The Tree Where Man Was Born (39 page)

Already the hunters are tending to their arrows, long thin shafts cut from a grewia or dombeya and feathered with vanes of bustard, guinea fowl, or vulture. Bird arrows are tipped with sharpened wood, and each bundle has an arrow with a lance blade of honed iron that is used for small game like guinea fowl and dik-dik. All the rest have single or double-barbed metal points dipped in black resinous poison, made ordinarily from seeds of the black strocanthus fruit or sap of the desert rose. Both poisons are heart stimulants, consumed safely in meat but fatal when received into the bloodstream. Dafi wraps the poisoned barbs in thin strips of impala hide so that the poison will not dry out; the protection of the hunter is incidental. His long stiff bow of dombeya is also wrapped with circlets of impala, though this is maridadi—decoration. Ordinarily, Hadza bow strings are of zebra tendon, while split tendons of impala are
the sinew that binds the arrow vanes onto the shaft. When not out hunting roots and tubers with their digging sticks, Hadza women remain at their own hearths. Here their children, with their big bellies and small prominent behinds dusted gray with hearth ash, play a variety of games with the hard bright yellow fruits of night-shade known as Sodom apples. Gondoshabe sits with Gindu, mother of Andaranda who killed the zebra, and lank-dugged Angate with a tobacco wad behind her ear, and Hanako, young wife of the swift hunter Salibogo, threading beads on long strands of fiber from the baobab, and Giga’s daughter Kabaka, who with her baby has run away from the game scout Nangai at Yaida Chini. The women wear the same three garments as the women of the Bushmen: a genital cover, skirt, and carrying bag, formerly of hide, but now of cloth. They sit flat on the ground with legs straight out, toes upright, or squat on their haunches like the men. Though the nomadic Hadza do not burden themselves with metal bracelets, most women wear single headbands of white, red, and blue beads as well as bead armlets, anklets, and knee bands, and like the men, they may have three scars cut on the cheek in decoration. Small boys wear a simple strand of beads around the waist, small girls a rag and small bead apron, while infants may wear fetishes and charms as protection against the touch of menstruating women and the night cries of hurtful birds.
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Kabaka’s baby is immobilized by strings of beads, but for all her wealth Kabaka looks disgruntled, and it is she who raises her voice against the mzungu’s presence in the camp. The wild Hadza women pay her little mind; though shyer than the men, they soon disregard the visitors and go on about their business. They grind maize, gather firewood; they dry new gourds bartered from the Mbulu, for they have no pottery, and fetch water from the river in the old. The gourds of cool water stand at angles beside a calabash of bright fresh berries. In this dry place, the sparkle of precious water borne in gourds has a true splendor. Gourds and arrow shafts may be marked with cross-hatching incised between parallel lines, these pairs of lines being set at angles to each other, but otherwise the Hadza have
no art besides the decoration of their persons and the simplicity of their lives.

The Gidabembe rocks fall to the river edge, two hundred feet below. On the far side of the river lies low heavy forest, and beyond the forest is acacia savanna with big trees. Mbulu people have come down off the escarpment to clear patches of savanna; their presence has brought the humble duka that glints against the hills. Already a few Mbulu have crossed the river and set up maize shambas in the region of Gidabembe, and meanwhile Mangati filter up into the Sipunga from the south. While as yet there is no sign of overgrazing, this will come. The Mbulu and Mangati have caused the wild animals to scatter, and large game has become scarce during the dry season, when the only water available, in the Udahaya, is cut off by man. Eventually the Mbulu will call upon the Game Department to destroy the last elephant and buffalo, and meanwhile the wild animals are poached relentlessly by tillers and herdsmen alike.

A very few strangers, scattered through this valley, threaten the wildlife on which the Hadza depend, yet the Hadza accept these strangers as openly and cheerfully as they accept us. They cannot know that their time is past, although hunting is much harder now, and soon may be beyond their skills. In the old days, in time of famine, people of other tribes would go into the bush to live with the hospitable Hadza, who have no memory of hunger—despite a passion for honey and meat, they depend on seeds, tubers, roots, wild cowpeas, ivy gourd, borage, and berries of toothbrush bush and grewia, in addition to certain fungi and such seasonal tree fruits as baobab, figs, desert dates (Balanites), and tamarind. Excess meat and honey, used formerly in trade for beads and iron and tobacco, is hard to come by, for log hives brought in by the Mbulu are attracting the wild bees, and game is scarce. When the hunting is gone, the Hadza may take to killing stock, as the Bushmen did. Already one Hadza has been speared to death near Mangola for the killing and consumption of a goat.

A few Mbulu and Mangati stroll through Gidabembe, tall and contemptuous; they grin coldly for the benefit of the white man by way of answer to the Hadza greetings. There are two Mbulu shambas within a mile of Gidabembe, and already the Hadza have adopted this Mbulu name for their ancestral place, which in their own tongue is Ugulu. Recently, a family of Mangati has built a typical figure-eight stockade close by; one of the loops of the stockade is used for cattle, and in the other is the rectangular Mangati hut, like an Mbulu tembe but built above the level of the ground. The Mbulu and the men of the Mangati wrap themselves in trade cloth, but Mangati women wear skirts of leather cured in human urine, as Maasai women did in former days. Certain warm-breasted leather-skirted girls of the Mangati, carved northern faces softened by the south, are the loveliest women, black or brown or white, that I have seen in Africa.

