The Tree Where Man Was Born

  On foot, the pulse of Africa comes through your boot. You are an animal among others, chary of the shadowed places, of sudden quiet in the air. A fine walk in the early woods turned hour by hour into a wearing trek through head-high caper and toothbrush bush, and as the sun climbed, heat settled in the woods, and colors faded, and dew dried. The thickened bush gave off coarse smells, the gun grew heavy, the step slowed. A humid pall had crossed the sun, and no bird sang. One had to concentrate to be aware, reminding oneself that this midday stillness, when dozing animals may be taken by surprise, is not the hour to walk carelessly in thickets. But a time comes when awareness goes, and one reels sweaty and heavy-legged under the sun, dulled to all signs and signals, like a laggard buffalo behind its herd. This time, for man as well as animals, is a time of danger.

  “Like Endobash Plains, this,” said Iain, bashing through; even Iain seemed subdued. “Let’s have some gun support through here.” And when at last we were in the clear again, walking homeward through the woods, he said, “Pushing through bush like that . . . a bit dicey, you know. Doesn’t pay to think about it too much; you might not do it. People talk about going too near elephants, but walking these transects each month is a hell of a lot more dangerous.” I was happy that the walk was over, and looked with fresh eyes on the rest of the precious day. In the afternoon, in a quiet glade, I watched striped kingfishers sing in a trio. In the urgency of their song, these woodland birds lifted bright wings like butterflies, and trembled.

  In mid-February, I made a trip to southern Tanzania to look at the elephant damage in the huge new park along the Ruaha River, and Douglas-Hamilton decided to come along. He was anxious, in fact, to fly us down in his new plane, an ancient Piper with a fuel range barely adequate for the distance even if his navigation were exact. “I’ve just got my license,” Iain said. “It will be an adventure.” But the idea was discouraged by John Owen, who had us picked up in Arusha by John Savidge, the warden of Ruaha.

  We flew south over the Maasai Steppe, the broad trackless central plateau of Tanzania. On the north-south line, the Maasai Steppe is located at the center of Africa, and at its western edge, Savidge picked up the Great North Road (from the Cape to Cairo; this road was pioneered in the famous five thousand-mile walk in 1898–1899 by Ewart Grogan). Here and elsewhere north of the Zambezi River, the Great North Road is mostly rude dirt track. The plane crossed a litter of tin roofs in the Kondoa-Irangi hills, where the primitive farming practices of a swelling population have caused the precious topsoil to wash down in great erosion fans onto the naked plain. In Tanzania, intensive agriculture is seen as the solution to malnutrition and unemployment, and a population increase is encouraged. But except in the highlands, the red earths of East Africa are too poor to support permanent agriculture, and where they are fertile, the soils are soon impoverished by the plow, which lays them bare to cycles of fierce sun and leaching rain. In the wet season the ground is muck, and in the dry a hard-caked dusty stone. Wind and rain erode a soil that may have taken centuries to form, and there is desert. In Ethiopia, Madagascar, and throughout East Africa one sees this fatal erosion of thin fragile lateritic soils; the rust red of the laterite comes to the surface of the African landscape like blood welling in scraped skin.

  Off to the west lay Dodoma, on the old trading route from Zanzibar and Bagamoyo, on the coast, to Tabora and Lake Tanganyika; through Dodoma came the Arab and Swahili trading caravans that would emerge months later with ivory and long lines of slaves. Speke and Burton passed through here in 1857, and Speke and Grant a few years later, on their way to the discovery of the headwaters of the Nile. Traders, missionaries, and explorers were careful to avoid the country to the north, for Dodoma lies at the south end of the Maasai Steppe, the two hundred-mile southern extension of Maasai Land. Here the Maasai are alleged, on no good evidence, to have stopped the northward expansion of fierce Ngoni Zulu from southern Africa, or sometimes it is said that the Zulu stopped the southward course of the Maasai, but probably the two tribes never met. By 1840, the Ngoni had already settled in the vicinity of Lake Rukwa, in the Southern Highlands, well south of the northern edge of tsetse-infested forest that would surely have served as a barrier to the Maasai herds. More likely the Maasai were checked by the fierce Gogo and Hehe in this region. Between 1890 and 1894, the Hehe—now demoralized, like the Maasai—were also fighting the appropriation of their lands by Germans, who refused to recognize and work with local chiefs, and levied on the tribes a repressive system of taxation and forced labor that invited incessant revolt. The Maji-Maji Rebellion, between 1905 and 1907, devastated much of the southern country, and as in the Mau-Mau Rebellion, a half-century later, it was the African who suffered; an estimated one hundred thousand died.

