The Tree Where Man Was Born (26 page)

The elephant problem, still unresolved, will eventually affect conservation policies throughout East Africa, where even very honest governments may not be able to withstand political pressure to provide meat for the people. Already there is talk of systematic game-cropping in the parks on a sustained yield
basis, especially since park revenues from meat and hides and tusks could be considerable, and this temptation may prove impossible to resist for the new governments. Or an outbreak of political instability might wreck the tourist industry that justifies the existence of the parks, thus removing the last barrier between the animals and a hungry populace. African schoolchildren are now taught to appreciate their wild animals and the land, but public attitudes may not change in time to spare the wildlife in the next decades, when the world must deal with the worst consequences of overpopulation and pollution. And a stubborn fight for animal preservation in disregard of people and their famine-haunted future would only be the culminating failure of the western civilization that, through its blind administration of vaccines and quinine, has upset the ecologies of a whole continent. Thus wildlife must be treated in terms of resource management in this new Africa which includes, besides gazelles, a growing horde of tattered humans who squat for days and weeks and months and years on end, in a seeming trance, awaiting hope. In the grotesque costumes of African roadsides—rag-wrapped heads and the wool greatcoats and steel helmets of old white man’s wars are worn here in hundred-degree heat—the figures look like survivors of a cataclysm. Once, in Nanyuki, I saw a legless man, lacking all means of locomotion, who had been installed in an old auto tire in a ditch at the end of town. Fiercely, eyes bulging, oblivious of the rush of exhaust fumes spinning up the dust around his ears, he glared at an ancient newspaper, as if deciphering the news of doomsday.

The elephant problem is the reverse side of the problem of livestock, which are also out of balance with the environment. In small numbers, cattle were no threat to the African landscape; it is only in the past century, with the coming of the white man, that a conflict has emerged. The Europeans saw livestock as a sign of promise in the heathen: what was good for the white in Europe was good for the black in Africa, and that was that. In addition, the white encouraged a contempt for game, not only
as fit food for man but as competitors of cattle and as carriers of the tsetse fly. In Uganda, Zambia, Rhodesia, Tanzania, the solution has been the destruction of the bush and a wholesale slaughter, over vast areas, of the native creatures, in a vain effort to render these regions habitable by men and cattle. Today it is known that the tsetse prefers warthog, giraffe, and buffalo, paying little attention to the antelopes, so that the vast majority of victims died in vain.

The European and his paraphernalia were all that was needed to upset the balance of man and the African land. It was clear to the simplest African that the wild animals were creatures of the past, destroying his shambas and competing with his livestock for the grass; they stood in the way of a “progress” that was very much to be desired. Game control, tsetse control, fenced water points, poaching—everywhere the wild animals made way for creatures which even from the point of view of economics seem very much less efficient than themselves. The ancestors of the wild animals have been evolving for 70 million years; the modern species, three quarters of a million years old, form the last great population of wild animals left on earth. Over their long evolutionary course, they have adapted to the heat and rain, to poor soils and coarse vegetation, and because they have had time to specialize, a dozen species can feed in the same area without competing. Rhino, giraffe, and gerenuk are browsers of leaves and shrubs, while zebra, topi, and wildebeest are grazers; buffalo, elephant, eland, impala, and most other antelope do both. Zebras will eat standing hay, and wildebeests and kongonis half-grown grass, leaving the newest growth to the gazelles; the topi has a taste for the rank meadow grass that most other antelopes avoid. Only a few wild herbivores require shade, and all have water-conserving mechanisms that permit them to go without water for days at a time; the Grant’s gazelle, gerenuk, and oryx may not drink for months. Cattle, by comparison, must be brought to water every day or two, and waste coarse grasses used by the wild animals.

In addition, the game matures and breeds much earlier than
domestic stock, and no fencing, shelter, tsetse control, or veterinary service is required. So far, game ranching experiments in Kenya and Tanzania are still experiments, having failed to anticipate the complex problems, from local politics and prejudices to the mechanics of harvesting in a hot wilderness without roads: the animals soon become so wary that systematic shooting is impossible, at least in areas accessible to service vehicles and refrigerator trucks. For this reason, the emphasis on game-cropping seems less promising than the development of semi-domesticated herds that can be harvested where needed. Whatever the solution, it seems clear that game ranching is a promising approach, all the more so since the tourists on whom East African economies count heavily do not come here to see cattle.

