"Ask them about their excavations," Yirmi whispers. "Take an interest in their work, they need attention and appreciation."
Daniela nods.
"With your fluent English you'll be able to communicate with them and understand their anthropological explanations, which I can't make head or tail of. Maybe also because my hearing is bad."
"Hearing or concentration?"
"Maybe also concentration… like any other solitary person."
"Don't worry, I'll show great interest," says the guest, her eyes sparkling as they near the fire, "and not merely out of politeness but also habit. A teacher knows how to engage young people."
They sit down with the researchers in a square of collapsible tables, at whose center, ringed by stones, a bluish fire hovers on its coals like a hen on a nest full of eggs. The aroma of the hot food on Daniela's plate is giving her a huge appetite. She has eaten nothing since Sijjin Kuang's sandwiches. Even so, she doesn't dig in before asking the scientists to explain to her the nature of their project.
The Tanzanian team leader chooses Dr. Roberto Saboleda Kukiriza, an archaeologist from Uganda, to explain the essence to the white woman.
Dr. Kukiriza is a handsome man of about thirty-five. His studies in London polished the English he learned as a child, and he is eager to explain and demonstrate their work. He immediately abandons his plateful of delicacies and hurries to fetch a folding wooden board that has glued to it a colorful map of Africa, indicating anthropological sites both established and potential.
He sets up the map for the guest, adjusting its position to catch the firelight, then turns to this woman who is at least twenty years his senior and says, "I will explain it to you, Madam, but only on the condition that you eat."
The scientific lecture has a political prologue: Dr. Kukiriza begins by deploring the violated honor of Africa and the developed world's loss of faith in its future. Famine, disease, and especially vicious conflicts and wars, have sown this despair. Indeed, one cannot bend the bitter truth that under colonial rule the extent of famine and disease and killing on the continent was less than after independence. Worst of all, the disdainful attitude of the first world, the second, and even the third — which calls Africa the last world — is being absorbed more and more deeply into the African soul itself: depression threatens to dry up the wellsprings of the people's joy. That is why this group of scientists has decided to transcend tribal and national rivalries and try to raise Africa's stature through original and independent research. Without state-of-the-art laboratories and sophisticated equipment, but only simple and inexpensive tools, they are digging and probing the earth to find the source of all of humanity, the evolutionary link between the chimpanzee and Homo sapiens, in order to put Africa back on the map of the world as the cradle of civilization.
Yes, although fossils of a human nature, prehistoric hominids, have been discovered in various places around the world, there is consensus in the scientific community that the original human, per se, came from the great apes of Africa. It is only when the chimpanzee branches into Australopithecus afarensis that the evolution that leads us to ourselves begins in earnest. In these times, when the developed world is giving up on this continent and may yet abandon it, it is perhaps proper for Africa to remind humankind, if not of where it is headed, then at least of where it has come from.
This, of course, is an ideological goal and not a scientific one, admits the eloquent speaker to the white visitor, yet in the end a modest goal, not a revolution, for in any case we remain obligated to evolutionary science, and ideology is merely a frosting that can be scraped off. Indeed, evolution itself is not a revolution but rather a process of transmission, like a relay race. Chimpanzees are still running around the world with no intention of turning into humans, but five to seven million years ago one chimp was born who handed down something new to its descendants. And one of those descendants passed this same something, with a minor addition, to its own offspring. And what is this "something"? One may call it a new trait, physical or mental. Trait of course is an imprecise literary word, but there is none better to explain the whole matter. Because what it describes might be an extra wisdom tooth, or a twisted one, or a more rounded design of the hip joint, or a keener, subtler sense of smell that increases the animal's curiosity about its environment.
The various transmitters of this trait, continues the Ugandan archaeologist in his superb English, were not aware of what they passed along of themselves, nor what this transmission would lead to. They remained bound and loyal to their own kind, to their existence as apes of various species, most of which became extinct over time. But what they handed down continued under its own power, to develop or alter from transmission to transmission, now getting stronger and now weaker, sometimes clear and sometimes blurred — until through countless transmissions there gradually arose our primal direct ancestor, the first Homo sapiens, who was human in every regard.
And this development from the chimpanzee was not a highway but rather a road that branched into many byways, and there were relatives who strayed or were expelled from the main road and got stuck in dead-end streets. For example, three and a half million years ago, our family members known as the robust australopithecines, who included Australopithecus boisei, which was discovered right here in East Africa, were cut off from human evolution. They were, to put it bluntly, eating machines, or as they are more fondly known, nut-crackers. A million years ago they became extinct owing to their small and limited brains, which inhibited their culinary flexibility.
"Eating machines?" Yirmiyahu loves the expression.
"Yes, they had faces the size of dinner plates and huge jawbones, but they were vegetarians nonetheless."
Here the team leader interrupts the flow of his colleague's lecture before it strays farther still from the main path. The food is growing cold, and this communal meal must be concluded honorably. Later on we will be able to show our guest some of the fossils we have found.
The food suits the Israeli woman's palate, and she heaps warm praise upon the chefs and does not decline a second helping.
And at the meal's end, after the remains have been cleared away, the truths unearthed in this remote volcanic canyon can finally be made tangible for the visitor. On the table are arrayed not sweets but a dessert of highly significant fossils: A fragment of a huge lower jawbone, with two big teeth still planted in it. Two great eye sockets in a section of skull. A twisted hipbone from which a world of knowledge might be derived.
Now the Ugandan is joined by the Kenyan and Ghanian, who assist him in explaining the dramatic importance of the bones. Daniela senses, with pleasure, not only their desire to share this chance to show off their accomplishments to a stranger willing to express interest for an hour or so but also their hunger for mature, womanly, motherly protection. She therefore takes pains not to miss a single word and to encourage the speakers with nods of agreement. And even as millions of years of anthropology are jumbled between the jaws of an eating machine, with the empty eyes of a prehistoric ape looking on in wide amazement, she steals a glance at her brother-in-law to see if he is working as hard as she is to follow the explanations. But the newly exposed skull of the old man is facing the fire, his eyes fixed on the flame, and his illuminated face wears an expression of sorrow.
Again the Tanzanian team leader is compelled to exert his authority. That's enough for now, he tells his friends. If we want our guest to remember anything, let us not burden her with too many dates and fossils. Although she is here for only a short visit, perhaps we will be fortunate enough to see her again. Daniela can sense the disappointment of the speakers, whose opportunity to impress a woman has been cut short, and therefore, before departing, she turns to them with a challenging question, but one surely in keeping with the spirit of the times: Here you are a purely African group, a team of black men, and this is an honorable scientific accomplishment; but why have you not thought to include a woman?