  The great Bahi Swamp lay south and west as the plane crossed the northern boundary of the park. This west part of the park is unbroken miombo or dry forest which subsides into acacia scrub and riverain vegetation as the Great Ruaha River slides eastward toward the coast. Miombo, composed mostly of scrubby species of Brachystegia, extends east and west for sixteen hundred miles in a vast infertile wilderness. It is hot, dull, and oppressive, and the great emphasis in south Tanzania on bush-clearing and the slaughter of wild animals in futile attempts to eradicate the tsetse fly has made much of it more empty and monotonous than it was before.

  We had a pleasant visit at Ruaha, and a good swim in a swirling pool at the edge of the river rapids. Here Iain wished to see who could swim farthest out without being swept away, and I spared one of his nine lives by declining. That evening, a spirited discussion of the elephant problem got us nowhere. Elephants have much increased along the Ruaha since the last native villages in this area were evacuated, and Savidge and his wife were upset by the elephant damage to the lovely winter thorn and baobab near park headquarters; they wanted an elephant control program set up at once. While their feelings were understandable, neither Douglas-Hamilton nor I agreed that slaughter was the solution—not, at least, until all other courses had been tried.

  The Ruaha situation was discussed on the first of March at a Kenya-Tanzania elephant meeting convened at Voi, in Tsavo Park. John Owen had been kind enough to invite me to the conference, and on March 1, 1969, I flew with him to Tsavo. We left Arusha in mid-morning, passing south of black Mt. Meru and the broad back side of Kilimanjaro and its gaunt eastern peak, Mawensi, that like Mt. Kenya is the black hard core of a volcano whose sides have blown away. Straight ahead lay Kenya’s Serengeti, a bare steppe with isolated rises. Beyond lay nyika, the wilderness, thousands of square miles of thorn scrub between the highland plateaus and the sea. Soon the plane’s shadow was crossing Tsavo. This largest of national parks in Africa, like most, came into being because the area involved, due to tsetse or other pestilence, was considered unfit for anything else, and it is divided into eastern and western sections by the Mombasa Railroad. Surrounding the railroad is an abrupt congregation of small mountains called the Teita Hills, and under the Teita Hills lay Voi.

  Our host at Voi was David Sheldrick, warden of Tsavo East and a central figure in the first flare-up in the great elephant dispute that arose in the mid-1960s. His opponent was Dr. Richard Laws, at that time head of the Tsavo Research Project and the chief proponent of elephant cropping as a means of stabilizing elephant populations to keep them in balance with contracting habitats. In a paper5 prepared with the help of Ian Parker, whose Wildlife Services Ltd., Nairobi, did all the shooting, Laws described the elimination of four hundred elephant killed in 1965 on the south bank of the Nile at Murchison Falls, and of three hundred more destroyed at Tsavo. In effect, Laws concluded that the assumption of a general increase in elephant populations was mistaken; that what had increased was the density of elephant populations in certain protected areas, notably the parks; that this increase, at least in part, represented an immigration of elephants into the parks from unprotected areas, and a corresponding lack of places to which to emigrate, due to increasing human pressure at park boundarie
s; that this interruption of migration patterns, especially in the dry season, often put unnatural pressure on the habitat, which was therefore deteriorating; that one symptom of this deterioration was the rapid conversion of woodland to grassland, a process accelerated by periodic fires; that—quite apart from the progressive elimination of suitable habitat for other woodland species—the invading grassland provided inadequate nourishment for the elephants, which were exhibiting such strong evidence of nutritional deficiency as reduced fertility, increased calf mortality, retarded growth, and even such pathological symptoms of stress as deforming abscesses of the jaw (on the south bank of the Victoria Nile, these abscesses were present in thirty percent of the killed animals); that, far from increasing, many elephant populations were in the process of a “crash” that, due to elephant longevity, might extend over a half-century; and finally, that this crash, which at Murchison Falls was well advanced, had already begun at Tsavo, and because of increasing destruction of habitat, might well cause the complete extinction of elephant populations in both places. Laws concluded that these threatened populations would benefit most from an acceleration of the crash brought about by man, in order to save the remaining habitats for the animals that survived.

