The Tree Where Man Was Born

  That so little is known of Negroid origins is one of the enigmas of inner Africa, where history must be deduced from chipped stones, clay sherds, rock paintings, and the bones of man and prey. It is presently assumed that Bushmanoid, Pygmoid, and Negroid are races of an ancestral African who adapted over the millenniums to differing environments—the open grasslands, the equatorial forests, the river basins—and would later share his continent with Caucasoids* out of the north, and that a confluence of Negroid and Caucasoid produced the long-headed, small-faced race called the Nilotes or Nilotic peoples, represented by these tall Shilluk casting their nets upon the Nile.

  One morning on the Nile peninsula, in a large company of tribesmen, I met two Shilluk who had ridden on the truck. Dressed as they were in mission pants, their pagan scars and fierce filed teeth could only seem grotesque. The two candidates for civilization were glad to see me, for my acquaintance was an evidence of their worldliness. “Ezzay-yek, ezzay-yek!” they greeted me in Arabic—another attainment—and offered a passive rubber handshake. And staring after these new Africans as they moved off toward the river, I felt a terrific sadness. The Shilluk believe that when God set out to create man, he used light-colored clay, but toward the end his hands became dirty, and that the dark peoples were less favored than the light in such attainments as guns and a written language.3

  There is a Nuer song that may have come from the Arab slaving raids of the last century . . .

  The wind blows wirawira.

  Where does it blow?

  It blows to the river . . .

  This land is overrun by strangers

  Who throw our ornaments into the river

  And draw their water from its bank.

  Blackhair my sister,

  I am bewildered.

  Blackhair my sister, I am bewildered.

  We are perplexed;

  We gaze at the stars of God.4

  We left Malakal in the cab of a small pickup truck whose driver was called Gabriel Babili. A cable ferry took us across the Sobat River, where a group of Dinka washed themselves, slowly and gracefully, beside a stranded metal whaleboat, a sister craft of the British boat in the museum of the Mahdi wars, at Omdurman. In the windblown grass along the track, men of the Nuer carried paired spears of the style used by the Dervishes, which, together with hoes, fishhooks, and ornaments, are gotten in exchange for hides. The truck stopped everywhere to trade. Once the way was blocked by a great herd of the archaic cattle of Egyptian art, their huge horns curved inward at the tip. The herdsmen were coated from face to foot with ash; the mouths and eyes in the gray masks looked moist and hideous. Some were heedless of the truck, not understanding it, and others, panicked by the horn, fled for their lives. Across the dry plains to the east ran a faded track. “That is the road to Abyss-in-i-a,” said Gabriel Babili, who had a bad smell, mission English, and an enchanted smile.

  Christian missions were established in the south Sudan as early as 540 A.D., at the time of the Axumite Christianity in Ethiopia, and the Nubian kingdoms that resulted held out against the tide of Islam until the fourteenth century. But modern missions set up at the turn of this century in what had become the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan do not appear to have made a deep impression. The people are beautiful, the women modest, and the girls saucily turned out in head feathers, beads, copper bracelets, and cowries, but away from the towns the men go naked—from a narrow point of view, that is, for often those parts of their persons of no interest to moralists are superbly decorated with beads and clay—and this freedom from shame is a source of distress to missionary and Mussulman alike.

  In terms of material culture, the Nilotes of the south Sudan have remained among the most primitive people in Africa, and moral disapproval of their condition dates back at least as far as the 1860s, when the august Sir Samuel Baker, barging upriver with Mrs. Baker and a sedate avalanche of baggage in search of the headwaters of the Nile, concluded that the Dinka had less character than dogs (perhaps Sir Samuel had stern British dogs in mind) due less to this abominable nudity than to what Sir Samuel perceived as an unconscionable absence of rules and regulations in their society or for that matter of any society at all that could be recognized as such by a subject of Her Britannic Majesty. But, in fact, the Nilotic societies are based on a very elaborate set of laws and customs, including the practice among Dinka and Shilluk of their own form of ancient Egyptian divine kingship, with its custom of putting to death the failing chief. Among the Dinka, the Master of the Fishing Spear indicates by a sign of the hand that he is now to be buried alive “to avoid admitting . . . the involuntary death which is the lot of ordinary men and beasts.”5

