Africa 2008

Africa Again

In the Okavango Delta, Botswana

There is a special landscape, a primordial scene, I love above all others. Most people travel to Africa to see animals and exotic birds. I too, but what draws me most keenly is the grassy woodland landscape that is at its finest there. Certain of its elements occur in many places around the world, in high-grass prairie, high and low veldt, steppes, high desert, the great Pannonian plain -- but nowhere is the ensemble more splendid than in Africa south of the Sahara.

You perceive the scene in strata. First is the ground, the gray, tan, or reddish soil. This is the underpainting for the scene, visible in strips and patches in the foreground and deeper into the picture. The color of the ground tells you about the mineral composition of the land, and what will grow above it.

Second, an uninterrupted layer of grass, ankle-high or up to one’s waist. The color is tawny, the texture thick. This is the foreground of the scene. It is what the small animals hide within, what slightly large animals graze upon. It is always moving gently, and shadows play within it.

Third, a variegated layer of brush and short trees, predominantly acacias -- of which there are hundreds of species. The color range is dusty gray-green to shiny green. The scrub grows up through the layer of grass, and is never dense -- no copses, no thickets. The scrub is porous, irregularly spaced, like rapid indicative brushstrokes. Here is where the smaller birds hang out, and this is the vegetation that medium-sized animals like baboons, cats, and the small antelopes, eat and in which they move.

In many parts of Africa, this third layer is actually duplex. Relatively taller trees, spaced apart, emerge from the scrub, often from the tops of termite mounds, reaching the size of mature fruit trees in our part of the world. These are the larger, dull green acacias (“thorn-trees”), together with the precious woods with shiny leaves -- rosewood, ebony, teak, mahogany, the wild red seringa. Many of these larger trees, especially those without thorns, are damaged and may seem dead, since large game rub against them and their tops are eaten by giraffe or elephant. But the precious-wood trees have barks that quickly scab over, forming a surface that must be all the more satisfying for rubbing. They rise above the scrub in consort with the younger baobabs, whose ramified foliage seems like a representation by an indecisive artist -- maybe of dried parsley, maybe whiskers -- but in either case rendered with a precise pen. The short baobab is the only tree where it appears that its roots are at the top.

These medium-height trees and bushes, standing above the scrub, are where the birds are most easily seen. The exotic and colorful birds of Africa tend to pose on dead or unleafed branches, and they stay put, seemingly unafraid of raptors. Unlike woodland birds in our lands, they tend not to flit in and out of bushes or trees, so they are the birder’s delight. It is in this upper zone of the third stratum that you spot elephant, buffalo, hippo (when on land), ostrich, zebra, the large antelopes and ungulates like the gnu (or wildebeest).

The main thing is that this duplex woodland layer, though everywhere complex, is discontinuous. Heights and textures vary from spot to spot. It is never a uniform woods, and it never forms a canopy. Most animals that hunt need protection from bushes and trees, but also need pathways for moving at speed. Cheetah, for example, zip in and out of open areas during the chase, but seldom stay out in the open; when they are not running, they are hiding. Leopard need short, loosely branched trees, either for protection or for dragging up a kill to consume at leisure.

The fourth layer is the most iconically familiar, from photography: tall trees standing against a featureless sky, whose color is neither blue nor gray but simply sky. Here are the stately umbrella acacias, looking so much like the pines of Rome, the yellow-fever acacias with their twisted trunks and branches, and the large mature baobabs, with their enormous trunks and frizzy tops. These uprights, irregularly spaced against the surround of space, sometimes startle one by moving, but that movement turns out to be the ridiculously slender necks of giraffe, preening and gliding like debutantes at a cotillion. At the tops of these tallest trees, eagles, vultures, hawks wait patiently, getting a fix on the animals and birds below.

