The Tree Where Man Was Born (20 page)

Even the most pragmatic narratives of life in Africa must touch on what H. M. Stanley was pleased to call “my dark companions and their strange stories”—the pervasive witchcraft and sorcery, which may be legitimate, in one’s best interests, or may be used wrongfully, taking the law into one’s own hands. The Kikuyu recognize nine categories of magic besides charms (protective magic) and sorcery (destructive magic), and strange powers are by no means limited to the witch doctor, but are freely applied by all. Thus his captor was awed by Kimathi’s uncanny sense of impending danger, as Karen Blixen was awed by the instincts of her servants, who would always know of her return and would be at the railroad to meet her. C. P. J. Ionides, the great reptile man of southeast Tanzania, was mystified by the preventive cure administered to him by an African which appeared to have made him immune, or nearly so, to dangerous snake bites.
⁹
A doctor who has worked with Africans for thirty years has told me in detail of the spells and curses, especially popular among wives of unwanted husbands, that can cause a healthy person to give up and die in a few days
of strange wasting diseases: he resigns himself to death because a witch has eaten his “life-soul.” Or a man whose wife is unfaithful while he is off hunting is subject to death or serious injury from wild animals.
¹⁰
Fetishes are in common use: certain Karomojong are cursed with drought if someone experienced in these matters places an ostrich head on a mountain top with its bill pointed at their village.

A witch has mystical resources not possessed by the mere sorcerer, and will often remain at home while his “shadow-soul” is abroad in the form of a night animal. A missionary tells
¹¹
of an old witch doctor in a tribe plagued by lions who for years refused to be converted; then a hunter was sent in by the Game Department, and soon thereafter, the old man became a Christian. When asked why, he shook his head in resignation. “Why not?” he said. “You’ve shot my lions,” Cults of leopard-men
¹²
and lion-men who kill with claws are both well known, and the lion-men, if they exist, may cloak their work behind that of a real man-eater, as was thought to have been the case in the widespread deaths in 1920 and again in 1946 among the Turu in the region of Singida, in south-central Tanzania, which came to a prompt halt when an investigation was begun: “Too many eyes are watching now,” said a Turu chief.
¹³
Another chief in the same region predicted to a British District Officer that elephants would take care of a local man who was annoying the village by holding up an irrigation scheme, and shortly thereafter a herd of elephant came through the nearby banana groves without touching a tree and utterly destroyed the shamba of the offender.
¹⁴

Most rural Africans have knowledge of animals controlled by gifted individuals—not always witch doctors—whose spirits inhabit them: the man-eaters of Tsavo were especially feared due to their occupancy by human spirits, and many tales are told in many parts of Africa of hyena spirits in human form who are detected by some such sign as a mouth in the back of the head.
¹⁵
A werewolf hyena is often an old witch woman, “trotting along the river now, baring her teeth in the night air,”
¹⁶
and the Bantu of Tanzania know of those who ride hyenas
in the night. Peasants are more witch-ridden than hunters and nomads, and among the Mbugwe, tillers of sorghum and millet who settled on the bare mud flats south of Lake Manyara as a protection against Maasai raids, more than half the adult population are considered witches who control all the hyenas or “night cattle” in the region, and sometimes lions into the bargain; fear of black magic is so prevalent that people eat in the darkness of their huts rather than expose their food to the evil eye of others, and when in the bush hide their food with their clothes or go to eat alone behind a tree.
¹⁷
That several people in the Manyara region have been taken by lions in recent years will only affirm the beliefs of the Mbugwe.

Belief in lycanthropy involving lions and hyenas, like the summoning of beasts to carry out specific deeds, is not only widespread but in many cases very difficult to put aside as superstition; these events have a reality in the ancestral intuition of mankind that cannot be dismissed simply because it cannot be explained. The story I like best—because it is mythic and rings true, whether or not it actually took place—was told me by a lady whose husband had it from the hunter Bror von Blixen, a practical sort, so it is said, not given to flights of fancy. One day on safari Blixen was begged by natives of the locality to deal with a dangerous hyena that was raiding the village stock at night; no one dared to kill it himself for fear of reprisal from its witch. Blixen agreed, but his staff would not keep watch with him: to kill Fisi, the Hyena, would bring evil luck. Finally Blixen prevailed on his gun bearer to go along, and later this man bore witness to what happened.

The moonlight was crossed by the silhouette of a hyena, and when Blixen fired, wounding it, the creature dragged itself into a thicket. They followed the blood trail to a bush, from the far side of which the hyena soon emerged. Blixen’s second shot killed it, and the two men went forward. Where the hyena had fallen, in the moonlight, lay the body of an African.

The great fig west of the Gol Mountains overlooks a dry korongo, and nearby there is a Maasai cattle well. In the well lay
a drowned hyena so blue and bloated that the rotting skin shone through the wide-stretched hairs. Though it had been there many days, no scavenger had touched it. Even its eye was still in place, fixed malevolently upon the heavens.

