The Tree Where Man Was Born (4 page)

The first light shone on a new land of long grass and small acacia, with occasional great solitary baobab. The feather-leaved, sweet-scented acacias or thorn trees, in their great variety, are the dominant vegetation in dry country south to the Cape, but the tree of Africa is the baobab, with its gigantesque bulk and primitive appearance; it is thought to reach the age of twenty-five hundred years, and may be the oldest living thing on earth. The grassland danced with antelope and birds—tropical hawks, doves, pigeons, guinea fowl and francolins, bee-eaters, rollers, hornbills, and myriad weavers, including the quelea or Sudan dioch, which breeds and travels in dense clouds and rivals the locust as an agent of destruction. At the edge of a slough stood two hundred crested cranes and a solitary ostrich, like a warder; where trees gathered in a wood were the white faces of the vervet monkey. In the afternoon, the savanna opened out on a great plain where gazelles fled to the horizons, and naked herdsmen, spear blades gleaming, observed the passage of the truck through the rushing grass with the alert languor of egrets. All the world was blue and gold, with far islands of acacia and ceremonial half circles of human huts. Toward dusk, the truck arrived at Malakal, where it would turn to go back into the north.

The two days passed in Malakal, awaiting a ride south, I spent mostly on a long peninsula which cut off a swamp along the Nile edge. There was a footpath to a point on the peninsula where a Shilluk tended a weir; from here, in crude dugout canoes,
the tribesmen crossed the river to a large village in a grove of palms. Respecting crocodiles, I did not press to be taken across, for the north wind which blows from November to March was sweeping up the river, and the canoes were desperately overcrowded; instead I watched the people come and go, and listened to the singsong of their voices. Shilluk women who passed along the path bore cargoes on their heads, swaying like cobras through the blowing grass, and bands of girls, straight-backed, high-breasted, flirted and waved. The men were painted in a gray ash or red ocher, and the oldest had several rows of beads raised on their foreheads, but scarification, which is performed at a boy’s initiation into the tribe, is dying out, for few younger men had more than a single row, and some were not scarred at all.

From the village across the river, on the wind, came a chant and a thump of drums. On the peninsula, bent figures hoed small gardens, and in the swamp behind, two naked fishers, laughing and arguing, handled a cast net. Cisticolas flitted through fierce reeds, and a snake slid out across some rotted sedge into the water, and trees of the river danced with turquoise rollers. In such a setting, in the expectant sunrise, the naked men seemed archetypal: here were dark figures of prehistory. A few centuries ago, the Shilluk lived as far north as Khartoum, and perhaps these glistening fishers were descended from some of the earliest known Negroids, a community of Middle Stone Age fishermen who inhabited the Khartoum region at least seven thousand years ago. (It has been suggested that the Khartoum fishermen invented pottery, possibly through the accidental burning of the mud-lined baskets that are still in use.
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) The early Negroids appear to have been scattered and few; perhaps they were sedentary fishermen whose modern dominance of the African population came about with the development of agriculture. Possibly they evolved in the central lakes region, and only later came to occupy those regions southwest and west of the Sahara which are now associated with the “true Negro,” whoever that may be: a skull contemporaneous with the skulls found
at Khartoum has been dug up northeast of Timbuktu, in a land which had not yet turned to desert, and other remains of ancient Negroids have been found in Nigeria and on Lake Edward.

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

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.”
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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 say
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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.
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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, were not to be depended on. In this district alone, he said, seven warriors had been shot down in the past month.