had come to Africa to see are exhilarating in their multitudes and colors, and I imagined for a time that this glimpse of the earth’s morning might account for the anticipation that I felt, the sense of origins, of innocence and mystery, like a marvelous childhood faculty restored. Perhaps it is the consciousness that here in Africa, south of the Sahara, our kind was born. But there was also something else that, years ago, under the sky of the Sudan, had made me restless, the stillness in this ancient continent, the echo of so much that has died away, the imminence of so much as yet unknown. Something has happened here, is happening, will happen—whole landscapes seem alert.

In early 1961, on the way around the world to join an anthropological expedition into New Guinea, I traveled south through Africa, wishing to see the Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel, up the Nile, the warrior-herdsmen of the south Sudan, and the great animal herds of the Serengeti Plains, all of which, in 1961, seemed on the point of disappearance. Traveling overland from Cairo, I got as far south as the Ngorongoro Crater, in the country still known then as Tanganyika. The new Sunday air charter from Nairobi permitted a brief visit to the Serengeti, where I saw the first leopard of my life, loping along among low bushes by a stream; on the homeward journey the pilot flew over the endless companies of game animals on the plain that is the greatest wildlife spectacle left in the world. But animals seen from the air, without the dimensions of sound and feel and smell, remain remote. I had no real sense of having experienced
the Serengeti, and when I was invited to return by John Owen, then director of the Tanzania National Parks, I fairly leapt at the opportunity. From late January to mid-March of 1969 I lived mostly at Seronera, where I was very hospitably received by the parks staff and the scientists of the Serengeti Research Institute, set up in 1966 for the crucial ecological studies that will certainly affect the future of man and animal in Africa. Often these men—wardens and scientists alike—took me along on air surveys, field trips, and safaris, and gave me invaluable instruction in African ecology; meanwhile I had my own Land Rover, with four-wheel drive, and the chance to investigate all and everything, as I pleased . . .

Because of the chronic political disorder in East Africa in the decade since this book was published, any attempt at revising the text from a political/geographic point of view would probably be out of date before this edition could be printed; thus, Lake Turkana in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District will be recognized in these pages by its former name, Lake Rudolf. The land and wildlife problems continue in much the same patterns as before.

P
ETER
M
ATTHIESSEN

The tree where man was born, according to the Nuer, still stood within man’s memory in the west part of the south Sudan, and I imagine a great baobab thrust up like an old root of life in those wild grasses that blow forever to the horizons, and wild man in naked silhouette against the first blue sky. That bodeful man of silence and the past is everywhere in Africa. One hears the silence, hears one’s step, and stops . . . and he is there, in the near distance. I see him still: a spear point glitters in the sun.