In the forests and woods of America, the top layer of growth is a cover above one. You peer up to the sky through trees; but since humans cannot easily perceive distance upward, it is pointless to estimate how far the vault of sky may be. Humans, however, are programmed to perceive distance horizontally. We can see for miles; but we have also learned the real size of natural objects and so can override mere retinal size. We think to ourselves, that small hill is about ten miles off. In Africa, the upright elements in the topmost stratum of the landscape are seen in arbitrary spacing, against or in sky, never beneath or in front of it. Super-positional depth cues are lacking, and there is no evident horizon line. You see trees and the sky simultaneously and in the same plane, “out there.” Trees, giraffe necks, elephant contours, and lower sky seem positioned on the same drop at some indeterminate point in infinite stretched space. It is like being on the ocean. It must have awed, and daunted, the early explorers from the West.

The sky itself, if it is the dry season, does not appear curved like the underside of a bowl, but rather like a stretched, unmarked canvas, a kind of dull metallic backdrop: if you could reach out and rub your thumb against it, it would squeak. This sky is normally a faint opaline, lacking even wisps of cloud. Occasionally, unusually, there are little imperfections, like smears of spit on a shiny blank surface. When, at the end of or nearing a rainy season, there are clouds -- and such gorgeous cottony clouds! -- they shift horizontally, very slowly, against this backdrop, as if back-projected in a slow panning motion, rather than puffing up in stacks. As the clouds gently pull apart strand by strand, the gaps that open are a contrasting Poussin blue. [In the rainy season itself, all sense of sky over land disappears: you just get under something and stay there.]

What I describe here is the prototypical landscape, present everywhere save (I believe) in the Kalahari or the equatorial jungle. There is of course regional variation, largely in the relation between the third and fourth layers. In sand-based lowlands or low veldt, the layering may cease with the top portion of the layer of scrub and low trees: tall trees are missing, and only sky ensues. Here, the tallest animals and the great raptor birds will be relatively absent: zebra, wildebeest, ostrich and large antelope abound, and shrikes and hornbills, but giraffe or elephant or eagle are few. [When you see zebra, you tend to see dozens of them, in which case the group is called a “dazzle.”] In the highlands -- in East Africa rather than southern – it is the upper scrub layer that may be thin, even absent, so that the tall trees stand up forthrightly right out of the grass. It is the ecosystem that matches most closely, “savanna.” Here will be lacking the medium-sized birds, whose striking colors are evolutionarily matched to a dense shading of vegetation more typical of lower elevations. Here are elephant and giraffe, but not leopard or cheetah or the lesser antelope, for they need high bushes and short trees for protection.

Whatever the composition of the particular scene, the dominating perception, as I have said, is one of layered horizontality. Nothing achieves a very great height, and the picture plane begins right at your feet. What comes to mind, from the experience of art, is the laterally organized Dutch landscape, where first, in front, you see a log or a stream; then a little path leading through a copse; further along, a house hidden under trees and a low steeple further back; and in the distance, a canal or a finger of sea and a low layer of sky. The kind of landscape favored by Veronese or Claude, or Corot or the German Romantics, where the scene accumulates from bottom to top and culminates up on high, with the ruins of a castle on a crag, tumultuous weather going on behind (and gods coming down and going up) -- that is Alpine or Andean (or mythological), it is not African. Even in East Africa, there are no hills: huge peaks simply thrust up singularly from the plain. African landscapes are marvelously beautiful, in their immensity (which is to say, their unmeasureable extent), but they are seldom dramatic and never sublime. Many wonderful things are happening in this vast stratified scene, but no one great thing.

When you stand or walk in the landscape -- something you do with great caution, and with a quick route for escape -- there is often the scent of thyme, sometimes that of once-wet grass, but very seldom a floral odor or any bright blossom. One characteristic smell (which I encountered on my earlier visit) is that of faint smoke, because humans who are out and about in this enormous space during the day huddle together at dark around a campfire or in a kraal and murmur the night away -- partly for sociality, partly to ward off animals. During daytime, the scene is relatively empty of sound, unless, very near you, large animals are crushing branches under foot or pushing down trees. It is at night that animal sounds impinge. They are amazing. Lion roar, checking in with each other as they explore; when you wake suddenly from sleep and hear this sound next to you (underneath you, if you are in a tent on a platform), you experience an instinctual fear which cannot be reasoned away. Elephant bray, the sound of a trombone played with a careless embouchure. Hippo snuffle, ingesting great maws-full of grass just outside your tent, so close that you can hear them chew and swallow. At night also there are the fervent nocturnal stridulations of insects and, at dawn, the eloquent sounds of birds, both of which kinds of sound are clearly of communicative significance -- undecodable, alas, by me.

