Humanity is a product of Africa. We are what we are today because we’ve been shaped by our environment — and it was the African environment that hosted almost every major evolutionary change we’ve experienced on our journey towards being human.
‘The morphology of the face, how we lost our canines, the very definitions of our humanity,’ he said. ‘We are defined by peacefulness and cooperation. Those qualities developed here in Africa.’
There were four of us at the sushi bar — Professor Berger had brought a friend, and Mike had brought me.
‘Look at us,’ Professor Berger said. ‘You couldn’t take four of any other mammalian species to sit down as we are doing here. This is the proof that we are the cooperative species.’
Picking up a spicy tuna hand roll, Mike said, ‘So maybe there’s hope for the world?’
‘We are undoubtedly a peaceful species. We developed a pedomor-phic face — child-like, non-threatening. Go ahead, Paul, threaten me with your face.’
I attempted a fierce face.
Professor Berger crowed to the table, ‘See, he didn’t show his teeth! Mammals express threat by showing their teeth, but humans don’t. Warfare is symbolic — it was, anyway, until this century. The idea of mass slaughter is pretty recent.’
A recurrent human event in history that has always fascinated me is First Contact. The most vivid examples come from travel — exploration and discovery. Usually, First Contact is construed as Columbus meeting his first Arawak and calling him an Indian; but consider the converse — the Arawak meeting a fat little Italian clutching a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels on the deck of a caravel. In the year of Contact, 1778, the Hawaiians believed Captain Cook to be the God Lono. The Aztecs in 1517 took the Spaniards to be avatars of Quetzal-cóatl, the Plumed Serpent, God of Learning and of Wind. The Polar Inuit assumed that they were the only people in the world, so when they saw their first white stranger, the explorer Sir William Parry, in 1821, they said to him, ‘Are you from the sun or the moon?’
And as recently as the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors and New Guinea Highlanders met for the first time. The grasping world-weary Aussies took the Highlanders to be savages, while the Highlanders, assuming that the Aussies were the ghosts of their own dead ancestors, on a visit, felt a kinship and gave them food, thinking, They are like people you see in a dream. But the Australians were looking for gold and killed the Highlanders who were uncooperative.
We talked about this, appropriately, four strangers discussing the elements of meeting, the hope implied in our amiable lunch. First Contact was a vivid and recurrent event for everyone — bumping into a stranger on the subway, finding yourself with a fellow rider in an elevator, knocking elbows with your seat-mate on a plane, at a bus stop, a check-out counter, on a beach, in a church or movie theater, wherever we were thrown together and had to deal with it. As a traveler, First Contact was the story of my life, and was a motif of my African trip, the safari that had taken me through the Sudanese desert, on a cattle truck from the Ethiopian border, on a steamer on Lake Victoria or in a dugout on the Zambesi, at a lunch table or a farm in Harare, and right here in the sushi bar.
‘All the evidence in First Contact proves that we are a peaceful species,’ Professor Berger said, summing it up. ‘The aggression comes later.’
Africa, ancient in human terms, was the best place for studying our ancestry, he said. Humankind had been able to develop here without leaving, had roamed over this enormous fruitful place, with a good climate and shelter. Africa had everything, Europe not much, which was why there were humans living in Africa 160,000 years before anyone remotely human existed in Europe.
‘We are a coastal species — we lived, historically, with access to the sea,’ Professor Berger said. ‘That’s especially true in Africa. We were able to conquer the marine environment. When we ran out of animals to kill we turned to the sea. There’s never a lean season if you know how to fish.’
One theory he had discussed in his book was that the larger brain size of early man was attributable to the protein-rich marine diet available on the African coast.
I said, ‘But what about the people who have always been living in the African forests, in the jungle, even in the deserts.’
‘People in the forest were historically sidelined,’ he said. ‘Look at the pygmies in the Ituri Forest. Also the desert-dwelling Arabs, the Khoisan, and certain native Americans. The people who lived away from the watercourses were people who became marginalized.’
He had painted a bright persuasive picture — we humans were peaceable, resourceful, cooperative. But there was a dark side. Not long after that lunch, a Johannesburg psychologist described South Africa as ‘a society that has come out of an abyss.’
The man was Saths Cooper, a close colleague of the murdered Steve Biko. Cooper’s political activism had earned him a jail term of nine years, more than five of it on Robben Island. He was now a doctor. He chaired the Statutory Professional Board for Psychology at the Health Professions Council of South Africa. He said, ‘We have not come to actual grips with the depth of depravity that occurred.’
At its high-minded best South Africa was a society concerned with justice, dealing with its murderous past in a noble way, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and trying to get a handle on its conflict-ridden present. Capital punishment had been eliminated, mercy and forgiveness were the text for every sermon and for most political speeches. But at another level there was something akin to savagery suggested in the crime figures — fifty-five murders a day, and a rape every twenty-three seconds. These were just the reported incidents; the actual numbers were higher. The society that existed in South Africa — probably the most open in Africa — had a free press, virtually no censorship, no political terror, and had produced a distinguished literature in two languages. Its very openness insured that every lapse, every crime, every transgression was scrutinized in detail.
At a popular level, a mall culture had begun to develop at the edge of its cities, partly as a response to the insecurity and high incidence of crime in city centers but also because there were enough consumers with money to spend on new clothes and restaurants. The suburbs of Rosebank and Sandton were multiracial and generally safe, and their shopping malls were palmy and serene.
I took heart from a wise paleoanthropologist who knew his hominids saying: Here we are, four strangers together, sitting at the same table. We are peaceful We are the cooperative species. That was hopeful, and the fact that he was saying that in the clean and safe food court of an African shopping mall, was hopeful too.
20. The Wild Things at Mala Mala
The big furry reason that draws most people to Africa is the possibility of viewing dangerous animals from the comfort and safety of a Land-Rover, wearing a silly hat and carrying a scorecard. At the end of the day, the score has to show the Big Five. I could tick off only one of those, a tottering tembo I had accidentally glimpsed from the train in Tanzania. Much as I despaired of tourism in Africa and mocked the voyeurism that amounted to pestering animals in the bush, my idea was to satisfy myself that my own improvised safari would also include a week of peering at the wild creatures Africa was famous for.
I had seen so few — some jaw-snapping hyenas in Harar, shy gazelles in Kenya, a few loping giraffes and the trudging elephant from the windows of the Kilimanjaro Express, some mottled hippos in the Shire River, an ostrich glaring at me in Zimbabwe, dikdiks and baboons here and there, birds everywhere. No rhinos, no leopards, no herds of anything. But I could relate to animals in their awkwardness, for they looked like loners in the bush and all of them were more or less fleeing. The gazelles had fled with sharply lifted knees as though in a steeplechase.