Nine Faces Of Kenya, Page 2

  The word anthology is derived from the Greek for flower, and flowers can be plucked only from plants that actually grow; the compiler cannot invent them. So gaps in the arrangement may be due to limits of space, but also to a lack of deserving material from which to quote.

  A word about nomenclature and spelling. Explorers were in the habit of calling lakes, mountains and other natural features after European royalty, Lake Rudolf for example, and after patrons, such as Lord Aberdare, and sometimes after themselves, such as Fort Hall and Thomson’s Falls. The correct African names have now replaced nearly all these alien terms, with the exception of Lake Victoria, whose waters are bordered by several different peoples and so has no common African name. Porters of the old Swahili caravans knew certain tribes by derogatory nicknames given them by the Maasai, such as Suk, meaning snot, and Lumbwa, from umbwa, meaning dog. These have been discarded and the correct names, respectively Pokot and Kipsigis, reinstated. The Maasai have acquired an extra “a”, Masai having been the former spelling. In the past, the prefix “ki” was attached to the noun Swahili to indicate the language, Ki-Swahili. This was grammatically correct, but has fallen out of general use. Similarly, the Dorobo people were called Wandorobo, and the Kamba the Wakamba, “wa” being the prefix used to indicate the plural in many Bantu languages. African society was, and still mainly is, divided into tribes, each with its separate language, set of customs and tradition of a common ancestry. I have retained the spelling of place names and Swahili words used by the authors of the selected passages, although they vary considerably, sometimes in a rather wayward fashion. The word “tribe” is now somewhat frowned upon, and the euphemism “ethnic group” preferred. As tribe was the word in general use until quite recently, I have continued to use it.

  I am afraid that the appearance of such colonial terms as “native” and “boy” will give offence to some, which I naturally regret. When, where and why adult males were first called “boys” I have no idea, but it was the general term and therefore cannot be avoided when quoting from writings of the time.

  Colonialism is now a dirty word to many, arousing feelings of indignation in black breasts and guilt in white ones – emotions equally disruptive, in my opinion, to a calm assessment of past history and the profitable conduct of present affairs. The most cogent summing-up of colonialism I have seen was handed down by the quarterchief of Wum in Cameroon to the indefatigable traveller Dervla Murphy in the words: “Colonialism is like the zebra. Some say it is a black animal, some say it is a white animal, and those whose sight is good, they know it is a striped animal.”

  The Africa and its peoples encountered by the first agents of the West has vanished, and will never come again. The wild animals in their amazing abundance and variety have also gone forever, save for surviving pockets in parks and reserves. So perhaps this is a good moment to try to draw together some of the strands that have united to form the sovereign state of Kenya today. I hope that the visitor will find something in these pages to remind him of a land of great beauty, beguilement, harshness and infinite variety; the native in the wider sense something to interest, entertain and even amuse. As Henry James observed – though he was thinking of cats and monkeys – “all human life is there.”

  I have done the state some service –

  Othello

  The Background

  Fifteen million years ago there was no Great Rift Valley, no towering highlands, and a carpet of forest covered the land down to the Indian Ocean. Then came a collision of titanic proportions: the African continent rammed into that of Eurasia and two massive blisters, one in Kenya and one in Ethiopia, arose.

  Swellings of molten lava from deep down in the earth’s mantle heaved up the land by 3000 feet and more to form these two nations’ highlands. The crust groaned under tremendous pressure as it was forced higher and higher: in the end the strain was just too much; the crust had to crack, and it did. Countless trillions of tons of rock crashed downwards as fault lines opened up, stretching from northeast to southwest: the blisters were lanced, creating the first visible signs of what was to become the Great Rift Valley.

  Inevitably the boiling, swirling lava and gases found ways to escape, tearing explosion craters in the hillsides and building huge volcanoes that, in middle Miocene times (say 12 million years ago), soared up 20,000 feet. They would have been snow-covered then, just as Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro are today. Through the ages the ancient volcanoes were ground down by the elements, leaving mere stubs a tenth of the original size; their pulverized rocks contributed to the layer upon layer of deep sediments in the lava floor of the valley, a floor that is now more than 4000 feet thick. Through the ages too that floor sank lower and lower, partly because of the weight of the sediments and lava and partly because of the movement apart of the plates. These days, in the region of Lake Baringo, which was the highest point of the Kenyan blister, the walls of the valley rise 3000 feet from the lava floor, and they are virtually sheer. And the bottom of the valley, through Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia, is littered with lakes and more or less extinct volcanic cones. It is littered too with fossil sites rich in the remains of our early ancestors and their australopithecine cousins…. As the blisters rose higher and higher they eventually reached a point at which they threw the land to their east into rain shadow, thus depriving the thirsty tropical forest there of its sustenance. The forests of East Africa shrank, producing a patch-work of embryonic savanna (open terrain) and woodland, and leaving a scattering of West African-like trees, birds, butterflies and animals in the Arabuko Soreke coastal forest just north of Mombasa and up to the Tana River as a reminder of times past.

