Read Online The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen, Jane Goodall - Free Book Online
Authors: Peter Matthiessen, Jane Goodall
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different. And the times were not so old for the history begins in our lifetimes. When Baroness leave for England the Mr. Matthew Wellington leave in Mombasa. Mr. Wellington help carried Dead Bwana Livingstone to the sea, so the history is now.” 15
A half century after he had come to work for the “everlasting dear Baroness,” as a sickly boy responsible for her dogs, Kamandestood there in the Langata dusk in the last light from the Ngong Hills and the Maasai Plain. In this old African’s remote unsqueamish gaze one saw that reasons were beside the point, that such events as Mau-Mau and the passage of his mistress had causes not apprehended by the stranger, who must fail in a logical comprehension of the African, yet may hope to intuit his more mysterious, more universal sense of existence. Life begins before a soul is born and commences once again with the act of dying, and as in the Afro-Asian symbol of the snake of eternity swallowing its tail, all is in flux, all comes full circle, with no beginning and no end.
III
NORTHWEST FRONTIER
Somewhere the Sky touches the Earth, and the name of that place is the End.
— A K AMBA SAYING 1
Of all roads in East Africa, the road north from Nairobi toward Mt. Kenya will hold most associations for the traveler with any acquaintance with the brief history of the region. One soon comes to Thika and the Blue Post Hotel, a relic of the days not long after the turn of the century when the first planters of coffee and flax and pyrethrum were clearing Kikuyu Land, and continues to Nyeri, named in 1903 by Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the hero of the Nandi wars, who witnessed a procession of some seven hundred elephants through its village street. Crossing the equator at Nanyuki, the high road begins a slow descent over the ranching country west of Mt. Kenya—Kere-Nyaga, named for Nyaga or Ngai, which is the Maasai word for God used also by the Kamba and Kikuyu—a formidable mountain, dark and looming, jagged and malign, rising to snow fields that the Africans avoided, for the bright whiteness was a kingdom of Ngai.
Before World War I, when Elspeth Huxley was a child on a Thika farm, a few Dorobo still wandered in these highlands:
A brown furry figure stepped forth into a shaft of sunlight, which awoke in his fur pelt a rich, rufous glow, and twinkled on his copper ornaments.
He was a small man: not a dwarf exactly, or a pygmy, but one who stood about half-way between a pygmy and an ordinary human. His limbs were light in colour and he wore a cloak of bushbuck skin, a little leather cap, and ear-rings, and carried a long bow and a quiver of arrows. He stood stock-still and looked at me just as the dikdik had done, and I wondered whether he, too, would vanish if I moved. . . . I knew him for a Dorobo, one of that race of hunters living in the forest on game they trapped or shot with poisoned arrows. They did not cultivate, they existed on meat and roots and wild honey, and were the relics of an old, old people who had once had sole possession of all these lands—the true aborigines. Then had come others like the Kikuyu and Masai, and the Dorobo had taken refuge in the forests. Now they lived in peace, or at least neutrality, with the herdsmen and cultivators, and sometimes bartered skins and honey for beads, and for spears and knives made by native smiths. They knew all the ways of the forest animals, even of the bongo, the shyest and most beautiful, and their greatest delight was to feast for three days upon a raw elephant. 2
Like the Bushmen of south Africa, who were hunted down or driven into swamps and deserts by black men and white alike when they struck at domestic stock that threatened their hunting lands, the Dorobo were threatened by the clearing of their forests, and doubtless there were skirmishes and killings before they attached themselves to the Nandi and Maasai as rainmakers and tricksters, circumcisers and attendants of the dead. Probably it is too late to
A half century after he had come to work for the “everlasting dear Baroness,” as a sickly boy responsible for her dogs, Kamandestood there in the Langata dusk in the last light from the Ngong Hills and the Maasai Plain. In this old African’s remote unsqueamish gaze one saw that reasons were beside the point, that such events as Mau-Mau and the passage of his mistress had causes not apprehended by the stranger, who must fail in a logical comprehension of the African, yet may hope to intuit his more mysterious, more universal sense of existence. Life begins before a soul is born and commences once again with the act of dying, and as in the Afro-Asian symbol of the snake of eternity swallowing its tail, all is in flux, all comes full circle, with no beginning and no end.
III
NORTHWEST FRONTIER
Somewhere the Sky touches the Earth, and the name of that place is the End.
— A K AMBA SAYING 1
Of all roads in East Africa, the road north from Nairobi toward Mt. Kenya will hold most associations for the traveler with any acquaintance with the brief history of the region. One soon comes to Thika and the Blue Post Hotel, a relic of the days not long after the turn of the century when the first planters of coffee and flax and pyrethrum were clearing Kikuyu Land, and continues to Nyeri, named in 1903 by Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the hero of the Nandi wars, who witnessed a procession of some seven hundred elephants through its village street. Crossing the equator at Nanyuki, the high road begins a slow descent over the ranching country west of Mt. Kenya—Kere-Nyaga, named for Nyaga or Ngai, which is the Maasai word for God used also by the Kamba and Kikuyu—a formidable mountain, dark and looming, jagged and malign, rising to snow fields that the Africans avoided, for the bright whiteness was a kingdom of Ngai.
Before World War I, when Elspeth Huxley was a child on a Thika farm, a few Dorobo still wandered in these highlands:
A brown furry figure stepped forth into a shaft of sunlight, which awoke in his fur pelt a rich, rufous glow, and twinkled on his copper ornaments.
He was a small man: not a dwarf exactly, or a pygmy, but one who stood about half-way between a pygmy and an ordinary human. His limbs were light in colour and he wore a cloak of bushbuck skin, a little leather cap, and ear-rings, and carried a long bow and a quiver of arrows. He stood stock-still and looked at me just as the dikdik had done, and I wondered whether he, too, would vanish if I moved. . . . I knew him for a Dorobo, one of that race of hunters living in the forest on game they trapped or shot with poisoned arrows. They did not cultivate, they existed on meat and roots and wild honey, and were the relics of an old, old people who had once had sole possession of all these lands—the true aborigines. Then had come others like the Kikuyu and Masai, and the Dorobo had taken refuge in the forests. Now they lived in peace, or at least neutrality, with the herdsmen and cultivators, and sometimes bartered skins and honey for beads, and for spears and knives made by native smiths. They knew all the ways of the forest animals, even of the bongo, the shyest and most beautiful, and their greatest delight was to feast for three days upon a raw elephant. 2
Like the Bushmen of south Africa, who were hunted down or driven into swamps and deserts by black men and white alike when they struck at domestic stock that threatened their hunting lands, the Dorobo were threatened by the clearing of their forests, and doubtless there were skirmishes and killings before they attached themselves to the Nandi and Maasai as rainmakers and tricksters, circumcisers and attendants of the dead. Probably it is too late to
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