Autobiographical essay 3

African Rift

We were in Dar es Salaam to meet Jane Goodall. The primatologist had responded to a letter of enquiry from my then-partner, Helen, a biologist, by inviting us to her home to discuss if and how we could undertake a year-long chimpanzee habituation project at her research centre in Gombe Stream National Park. The plan was to redirect tourist pressure away from the prime research troupe to a new group, safeguarding the integrity of Dr Goodall’s famous longitudinal study. Temporarily bedridden with malaria, I couldn’t confer with Dr Goodall in person, so my proposed role as project documenter was conveyed by phone. As a prelude to commencing the project later that year, Dr Goodall organized for us to visit Gombe immediately, entrusting our safety and our induction to the head park ranger. Too weak to cart it and believing I’d return to Gombe anyway, I left my large format camera at a city hotel for safekeeping.

It was September 1989 when we made the two-day train journey from what was then Tanzania’s capital to Kigoma (where Stanley met Livingstone) and thence by outboard wooden long boat up the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika to Gombe. The denuded lakeside scarp footed with thatch-roofed villages, rowboats, woodsmoke, fishing nets, child’s song and flaxen beaches sparkling silver with fish drying in the tropic glare concluded abruptly as we crossed the boundary into and ashore the paltry thirty-five square kilometre protectorate of biodiverse emerald.

Shouldering a tranquilizer-gun and two-way radio, the ranger was tasked with guiding us to the chimps whenever they were sighted. We were instructed to obey his hand signals, never raise our voices or move suddenly when near our quarry. Still recovering from malaria and now stricken by a painful bacterial infection, I was only able to partake in one extended outing. On that occasion we climbed the hill above the research centre and encountered a family of three or four in a clearing. The chimps knew and trusted the ranger, but not Helen or me. They studied us intently for a while before trundling off, except for a juvenile female, whom the ranger told us she was a “grand-daughter of David Greybeard”, one of Dr Goodall’s most beloved and renowned subjects, who died in 1968. The ranger signaled us to turn and follow him down the rise, into the vine forest. The young chimp followed. A hundred metres in, the ranger waved us to sit down to his left, side by side, along the contour. Copying us, the young chimp also sat down, not at a distance away, as expected, but right next to Helen, between her and the ranger crouched three metres to her right. I glanced across and the chimp and I locked gazes. As I turned away I noticed the ranger had the dart-rifle on his lap, pointed at the chimp, right hand over the butt, the left holding the barrel. The chimp stared at the open daypack Helen had dropped by her hip. As the chimp reached out to touch the bag, the ranger called to Helen to close and grab it away. The chimp quickly withdrew her arm, and for a full minute eyed all around, then closed them again, as if thinking up strategy. After a pause, she rose up and began to ever-so-casually, crutch-walk behind Helen towards the pack’s new location. The ranger made a loud hooting sound, presumably as a distraction or warning. The chimp shot a look at the ranger, back to Helen, to me, and the bag, then, in reverse, scampered up slope to a nearby tree, climbed a high branch, and resumed eying the daypack beneath. The ranger gestured for us to stand and proceed down the hill, homeward. Intensely inquisitive and evidently executing forethought, conscious of the mental state of others, social cues and the impropriety–and danger–of a transgression, the juvenile Pan behaved not unlike a human pre-adolescent.