  The pruning of East Africa’s forests by the birth of the highlands is ecological modification on a grand scale. But the cracking and blistering geological face of this area generated more subtle, local effects too: within a radius of just a few miles around any part of the rift, but particularly in the highest areas, there is a mosaic of dense tropical forest, semi-arid desert, alpine meadows, grasslands, open woodland, and every ecological shade in between. It is a remarkable piece of topography, and it has been that way since the middle Miocene right up to the present. The creation of this matrix of ecologies as the blisters swelled and cracked provided an unusual diversity of habitats for the animals there to exploit. And this may well have been an important factor in speeding along the pace of hominid evolution in East Africa. (Hominid is the name used for humans and their close evolutionary relatives such as the australopithecines.)

  As the Rift Valley sweeps northwards out of Kenya and into Ethiopia in modern-day Africa it forms the spectacular Lake Turkana basin. Spectacular, not only for the stunning beauty of the lake itself and its powerfully stark surroundings, but also for its rich treasure trove of pre-human fossils buried in the layered deposits on the eastern shore of the lake. Beginning with a small tentative expedition in 1968, it is here that Richard Leakey leads the search for ancient human ancestors in Kenya.

  People of the Lake Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin.

  Finds made by the Leakey family in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania – “the place of wild sisal” – have made archaeological history.

  Since I first began to live most of the year at Olduvai a systematic search of the exposures for hominid and other fossils has been made at the end of each rainy season. At this time the fossils have been washed clean and can be seen much more clearly than when they are covered in dust during the dry season. Some important discovery has been made almost every year in the course of the annual search.

  One of the most significant aspects of the work at Olduvai during the 1960s was the discovery that Australopithecus boisei lived side by side with an early species of Homo. This was later borne out by discoveries at East Turkana in Kenya….

  The discovery of the skull of Australopithecus boisei (Zinjanthropus)1 was one of the occasions when both perseverance and luck played a part. Despite the fact that we had found very few hominid remains on our early visits to
Olduvai, Louis and I had remained firmly convinced that they would one day come to light, and we kept on looking.

  On 17 July 1959 I was out hunting for fossils by myself, with my two Dalmatian dogs for company, while Louis rested in camp after a slight attack of flu. As I was working over the slopes of Bed I, I suddenly saw the skull. I was doubtful, at first, whether it was hominid, since the mastoid region that was exposed was quite different from any I had seen in human skulls. Instead of being solid bone it was permeated with air cells, such as are found in skulls of particularly heavy animals, to compensate for excessive weight. However, after brushing away a little of the covering soil I saw two teeth that were unquestionably hominid. I was tremendously excited by my discovery and quickly went back to camp to fetch Louis. When he saw the teeth he was disappointed, since he had hoped the skull would be Homo and not Australopithecus.

  When the skull had been partially exposed we found that it had been broken into a great many fragments, although all the pieces lay close together within an area approximately forty-five centimetres in diameter…. The task of reassembling the fragments took many months, and it was not until three years after the discovery that the final reconstruction was carried out….

  We resumed work at Olduvai in February the following year, 1960.

  The discovery of Homo habilis was made by my eldest son, Jonathan, who was working with me at Olduvai after leaving school. While excavations were in progress at the “Zinjanthropus” site, Jonathan often wandered off to search for fossils elsewhere. One day he returned with a very strange mandible which he had found on the slopes of Bed I. The mandible was later identified in the Nairobi Museum as the lower jaw of a sabre-toothed feline or machairodont, which is one of the rarest animals in the fauna of Olduvai. We immediately began a search for other parts. None came to light, but a single well-preserved hominid molar turned up most unexpectedly in the sieves. The discovery of the tooth led to extensive excavations, which proved to be among the most rewarding and exciting ever carried out at Olduvai. Jonathan directed the excavations and himself found the mandible and parietals which became the type of Homo habilis….

  Louis discovered a skull of Homo erectus on 2 December 1960. He had been visiting various sites with a geologist, and while they were walking through the side gorge Louis noticed a small, insignificant gully that he believed had not been examined previously. He walked across to it the following morning and immediately noticed a little rounded mass of bones lying in the bottom of the gully, where Bed II was exposed. At first glance these seemed very similar to the bony carapace of a fossil tortoise. Since this resemblance had deceived us both on many occasions, Louis was wholly astonished to discover that on this occasion what appeared to be a tortoise was in fact a human skull….

  In all, three types of early hominids have been found at Olduvai: Australopithecus boisei (first called “Zinjanthropus”); Homo habilis, a small, lightly-built creature; and Homo erectus, a hominid whose brain capacity was considerably larger than the other two….