  The Laws-Parker conclusions seemed particularly applicable to Tsavo, where the extended drought of 1960–1961, followed immediately by violent floods, had ravaged the habitat, causing the death of great numbers of elephants and rhino. Tsavo was still in poor condition in 1964, when Laws was invited by the Kenya National Parks to take a preliminary sample of three hundred elephants. Even so, further elephant slaughter on the scale recommended was resisted by Warden Sheldrick, who in the absence of more comprehensive studies felt that natural checks and balances should be permitted to take care of excess elephants. Eventually Sheldrick won the support of the Parks trustees, but meanwhile he had been attacked for the elevation of his own beliefs over trained scientific opinion. Laws spoke bitterly of “preservationists”; since man was responsible for the elephant problem, he was also responsible for its solution, no matter how abhorrent the idea of slaughter. Laws, in turn, was criticized by Sheldrick supporters for turning an honest difference of opinion into a public harangue, and anyway, these people said, Ian Parker’s financial interest in cropping operations, present and future, voided the objectivity of the report, which was invalidated in any case by its inadequate attention to vegetation patterns and climatic cycles. (The ad hominem aspects of the dispute were ill-founded on both sides. Sheldrick and Laws both found support among ecologists and biologists then working in East Africa; and while Parker’s interest in commercial game cropping may have lent vigor to his beliefs, he had long since demonstrated a sincere and intelligent interest in the welfare of African wildlife. As a member of the Game Department, Parker had worked on anti-poaching campaigns at Tsavo, and subsequently was made manager of the Galana River Game Management Scheme, a pioneering effort to crop wild herds for protein and profit.)

  The battle raged in newspapers and journals throughout Africa and beyond, and the smoke of it has not settled to this day. “The Tsavo elephant problem is a classical example of indecision, vacillation, and mismanagement,” Laws wrote in a recent paper. Still, his dire forecasts have not yet come to pass, perhaps because a series of favorable seasons have substantially restored the habitats of Tsavo. Most of the conferees at Voi were in sympathy with the anti-cropping views of David Sheldrick, although there were gradations of opinion. Tsavo ecologist Dr. Philip Glover, for example, agreed with Dr. Hugh Lamprey, head of the Serengeti Research Institute, that elephants would have to be cropped in the Serengeti unless fires there were brought under control. It was concluded that each of the parks presented a separate problem, and that in all cases more study was required before a cropping program was begun. No one agreed with the warden of Ruaha that elephants should be killed there without further ado, and no one sided publicly with the Scientific Officer of the Tanzania National Parks, who said, in effect, that no park elephants should be destroyed under any circumstances. This veteran ecologist, Mr. Vesey-FitzGerald, felt strongly that population fluctuations based on natural adjustments to inevitable ecological change within a park were part of long-range patterns not yet understood. He agreed that certain elephant populations were out of balance with their environment but felt that regulatory mechanisms such as loss of fertility would take care of this. There were no known occasions, he declared, when elephants had made their environment uninhabitable to themselves (though Laws’s observations at Murchison Falls appear to refute this). While fire should certainly be controlled to lessen the impact of the animals on the habitat, he said, any artificial reduction of populations would interfere with the natural rhythms of the African land. Until a thorough study had been made of all environmental factors, and especially the regeneration of affected vegetation, the slaughter of animals in a national park was a bad mistake and a worse precedent, and probably an impertinence into the bargain.

  Of all African animals, the elephant is the most difficult for man to live with, yet its passing—if this must come—seems the most tragic of all. I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange such as mow grass with its toenails or draw the tusks from the rotted carcass of another elephant and carry them off into the bush. There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, an ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea. I remember a remark made by a girl about her father, a businessman of narrow sensibilities who, casting about for a means of self-gratification, traveled to Africa and slew an elephant. Standing there in his new hunting togs in a vast and hostile silence, staring at the huge dead bleeding thing that moments before had borne such life, he was struck for the first time in his headlong passage through his days by his own irrelevance. “Even he,” his daughter said, “knew he’d done something stupid.”

  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.