  The Nuer and Dinka subsist chiefly on milk, cheese, and blood drawn by arrow from their animals’ necks. In the rainy season, they grow millet, and in the dry season, when the cattle are herded to the rivers, they eat fish. They are poor farmers and poor hunters, which accounts for the abundance of wild creatures in their land. In effect, their dependence on cattle is total. Besides blood and milk (meat is rarely eaten except when a beast dies of its own accord) the herds furnish dung for fuel and plastering, hides for decorative leather articles, tail hairs for tassels, bones for armlets and utensils, horns for spoons and fishing spears, and scrota for pouches. The ashes of burnt dung supply hair dye and hair straightener—the hair of the Nilotes is markedly longer than that of the Bantu peoples farther south—as well as mouthwash, and the urine is valued not only for tanning but for churning and cheese-making and for bathing the face and hands. Inevitably, intertribal wars are fought over cattle and cattle land, the aggressors being the Nuer and the victims the Dinka. Originally, God gave an old cow and a calf to Dinka and to Nuer, his two sons, but Dinka stole the calf of Nuer under cover of darkness. God, enraged, ordered Nuer to seize Dinka’s cow, and the Nuer have done so ever since. It remains the tradition of both tribes that the Nuer takes openly what the Dinka takes by stealth, and the Nuer adhere to an ancient custom of raiding and killing Dinka, who are resigned to their inferior role and offer small resistance; instead they prey upon the Bari, who live mostly on the islands of the Nile and, as a defense against mosquitoes, are said to array themselves each night in a coat of mud. The Nuer rarely war on the more sedentary Shilluk, who have few cattle and subsist mostly on maize meal, eked out by small animals speared in the night and by trapped birds. Alone of the three tribes, they have developed a crude snare, but they remain poor hunters, and are often hungry. The Nuer say6 that formerly Stomach lived apart from Man, off in the bush, an unobtrusive creature glad of a few roasted insects from the bush fires. Then Man permitted it to join his body, and it has tormented him ever since. But in most tribes in the Sudan and elsewhere, hunger and all human afflictions came about with God’s departure from the world. Once the sky pressed so close to the earth that the first man took care when he lifted spears or tools, lest he strike God. In those times, so the Dinka say, God had given the first man and woman one grain of millet every day, and this was plenty, until the woman took more than her share and, using a longer pestle, struck the sky. Then the sky and God withdrew out of man’s reach, and ever since man has had to work hard for his food, and has been visited by pain and death, for God is remote, and rarely hears him.7

  The savanna was still gold, still blowing. Toward sunset, the grass turned silver, and in a strange light a cheetah slipped across the track, its small head carried low. The plain changed gradually to woodland—acacias, fig, baobab, euphorbia, and palms. Soon vegetation crowded to the road, which was crossed at dusk by a band of bush-pig, neat-footed and burly, neck bristles erect, as if intent on punching holes right through the truck. They churned into the scrub. Gabriel, dire in all his thoughts, spoke darkly of encounters with night elephants, and blinded himself by keeping the lights on inside the cab “so other car not hit we,” although no other car had been seen that day. He was also fearful of rebellious tribesmen, who were raiding the government posts and whose attitudes toward drivers, most of them Arab, w
ere not to be depended on. In this district alone, he said, seven warriors had been shot down in the past month.

  The road edge glittered with night eyes—jackals, a porcupine, mongoose, a squirrel, small cats, gazelles, and the small woodland antelope known as duiker. I kept an eye out for an antelope known as Mrs. Gray’s lechwe, but this intriguing creature remained hidden. Toward nine, the truck surprised a pair of lionesses in the track; two males crouched down into the grass off to one side. These first wild lion I had ever seen were stirring, turning their heads without haste to regard the lights, then vanishing in matched bounds into the dark, one to each side. I stared at the dusty grass where they had gone, but the night was still. Perhaps the cats had been stalking a tiang, for moments later a band of these large blue-flanked antelope (the East African race is called the topi) fled past, eyes flashing. Panicked by the truck, they seemed at the same time drawn to it, rushing the headlights, one by one, before veering away.