The sense of enormous laterality is, of course, not absolute. I have mentioned the great volcanic peaks that rise out of the plain: Kilimanjaro, Meru, Kenya, a few others. But except in the dryest season you seldom see these mountains from bottom to top, since layers of cloud intervene. It is a magnificent sight when the whole mountain comes into view, but it is frustratingly rare; when it happens, it is like the Greeks being visited, suddenly, by a god. There is, however, in East Africa the dramatically comparable experience of the Great Rift Valley, in which lies Ngorongoro Crater and beyond which lies the Serengeti. As you drive west from Arusha, you become aware of something indistinct but awesome in the distance; as you get closer a 3000-foot vertical wall emerges into view, the eastern wall of the Valley. [ One has a similar experience approaching the eastern front of the Rockies, but the Rift wall is more like a monolithic curtain, one that appears impenetrable.] One of the most beautiful of Tanzanian game parks lies at the foot of the wall, Lake Manyara, famous for its elephant (no longer for its lion, which have gone elsewhere). The lake is large and shallow, alkaline. At times it dries up, but normally it offers one of the great sights of the world: thousands of flamingos, sometimes flying, usually standing. At times they move in perfect unison, step by step, first left, then right, a ridiculous chorus line of PeptoBismol pink.

I really do not know why the vast lateral woodland landscape of Africa moves me so. It must be something that I have not told my mind. The scene is not, exactly, beautiful, if one takes mountains and dashing waterfalls and historic ruins as beautiful. The African landscape pulsates with a somehow embodied meaning. I am willing to consider an atavistic explanation. This is the environment where homo s.s. evolved, it is where our story started. It was the perfect ecosystem for a species standing newly erect, four to five feet tall, moving through bush to track and to hunt and gather, while depending on scrub and grass to hide in. All I, their descendent, know is that here I feel at home, as nowhere else in the world. It is not a new sensation. Thirty-five years ago, I had one of the two spiritually transcendent experiences of my life. I was on a solitary walk on the hills above the Ngorongoro Crater, in dazzling sunlight, made somewhat giddy by altitude; and I was looking down into the crater, at the play of light and shade, two thousand feet below, on the tan and pale blue expanse of plain and lake. I felt as if my inner self had rushed out, leaving only my body and a infant’s sensorium. I wept for no reason. {in another language, one could better say, Weeping ensued.] It was a long time before this extraordinary feeling faded. I mentioned this to our guide on this trip, and he remarked that I was lucky to have come back from that walk alive, but back then I hadn’t known better. It would have been all right, though, to have ended then and there.

I have always felt warmly toward Africans in their own countries. [When they live abroad, for reasons understandable, they can seem quite different.] We met only pleasant and lively Africans on this trip, and I must say I have enormous admiration for the cheerful bravery with which they face life.

George, our driver around Johannesburg, was a charmer, and a bit of a puzzle. Tall, bright, handsome, Soweto-born, well-educated, at 32 getting together the second part of a dowry but thinking it would take another year. Why was he a driver? That’s a dumb question, perhaps, since driving foreigners is a good job, but still one wonders what jobs are open to gifted young men without university credentials. He was responsive to all our questions about the society, the revolution; and very positive about the ultimate benefits of the terrible times black Africans (and caring whites) have been through. He spoke of how it was the children who really brought about the change, beginning in 1976, and how the proximate causes were language (down with Afrikaans, the language of the oppressor) and education for all. He said that success owed as much to de Klerk as to Mandela and his colleagues, and told how the RSA would not have made it had not some whites stayed and participated. Crime, he said, is grossly overpublicized; Joburg is safe. Women are equal, own as many cars, and have as good jobs as men. The townships are improving. The RSA is a coming economic powerhouse, building in part to the structures put in place during apartheid. The World Cup will bring a huge boost to the economy and to national pride. Winnie Mandela proved to be a bad person, but will always be honored for her part in gaining freedom.