At dark, we go with drink onto the rock over the cave and roll a smoke, and stare out over Hadza Land, and listen. Already Peter has relaxed, though he has not slept, and I find him an excellent companion, well informed, inquiring, with an open mind and a capacity for silence, and possessed of an ironic perception that has surely spared his sanity. People who knew him from his sprees on infrequent visits to Arusha had warned me that Enderlein was “bushed,” as the saying goes here, from too much time alone out in the bush; they spoke of Peter’s beautiful young wife who had found bush life unbearable and had fled two years before, not to return. But a letter sent me in Nairobi gave me confidence that we would get on all right: “I think if you allow yourself two weeks here,” he wrote in part, “you would be able to get a fair insight into the valley and its mysteries; if you stay longer, you might well end up at my position, knowing nothing at all. It seems the longer one stays at a place, the less one has to say about it. . . .”

For this safari we had settled on two low camp cots, without tent, a few essentials such as rice and tea and rum, and whatever tinned goods might be rattling around in the rear of my
old Land Rover. For the rest we would make do as we went along. Even so, our camp was infinitely more complex than the Hadza hearths, and soon seemed littered. Both of us have a passion for traveling light, deploring the ponderous caravansary which Anglo-Saxons in particular tend to conceive of as safaris—the table, camp chairs, ice chests, private toilet tents, truckloads of provender and swarming staff that permit them to lug the colonial amenities of the Hotel Norfolk “into the blue.” Like myself, Peter has often been ashamed in front of Africans by the amount of equipment that his white friends required. Yet Africans admire wealth, and anyway, they do not make judgments in such matters, but accept a different culture as it is. The people at Gidabembe, who still trust, are neither subservient nor rude. Here was the gentleness, the loving attention to the moment, that is vanishing in East Africa, as it has vanished in the western world.

Exhilarated, happy, we lie flat out on the high rocks, still warm from the hot sun of afternoon. Peter draws his finger across the sky, starting to laugh. “Fake stars have five points, isn’t it true?” he says. “Now I shall try to count how many points the real stars have. . . .” He laughs quietly for a long time. And later he shouts suddenly, “You see? You see that constellation veering? It’s like a kite! It’s like a kite in that one moment just before it falls. . . .” And I turn my head to watch him bellow at the universe.

Three months after our stay at Gidabembe, Peter would write as follows from hospital in Arusha:

In a day the zebra is already gone, and Dafi and Salibogo will rejoin the hunters beyond Sipunga Hills. We go along to watch them hunt. A solitary elephant crosses a rise among great baobabs, and they cry out, but except at close range, it is hard to drive an arrow through the thick hide of an elephant. Their bows require a hundred-pound pull
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from a hunter who weighs little more than that himself, and the poison used here is not strong enough.

On the far side of Sipunga, down toward the Yaida Plain, there are impala, and Dafi and Salibogo run through the scattered trees, moving downwind before cutting back toward the animals. Both are very small and quick, as if in hunters, this small size, like the long legs of the nomadic herdsmen, was a phenomenon of natural selection. In the case of the well-fed Hadza, it would be hard to argue that small size is the consequence of life in a hostile and stunted environment; like hunter-gathers the world over, they tend to be better nourished than more settled peoples, who must struggle to subsist. Until recently there was no need to hunt hard to get all the meat they wanted, and probably the game will be all gone before they refine their skills. Enderlein once watched Ariangulo trackers brought here from the Tsavo country by white hunters. He says that the Hadza, who hunt alone except when encircling baboons, compare in neither tactics nor persistence with the Ariangulo, who have huge bows with arrows tipped in acokanthera and specialize in hunting elephants.

Magandula, grabbing a bow, trots after the hunters in his black shoes; the self-conscious leer upon his face fails to conceal an innocent excitement. Eventually Salibogo goes on by himself, running bent double over long stretches of open ground, rising and falling, crouching, peering, and snaking at
last on his belly to the caper bush where he will lie. The animals drift away from Dafi, who, in the way of lions, drives them gently into ambush, but the wind shifts and the lead animal crosses Salibogo’s scent. In the stillness comes the impala’s blowing snort, and the bright-eyed ones are gone.

With the impala goes the last good opportunity of the day. Even when Enderlein decides to use his rifle, we come up with nothing. Zebra, impala, and wildebeest are all shy and scarce, and a wildebeest bull struck at long range fails to come down. The day is dry and very hot, and much of this landscape south and west of the Sipunga has been burned by the Mangati; on a black ground, Senegal bustards pick the burnt eggs of guinea fowl. Farther north, in a grassland with low suffocated thorn, there are no animals at all. Overhead passes a pelican, flapping and sailing on its way to distant water, but here the thorn wood and dense dusty grass is empty, and as the morning turns to afternoon, black man and white fall silent. An African landscape full of animals, even dangerous ones, does not seem hostile; life is sustained here, and somewhere there is water. But without animals, the parched grass and bitter thorn, the hard-caked earth, the old sky shrouded by fire smoke through which a dull sun looms like a blind eye—all seems implacable. The sun god Haine, though worshipped by the Hadza, is remote and ill disposed toward man, and is not invoked. In the dark of the moon the hunters dance all night to insure good hunting and good health, for sometimes a hunter, crouched in night ambush at a waterhole, is taken by the lion, Sesemaya.