The eland, which mingles readily with cattle and on occasion follows herds into Maasai bomas, has been raised domestically in Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and Russia, and recent success with buffalo and oryx at Galana River suggests that other animals may also be tamed that will yield more protein with less damage to the land than the scrub cattle. Until this is proven, however, care must be taken not to penalize the pastoral peoples for conditions caused by rain cycles and climate. Amboseli, where wildlife and the Maasai herds share a game reserve that is turning to dust, is often cited as a habitat badly damaged by too many cattle, but recent studies
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indicate that the deteriorating vegetation is more a consequence of a raised water table with resultant high salinity than of overgrazing. Also, the contention that much of his herd is useless makes no sense to the Maasai, who knows that even the scraggiest of his cows can produce a calf in the next year. But one zebra skin is worth four times the price of such a cow, and eventually the tribe may be compelled to bring their myriad cattle into the economy by raising animals of better quality and permitting more of them to be sold and slaughtered. The population of the pastoral tribes rises between two and three percent each year, and landscape after landscape, wide open to settlement and the crude agriculture of the first comers, is ravaged
by burning, subsistence farming, overgrazing, and erosion. The thin soil is cut to mud and dust by plagues of scrawny kine, following the same track to the rare waterholes, and goats scour the last nourishment from the gullied earth. Certain Turkana, after centuries as herdsmen, are reverting to the status of hunter-gatherers. Having no choice, they have given up their old taboos and will eat virtually anything, from snakes to doum palm roots; in recent years they have been seen picking through thorn trees for the eggs and young of weavers. A similar fate is threatening the Maasai, for once the earth has blown away, plague and famine are inevitable.

Tsavo East is so very vast that to get any sense of it, one must see it from the air. In two planes, we flew north over the waterhole at Mudanda Rock to the confluence of the Tsavo and Athi Rivers that together form the Galana, under the Yatta Plateau; from here, we followed the Yatta northward. This extraordinary formation, which comes south one hundred and eighty miles from the region of Thika to a point east of Mtito Andei, is capped by a great tongue of lava; all the land surrounding has eroded away. The Yatta rises like a rampart from the rivers and dry plains, yet its steep sides present no problem to the elephants, which that day were present on the heights in numbers. The elephants of Tsavo are the most celebrated in East Africa, being very large and magisterial in color, due to their habit of dusting in red desert soil. Yet they were not always common here: the great ivory hunter Arthur Neumann, traveling on foot through the Tsavo region on the way from Mombasa to Lake Rudolf in the last years of the nineteenth century, saw no elephants at all.
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The two planes cross the high land between rivers. Somewhere here there is a rock heaped up with pebbles tossed onto it for luck by Maasai warriors on the way to raid the Giriama of the coast. Along the far side of the Yatta flows the Tiva, and beyond the Tiva the dry thorn scrub stretches eastward one hundred and fifty miles to the Tana River. Away from the rivers, the only large tree in this nyika is the great, strange baobab,
but the baobab, which stores calcium in its bark, has been hammered hard by elephants, and few young trees remain in Tsavo Park. For many tribes, the baobab, being infested with such nocturnal creatures as owls, bats, bushbabies, and ghosts, is a house of spirits; the Kamba say that its weird “upside-down” appearance was its punishment for not growing where God wanted.

Kamba hunters, with a few nomadic Orma Boran and Ariangulo or “Waliangulu” have most of this hostile country to themselves. Like the Kamba, the Ariangulo, a little-known tribe of the nyika that speaks an eastern Hamitic tongue like that of the Galla, are expert trackers and bowmen and have long hunted elephant throughout this region, using arrows tipped with acokanthera poison brewed by the Giriama, and selling ivory to the coastal traders. After 1948, when the Tsavo bush country, considered hopeless for all other purposes, was ordained a national park, a number of Kamba and Ariangulo hunters—or poachers, as they now were called, a matter of some indifference to them—continued in their old ways for several years. In the winter of 1950, in this burning land east of the Tiva, a band of thirty-eight Kamba, tracing a series of waterholes toward Dakadima Hill, found all of them dry. Half of the band set off for the Tiva, on the chance that the seasonal river still held water, and the rest headed south toward the Galana, which was sure to have water but was much farther away. The first group disappeared without a trace; in the second, there was one survivor.
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In the years of Mau-Mau, when most wardens were away in the Kenya Regiment, the elephant hunters descended upon Tsavo, but subsequent campaigns led by Sheldrick and Bill Woodley, now warden of the Aberdares National Park, compounded the excess-elephant problem by sending most of the hunters to jail. After serving sentences that were difficult for them to understand, some hunters became safari gun bearers and trackers, or scouts for the Kenya Game Department, and great credit for finding them places must go to Bill Woodley, who would later do the same for ex-Mau-Mau in the Aberdares.
A few reverted to poaching, and most have joined the many other Africans whose old way of life has vanished, leaving them without heritage or hope.

I flew back to Tanzania with Douglas-Hamilton, who had brought his new plane to the elephant conference. Iain’s plane is twenty years old, and looks it, but it “came with all sorts of spare parts—ailerons and wings and things. I shan’t be able to use them, I suppose, unless I crump it.” We took off from Voi at a very steep angle—a stalling angle, I was told later by Hugh Lamprey, a veteran flyer who once landed his plane on the stony saddle, fifteen thousand feet up, between the peaks of Kilimanjaro. Despite thunderheads and heavy rain, Iain chose a strange route through the Teita Hills, and I sat filled with gloom as the black rain smacked his windshield. There are bad air currents in the Teita Hills; it was at Voi that Karen Blixen’s friend, Denys Finch-Hatton, crashed and died.