It’s true, I think, that life in the townships is not so bad as one might expect. The ones we visited seemed neat and clean, with paved main streets and clean running water at the intersections, though with no inside plumbing or electricity. The townships are certainly not as bad as the Brazilian favelas or Indian slums. Broad views of the townships spreading for miles over the land in fact reminded me of the ticky-tacky houses spreading over Santa Clara County, but here occupied by blacks. Ken remarked, perceptively, that black rule has been prudent in certain crucial rhetorical or symbolic aspects. Those newly in power did not change the names (for the most part) of the country or cities or streets to reflect some phony, retrodictive popular history; nor did they force on the people a new standardizing religion or language. While honoring the enormous sacrifices made by the people for freedom, they recognized what was useful and built upon it.

George’s enthusiasm was impressive, even startling. Yet I didn’t really believe in it, any more than I would have believed in the 1960s what some city booster told me on a tour of Birmingham or Memphis. The reality is that life is poverty; women are not equal; those in the townships are still, by and large, in a sad mire. Later, while we were elsewhere in southern Africa, came the news that South Africans were killing refugees from Zimbabwe and Mozambique, presumably from xenophobia together with the acute fear of being displaced from the meager jobs they held, and thus from the necessities of life. George may be upbeat (and I am not sure at all whether he truly was, or whether he was shining on some tourists), but those lower on the social ladder than he are not. I am sure progress is occurring, but the legacy of apartheid and colonial exploitation, combined with the harsh imperatives of global capitalism in the new century, may make the RSA an alembic of human pain for a long time to come.

However, reverting to Africans as persons, and generalizing wildly: they are, among other things, not only unfailingly pleasant to outsiders but, one observes, playful among themselves. When Africans are on duty, but not at the moment busy -- guides at rest, shop-keepers waiting for trade, doormen, guards, sweepers, cleaners in moments of relaxation -- they laugh and joke and tease each other. It is not goofing off, nor is it showing off; it is not a performance. Sometimes, while waiting around, they dance in place a bit. Their very body language is cool. Anthropologists might relate this behavior to American blacks “doing the dozens.” In any event, it is lovely to observe; there is none of the subservient, guarded demeanor of those in other societies whose role it is to serve people better off then they. It means that the traveler feels free to joke with them and treat them casually, the way you might wink at a stranger on the street in small-town America.

Some of this inbred attitude is exploited, I think, by tour operators and their like. I found it off-putting always to be greeted, as we descended from the vehicle at a new camp or walked into the central space in a village, by Africans singing and dancing -- and to be sent on our way by something comparable. It is clearly a routine, however much comes naturally to those performing it. I accept that singing and dancing and drumming are traditionally used to mark moments of the day -- for example, to call people to a meal when it is ready. But in these commercial contexts it seems a bit much, when we realize that these Africans, whose role it is to deal with visitors, are educated and immersed in modern life. The point is not that they do not genuinely possess these cultural forms, but that traditionally they did not mark interactions such as: Here comes an OAT group again, or, Here’s the next tourist bus, time to peddle some crafts. Maybe I am too cynical; it is possible that these cultural forms still have a vital meaning, and are simply adapted without perceived strain to new occasions, as part of normal culture change.