We headed south. Miles from where it had first appeared, the lone hyena rose out of the land, and this time it came even closer, loping along beside the car, tail high and bald eye searching. We wondered then if this haunted beast was hunting for its mate, and if the mate might be the hyena in the well. But we did not know, and never would, and the mystery pleased us.

At Lemai on the Mara River, eighty miles north of Seronera near the Kenya border, the Ikuria Bantu were displeased because
part of their lands north of the Mara had been appropriated for the Serengeti park; they were harassing the Lemai guard post at night with threats and stones. Myles Turner flew an extra ranger to Lemai to strengthen the garrison, and I went along. We circled a concentration of six hundred buffalo near the Banagi River, then flew onward, passing east of the old Ikoma fort, built by the Germans in 1905 as a defense against rebellious Ikoma. Beyond Ikoma was another great herd of buffalo, black igneous lumps in the tsetse-ridden land. Zebra shone in the morning woods, but a rhino was as dull as stone in the early light.

To the north and west, over Lake Victoria, the cloud masses were a deepening gray-black; at times the plane flew through black rain. These lake basin storms are the worst in East Africa, building all day and coming to a boil in late afternoon. But the clouds were pierced by shafts of sun, and the plane cast a hard shadow on thatch roofs, bomas, and patchwork gardens scattered along the boundary of the park. Half-naked people stood outside the huts; they did not wave. “
Wa-Ikoma
,” Myles said. “Poachers.” Poaching has always been a problem on park borders, all the more so because no park in East Africa is a natural ecological unit that shelters all its game animals all year around. To contain the natural wanderings of its herds, the Serengeti park, five thousand square miles in extent, would have to be doubled in size, expanding east to the Crater Highlands and northward into Kenya, through the Maasai Mara to the Mau Range. Human population increase and a lack of protein in lands which suffer from advanced protein deficiency in the poor have made the poaching of wild game a widespread industry, and an estimated twenty thousand animals are killed each year in the Serengeti area alone. Poisoned arrows, which are silent, are still preferred to rifles, but traps and steel wire snares have replaced the traditional snares woven of the bayonet aloe or bowstring hemp that gave its Maasai name to Olduvai Gorge.

The parks are the last refuge of large animals, which in most of East Africa are all but gone. The game departments are
chronically bereft of funds, staff, and the technical training to protect the game, and most of their resources are devoted to destroying animals worth far more in meat and tusks and hides than the shamba being protected in the name of game control. Where animals are not shot out, poached, or harried to extinction, they are eliminated by human settlements at the only water points for miles around, or their habitat vanishes in the fires lit to bring forth new grass. Thus the survival of the animals depends on the survival of the parks, among which the Serengeti has no peer.

For purposes of efficiency when dealing with poachers and to inspire the African judiciary to impose meaningful sentences, all poachers are classed together as brutal hirelings of unscrupulous Asian interests in Nairobi or Dar es Salaam; traps, snares, and poisoned arrows maim and torture many more animals than are actually retrieved, and of late the gangs have become motorized, crossing park boundaries at will. In this official picture of the matter there is considerable truth, but it is also true that the majority of “poachers” are people of the region who are seeking to eke out a subsistence diet as they have always done. The parks for which their lands have been appropriated, and which they themselves have no means to visit even if they were interested, give sanctuary to marauding animals that are a threat to domestic stock and crops, not to speak of human life, and their resentment is natural and just. It is no good telling a shamba dweller that tourist revenues are crucial to the nation when his own meager existence remains unaffected, or affected for the worse. “The nation,” the concept of national consciousness, has not penetrated very far into the bush; as in the Sudan, there are many tribesmen who have no idea that they are Kenyan or Tanzanian and would care little if they knew. Even the urban African benefits little from a tourist economy, not to speak of the revenues of the parks, which are resented as the private preserves of white foreigners and the few blacks at the top. Not long ago it was estimated that only one East African in twelve had ever seen a lion, though lions are common in the park at the very outskirts of
Nairobi, but one is not allowed into the parks without a car, and very few Africans have access to a car, far less own one. The average citizen has more fear of than interest in wild animals, which most Africans regard as evidence of backwardness, a view in which they were long encouraged by European farmers and administrators. Far from being proud of the “priceless heritage” so dear to conservation literature, they are ashamed of it.

Nor is poaching a simple matter of free meat. Rural Africans in the vicinity of game reserves and parks quite naturally believe that the numbers of wild animals are inexhaustible, and see no reason why they should not be harvested as they have always been. Hunting, with its prestige for the good hunter, is a ceremony and sport as it is for westerners; its place in his economy as well as its risk to the poorly armed native hunter make it considerably less decadent. And no one can explain why killing animals is permitted to foreigners in search of trophies but not to citizens in search of food. Yet to permit random poaching by local hunters would encourage ever bolder operations directed by outsiders and carried out by professionals who do not hesitate to turn their poisoned arrows on African game rangers; arrow poisons are obtained from several plants (two Apocynaceae, an amaryllis, and two lilies), but the one used most commonly in this region comes from a shrubby dogbane (
Acokanthera
) which has no antidote, and can kill in a matter of minutes. Still, bows are no match for rifles, and ordinarily, the poacher dies instead.