  East Africa has been claimed by some to be the “cradle of mankind”; others postulate an Asiatic origin for the early hominids. The question has not been resolved, but it is certain that the conditions for preservation of early fossils in East Africa are unparalleled elsewhere. Active volcanoes depositing ash at relatively frequent intervals combined with fluctuating lakes in closed basins have preserved the remains of early man, his tools and the contemporary fauna in an unprecedented fashion. Such a wealth of evidence leads to the assumption that man originated in East Africa.

  Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man Mary Leakey.

  Other important finds came to light at Koobi Fora on Lake Turkana’s eastern shore. Richard Leakey describes one made in 1978.

  Kamoya and I were out on foot relocating a fossil site his men had discovered a week or so earlier at Ileret, some 70 kilometres (45 miles) north of the main camp. While we walked I was talking to Maundu, one of Kamoya’s assistants, and he was reporting the news of the previous two weeks’ work. As usual, we were all keeping a sharp look-out for signs of any interesting fossils as we went. Suddenly my eye was drawn to a small scatter of bone fragments protruding less than two centimetres through the grey sand. Maundu had also noticed the fragments and we both stopped and carefully knelt to inspect them more closely. We quickly agreed that they appeared to be some of the smaller bones from the underside of a hominid skull. Such finds are tremendously exciting and we immediately began to speculate about the chances of there being a whole intact cranium buried just beneath the surface. The answer had to wait until we could make a proper excavation the following day.

  We returned the next day at dawn and soon revealed a problem I had feared: the bone was extremely fragile and as Meave and I gradually exposed more and more of the skull we had to apply a hardening solution of plastic to strengthen it…. By 5.00 p.m. I was able to lift from the ground the delicate but intact cranium of a hominid who had lived and died close to the lakeshore almost one-and-a-half million years ago. Registered in the museum as KNM-ER 3883, the fossil is a fine example of Homo erectus, the hominid that immediately preceded Homo sapiens.

  From other fossil material that has been unearthed, it is clear that the skeleton of Homo erectus was essentially modern. A little stockier than the average human today, perhaps, but not all that different. The head and face, however, were still “primitive”: the forehead sloped backwards and was mounted with prominent brow-ridges, while the brain, though larger than that of Homo habilis, was only seventy per cent of the size of a Homo sapiens brain. The face protruded less than in Homo habilis, but it was not as flat or “tucked in” as in Homo sapiens. The chin that is so characteristic of modern humans was present but poorly developed.

  Palaeoanthropologists view the anatomical characteristics of Homo erectus as being distinctive enough to deserve recognition as a new stage in human evolution, an advance on Homo habilis. What is most striking about Homo erectus, however, is not the development of new anatomical features but the changes in behaviour. Through the development of the food-sharing, hunter-gatherer way of life and a sharpened intelligence, Homo erectus expanded into territories where no advanced hominid had lived before. Around a million or more years ago, some groups of this hominid moved into Europe and Asia. With this move, our ancestors changed from being exclusively tropical creatures, and learned to cope with the fluctuations in food availability that go with the changing seasons of temperate regions.

  Homo erectus is first recognized in the fossil record from about one-and-a-half million years ago, and continued until about 300,000 years ago when Homo sapiens began to emerge. Homo erectus spread across the continents of Africa, Asia and Europe, though not to the colder northern extremes of Eurasia and not into America or Australia. It was the time when hunting-and-gathering became firmly established, with active hunting as opposed to opportunistic scavenging becoming more and more important. Large-scale hunting first developed in this period, we see the first signs of the systematic and controlled use of fire, and there are indications of ritual in the lives of these hominids. Stone-tool manufacture became controlled and patterned. New challenges were being faced and overcome, and new lifestyles developed. The age of Homo erectus was clearly an important phase in human evolution.

  The Making of Mankind Richard Leakey.

  The chance find of some fossil zebra and antelope teeth in a load of sand used for building led, several years later, to the discovery of the “Laetoli footsteps” by a team led by Dr Mary Leakey.

  By an astonishing combination of circumstances, a very ordinary event which happened some three-and-three-quarter million years ago led to what is probably the most dramatic archaeological discovery of this century. Three hominids left a trail of footprints that have been clearly preserved, presenting us with an amazing picture of a few moments in the lives of some of our ancestors.

  The place where it happened is now called Laetoli, a wooded area near a volcanic mountain, Sad
iman, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of the present-day Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The dry season was probably nearing its end and the sight of gathering rain clouds promised welcome relief from months of drought. For a week or two the volcano had rumbled restlessly, occasionally belching out clouds of grey ash that settled over the surrounding countryside. Nothing violent or startling, just a steady background of subterranean stirrings such as is still experienced today from the Oldoinyo Lengai, 70 kilometres (45 miles) southeast of Olduvai. Like the ash from Lengai, the ash that Sadiman produced had a chemical composition that made it set like cement when dampened slightly and then dried by the sun.