Of course, even the most cynical or the most credulous visitor can make some tentative distinctions. For me, most of the arrival and departure ceremonies, involving singing and dancing, felt quite artificial, as well as musically, not to mention choreographically, spurious. And when, as so often happens, the visitors are urged to join in, the results are appalling. Americans should never get up and dance and sing with Africans. But at one camp there was, around a campfire in the dark, some choral singing that was ravishing to my ear. We know the sound from recordings and from modern touring groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and it’s mighty satisfying. The music is entirely diatonic, with harmonies made from the fourth and fifth tones (with an occasional 6th imposed on the melodic line for expressive effect). Our nearest equivalent is Shaker hymnody. The rhythms are complex, duple and triple time combined, and this we are familiar with from American jazz. There is a deep resonant vocal production from the men, a sharp keening sound from the women -- and lots of clicks in the articulation of the words. To my ear, this seems entirely and genuinely African.

Africans, generally, speak with soft voices (and wide smiles); no one has a harsh voice or a carking laugh. The men, especially, can be hard to hear, since their consonants are softened. The vowels are pure, especially the i and e sounds, without diphthongs, and these articulatory aspects, combined with a heritage of British pronunciation, lead to an continual slight confusion, an amusing challenge, on the part of the auditor. Purple sounds like pepple; birding = bedding, as in “Do you like bedding?” In southern Africa speech is especially soft and (in a linguistic sense) lax. In East Africa, speech is louder, higher pitched, tenser, and more plosive, and the smile on the face while speaking is less wide. I assume that the vocal differences reflect the body and its sounding capacities. In the south, the people are genetically Bantu, short, with round faces, large chests, stout legs. In East Africa, this body type is also present, but far more people are of a Nilotic body type: very tall and thin, with skinny legs and arms (which have an amazing spring and stamina, narrow heads, Marfan-like fingers and toes. [We were told that Nilotic is in fact a misattribution. The ancestral stock came, not from the Arabian peninsula as I had supposed -- what we think of as the Sudanese or Maasai “type” -- but from Angola, having migrated, millennia ago, across the fringes of the Sahara to the Nile valley, and thence southward in many stages. This makes sense, since Egyptians and Copts and Saudis are not of a “Nilotic” build.]

Verbal repetition is strong in African speech (in English, at any rate), which comports with what linguists report about Black English and various New World creoles. One of our two main tour leaders was highly educated and almost frighteningly articulate. Everything he said was beautifully composed and to the point -- and it only needed to be voiced once to be perfectly understood. The other, who had “good English” but who was less verbally and culturally sophisticated, said everything many times, and very deliberately, to a fault. “I am going to tell you what will happen … Here is what is going to happen … This is what will happen.” And, repetitively, “Are we all together? All right.” English-speaking, foreigner-encountering Africans, not surprisingly, employ some stock phrases that can be amusing or annoying, depending on circumstances. Our favorite guide’s standard verbal ploy, which we must have heard many hundreds of times, was to respond initially to any question or comment with “Jeez! For sure!”

Old forms of address to whites have disappeared: “bwana” is no more. But there are some curious hold-overs. When we would speak our guides’ names, to get their attention, they would often respond, “Yeah bo’.” I take this to be a compression of “Yes, boss,” and it’s a bit disturbing.

First names for Africans (with culture contact to the West) are charming: Precious, Valentine, Innocent, Melody, Magic, Agrippa, Schadrach. It reminds you what “Christian name” really means. (I believe they have other names as well.) In visits to primary schools we found the prevalent Western first names, including Kenneth and David, or so we were assured.

I had little sense of what such education amounted to, except for noting the obvious contextual factors: classrooms with no electricity, with workbooks shared among a number of children. Some children walk miles to and from school, sometimes twice if they go home for lunch, although more and more schools, apparently, provide “lunch” -- soybean porridge -- to obviate this. In an upper-grade class, the children were addressing themselves to workbooks on “Business Administration,” which described copiers and faxes and e-mail -- this in a school that had no computers, no electricity.

This has not been an account of a journey, but simply some musings about, some responses to, a strange and wonderful place. I do love Africa. I wish I had spent more of my life there, for it all seems fundamentally strange and deeply familiar.

David Jenness June 2008