  That night was spent on the floor of a Dinka hut, with bats chirping in the thatch above and the rhythm of chants and tom-toms in the distance. Toward four, we resumed the journey south. In a rainy mist, at dawn, a giraffe crossed the track and moved off westward toward the Sudd, pausing after a time to peer over its long shoulder. By midday, the track had come to Equatoria, the southernmost province of the Sudan, and late that afternoon it arrived at Juba, where we said good-by to Gabriel Babili.

  At Juba, the sweet smells of rot on the soft air, the tin ring and squawk of radios across the bare dirt yards of open-air cafés, the insect din, the mango trees in silhouette against the southern stars, evoke all tropics of the world. In the river, a few hippos rise and sink, and a tame ostrich, property of the governor, skirts pools in the mud street, and lepers come and go like the brown kites, tattered and scavenging. In early February, 1961, it was a refuge for displaced Belgians from the Congo, who occupied every bed at the hotel, and in a lot nearby the cars abandoned by refugees already fled to Europe were gathering red dust. The hostel of sorts to which we were sent had been commandeered by fleas, and we slept outside upon the ground, departing Juba without regret the following day. Through the border town of Nimule, the Sudanese assured us, passed all manner of transport into Uganda, for was not Nimule the frontier city of the largest country in all Africa, with vehicles arriving from all corners of the world?

  Our truck climbed all afternoon toward the plateaus of central Africa. But thanks to a dispute with the Arab driver incited by the soldier, who had risked our lives on more than one occasion by saluting the Moslems with hurled spit, we were thrown off in the dead of night at a silent crossroads known as Mangara. The culprit, who would clown in hell, ran after the truck down the road: “Hey, fellas, wait a minute! Like, there are lions here!” A kind citizen, attracted by his outcry, soon stood beside us in the darkness, and opened a room of the crossroads store for us to sleep in, and toward noon of the next day another truck picked us up and took us on to Nimule. There the border guards admitted that no machine of any kind had challenged their barrier in many days, though they, too, expressed confidence that Nimule was the crossroads of the world.

  Nimule is little more than a gathering of huts to which women carried water on their heads a mile or more uphill from the river, and the fried fish, bananas, papaws, and a scrawny pullet scavenged in the village would not be enough to see us through the long hot days. But we did not know this in the beginning, and at dawn on the second day, before any vehicles that might take us south could arrive from Juba, the South African and I walked a few miles downriver, where a small tract has been set aside for wildlife.

  Nimule is the only national park in the Sudan, and in the number and variety of animals to be seen in a small area, it is one of the best in Africa. It is also one of the most beautiful, a natural park between the mountains and a bend in the Albert Nile. To the south and west, early one morning, the mountains of Uganda brought the sky of Africa full circle. Somewhere in those mountains, down to the southeast, lived a light, small people called the Ik who until recently used pebble tools of the sort made in the Old Stone Age; in the Congo’s Ituri Forest, to the west, lived Pygmies who still carried fire rather than make it.

  Soft hills inset with outcrops of elephant-colored boulders rose beyond a bright stretch of blue river, and elephants climbed to a sunrise ridge from a world that was still in shadow. More than a hundred moved slowly toward the sun; the landscape stirred. The small boat manned by two askaris—rangers in khaki shirts and shorts, rakish safari hats, and long puttees—pushed through reeds and scudding nympheas to the open water.

  On the west bank, the askaris shook small bags of a fine dust to gauge the direction of the wind. We moved inland. Very soon there arose out of a copse a herd of buffalo, with its coterie of cattle egrets rising and settling once again on the twitching, dusty backs. To judge from the rapidity with which the askaris cocked their rifles, we were too close; the beasts took a few steps forward. Wet nostrils elevated to the wind, they wore an aggrieved, lowering expression. There were no handy trees to climb, and I wondered how to enter most promptly and least painfully the large thornbush close at hand. But the buffalo panicked before I did, wheeling away in dark commotion, leaving the white birds dangling above the dust.