Before we got to Gombe, Dr Goodall left Tanzania to fundraise in Europe, so we were put up as her guests, in her predator-and theft-proof, concrete safe-house, by the lake. The only nearby dwelling, another safe-house, two hundred metres up the lakeside track, was occupied by Dr Anthony Collins, an animal behaviourist from the University of Edinburgh, studying Baboons. To exercise and alleviate the boredom of illness I had adopted a mild regimen of a dip in the lake followed by a stroll each morning along the foreshore track between the two buildings. It was an alluring setting. Rising above me to the east, were the closed forests and open grassy hills of the park. To the west, far away across the glinting waters of the enormous Rift Valley lake, hugging the western horizon, I could make out the hazy, mist-capped, tropical, mud-green uplands of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Central Africa. What I hadn’t noticed was the Olive Baboon troupe that crossed my route from the forest on to the beach each morning, before me. I had been at Gombe four or five days when, for the first time, I decided to do my constitutional early, at dawn. I was nearing the end of my usual route, when I heard an anxious-sounding voice loudly call out ‘Harry, Harry, Harry, stop walking, stand still, don’t move, don’t make a sound!’ Our neighbour, Tony, the Baboon expert, was behind the steel mesh doorway of his safe house, pointing to a troupe of eleven or twelve of his subjects of study, dominated by a big male, about ten metres away, standing up, flashing his eyelids, yawning, canines bared and glaring – at me. A second male hit a cowering female and then a juvenile before looking up to also glower my way. Dr Collins called to me to turn my back on them, drop my head and arms, look down to the ground and stay silent and perfectly still. I could hear the click and clatter of him unlocking his steel front door and prepping his dart gun for use, if I was attacked. Awareness of the pain of illness receded as the mortal danger of my predicament sunk in. Minutes passed, punctuated by updated instructions: ‘Turn your body slightly to the left…start moving slowly towards me but keep facing the same way… stop… start moving again… stop’. The troupe eventually moved away, around and past me, down to the beach. The danger over, I got the reprimand I deserved: ‘Angry or frightened adult male baboons, defending their territory, status, females or offspring can and will tear a man to shreds’. Tony proffered reassurance, small talk and a cup of tea but my mind had turned to generic questions of human nature and distant memories of my second grade teacher and the napalm girl. I tottered home, chastened, exhausted and preoccupied with unwelcome thoughts of parallels between Papio and Sapiens masculinity. Insecurity from civil unrest in the Congo derailed our planned year of chimp habituation.

*

Baboons and Chimpanzees may be our close evolutionary kin and very like us in many ways, but we are not them. It was December 2004 or 2005 when, with my daughter and partner, I spent ten days cabin-camping at Wilson’s Promontory with South African archaeologist John Parkington, and his family. His knowledge and love of the languages, cultures and art of the Kalahari ‘Bushman’, !Kung or San people, with whom and for whom he has committed his career and life was and is profound, as is the judgment he has reached from it. All one afternoon, over drinks, with sadness in his voice, he carefully and quietly spelled out some of what he had learnt, to me. The traditional communities he knew when he was a young researcher, have now almost all been forcibly resettled. Their culture is no longer what it was, but John Parkington described them in the present tense as if what he remembered still lived. He said they are just like us, except they aren’t. In their world, it isn’t power or wealth or blood-line but knowledge and character that matter. Generosity, skill and humility are treasured: there are aggressive, egoistic and anti-social individuals but their behaviour is kept in check by the social pressure of the group. The San maintain their populations small and within the carrying capacity of the land, by an intentionally low birth rate. Fertility is limited by extending weaning for up to five years and, rarely, infanticide. Children are cared for by all the women, and the old are esteemed. There is sickness and there is disability, but a lot of their traditional medicine works, and life expectancy for those who survive childhood is high, almost as long as ours. There is conflict that sometimes spills into violence but systematic cruelty or murder, let alone war, is unknown. They are materially poor and there are gender roles, but everyone is afforded a voice, nutrition, shelter, value and dignity. Their lives are physically demanding (the men hunt, the women gather) and they suffer superstition and fear, but their days are filled with cooperative activities, gossip, play and religious ceremony: “there is much laughter and no one is lonely”. He concluded, “Our species evolved to live in small, demographically stable, self-sufficient, egalitarian, nomadic communities”. The “invention of agriculture” and then of permanent settlement, of private property and its accumulation, of fixed power hierarchies and ever larger populations, was “a huge mistake”; the vector for what has become “our psychological, social and ecological, undoing”.

John Parkington’s singular diagnosis, resonant of geographer Jared Diamond’s censure of the invention of farming, and before that, eighteenth century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise about our decline from an original, ideal, innocent ‘state of nature’, is not shared by all contemporary prehistorians. Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, for example, postulate a considerably messier picture of human cultural evolution. Even so, if we can suppose our species’ fate is neither truly predestined nor fully unbounded but fundamentally the reverberation of an ancient error, perhaps we can forgive ourselves for what we have become. I don’t know if Professor Parkington had the biblical expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden in mind, but the analogy is intriguing. Whilst the biblical sin was stealing the Forbidden Fruit from the Tree in The Garden of Eden in Paradise, our species’ pre-historical error (not sin) might be said to have begun with clearing Paradise (that is, nature) to make The Garden. Far from redrawing Augustine of Hippo’s odious fifth-century theology of ‘original sin’, this revised, existential interpretation of The Fall tells of tragedy not evil, and our relationship with each other and terrestrial nature, not a diety. The moral lesson is not that we, as a species, have little more agency than Chimpanzees or Baboons, or that we are essentially immoral or doomed to purgatory, but that we have always been, and remain, capable of reform; that we are deserving of redemption, or at least, forgiveness.