  To the south, on a rise that overlooks the Albert Nile where it bends away into Uganda, a herd of kob antelope stepped along the hill—some sixty female kobs and calves led by a single male with sweeping horns and fine black forelegs—and the delicate oribi, bright rufous with brief straight horns, scampered away in twos and threes, tails switching. A gray duiker, more like a fat hare than an antelope, gathered its legs beneath it in low flight, and a sow wart hog with five hoglets, new sun glinting on the manes and the inelegant raised tails, rushed off in a single file at the scent of man. Here and there a stately waterbuck regarded us, alert.

  Kob and waterbuck would be large animals elsewhere in the world, but here they seemed almost incidental, for to the east of them, the entire hillside surged with elephant, nearly two hundred now, including a few tuskers of enormous size. And to the north, on a small hillock, stood four rhinoceros, one of these a calf. The askaris approached the rhino gradually, keeping downwind—not always a simple matter, as the light wind was variable—and eventually brought us within stoning distance of the animals; they were astonished that we had no cameras, but simply wished to see. The rhinos were of the rare “white” (weit, or wide-mouthed) species, a grazing animal that lacks the long upper lip of the black rhino, which is a browser; mud-crusted, with their double horn, their ugliness was protean. The cow and calf having moved off, two males were left, and these, aware of an intrusion but unable to detect it, moved suspiciously toward each other, stopping short at the last second as if to contemplate the risks of battle, then retreating simultaneously. Having just come to Africa, I did not know that the white rhino is gentle and rarely makes a charge; buffalo in herds are also inoffensive, and no doubt the askaris were teasing as well as pleasing us, though they kept their laughter to themselves.

  Beyond the rhino, dry trees rose toward the dusty mountains, and beyond the hills hung the blue haze of Africa, and everywhere were birds—stonechats and silver birds, cordon bleus and flycatchers, shrikes, kingfishers, and sunbirds. Overhead sailed vultures and strange eagles and the brown kite of Africa and South Asia, which had followed me overland two thousand miles from Cairo, up the Nile. Here in Equatoria, in the heart of Africa, with Ethiopia to the east, Uganda and the Congo to the south, Lake Chad and the new states of what was once French Africa to the west, one sensed what this continent must have been, when the white rhinoceros was not confined to a few pockets but wandered everywhere, like the kites, from the plains of Libya south to the Cape of Good Hope. Today Libya is desert, and the wild things disappear. The ragged kite, with its affinity for man and carrion, will be the last to go.

  II

  WHITE HIGHLANDS

  In a low and sad voice (Moga wa Kebiro) said that strangers wou
ld come to Gikuyuland from out of the big water, the colour of their body would resemble that of a small light-coloured frog (kiengere) which lives in water, their dress would resemble the wings of butterflies; that these strangers would carry magical sticks which would produce fire. . . . The strangers, he said, would later bring an iron snake with as many legs as monyongoro (centipede), that this iron snake would spit fires and would stretch from the big water in the east to another big water in the west of the Gikuyu country. Further, he said that a big famine would come and this would be the sign to show that the strangers with iron snake were near at hand. . . . That the nations would mingle with a merciless attitude towards each other, and the result would seem as though they were eating one another. . . . Many moons afterwards . . . the strangers dressed in clothes resembling the wings of butterflies started to arrive in small groups; this was expected, for prior to their arrival a terrible disease had broken out and destroyed a great number of Gikuyu cattle as well as those of the neighbouring tribes, the Masai and Wakamba. The incident was followed by a great famine, which also devastated thousands of the tribesmen.

  —JOMO KENYATTA, Facing Mt. Kenya

  Those days at Nimule I recall as the longest in my life. There was no point in trying to cross the border, as the nearest town was far away across an arid plain. For fear of missing the stray vehicle that might pass through, we waited forever at the guard post, and during this period—though we never knew the reason for the crisis until days later, when finally we got away into Uganda—Patrice Lumumba, the firebrand of the new Africa, was murdered at Katanga in the Congo.