Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (27 page)

“Yeah, my uncle, he went to Russia just before I was born and he brought back the name Ivan. My favorite traditional name means waterfall. But almost always children are given English names now.”

“Why?” I ask.

He says, “I think it’s globalization. Everyone watches television and people are going to church more. They start reading the names written in the holy book. You call somebody an animal name, but when you take them in to get baptized the pastor will say: ‘No. You can’t do this. You can’t name your child
Hyena.
You should give them the name of a disciple, someone important.’”

“Are there really people named Hyena?”

“Yes,” Ivan says. “I have a friend named Fisi, Hyena.”

Ivan’s own children were baptized Tony, Adrian, and Austin. Out of the three, Austin’s name has gotten the most backlash. “It’s very hard to pronounce for people that speak Swahili,” Ivan says. “My family is Lutheran. They go to church, but then they go home and pray under trees.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t get taught the old ways. You cannot do it partially. And there has to be a training. You’re chosen to learn the sacred ways when you’re young. There is no documentary to teach me the old ways of my tribe, but I can read the Bible and it teaches me what I need to know A to Z.”

I find it terribly strange—this notion that Ivan has turned to Christianity because there’s no documentation of his own tribe’s spiritual tradition—but I have come to believe that the general leaning of the modern world, everywhere, is like this. We value academic degrees more than experience, trust professional documentaries more than family stories. We believe in the alphabet, that what’s written down is the gospel truth. It is the great boon of literature that it is available to everyone—not just a chosen few—but the movement from oral to literary traditions seems to have given us horse blinders in a world where everything we encounter is telling us something, where all we see and hear and feel is invested with its own soulful authority.

He glances at me shyly. “Are you religious?”

“I was raised Lutheran,” I tell him, “but I’m not conventionally religious.”

“Why not?” he asks, cocking his head to more intently study my face.

“In part, because of the baptism story you just told.”

Ivan sighs and turns to the fire. He says, “There really
is
something nice to the old names, the ways of this place. When someone uses a name of an animal or a thing in nature, we see that it means something to that family. But it is hard to have that kind of name here now. Children named after nature are sometimes picked on. They ask their parents, ‘Why don’t I have an English name?’”

English name. The term makes me think of names like Baker and Porter and Miller, all names that came from the occupations of ancestors. Historically—in many cultures, not just those of Africa—names were part of the phenomenal world. Identities were no less complicated, but the stories given at birth were, for better or worse, chosen because they represented something directly observable and life-world connecting. My own son is named in homage to my paternal grandfather, a highly adventurous wildcard who used to carve bows from wood, fletch feathers onto arrows. Historically, Archer was a surname in the trade-naming tradition. I have unconsciously—though maybe, I realize now, not unintentionally—taken it back.

“Hey, Ivan, what’s your last name?” I ask.

“Moshi.”

The irony is so obvious, so thick, so immediate, we both begin to laugh until we’re cackling like hyenas, animals that sometimes switch up their
woo-ee
calls for trembling giggles. Moshi is the name of Ivan’s home village, the birthplace of Chagga tribal culture. It is where his son, Austin Moshi, will learn to navigate between the abstraction of a Texas city he sees on television and the ancestral village that rose from the very land on which he stands.

 • • • 

The next afternoon, tsetse flies follow David’s Land Cruiser into camp. Swarming. I step away from the vehicle and linger to watch other safari-goers come into range. The flies force everyone who disembarks to do a dance with their hands. Swatting. Ivan comes up behind me. “You know why this is a national park?” he asks. “You know why the Serengeti, the migration, still exists? It’s because of the tsetse fly!”

“What do you mean?”

“This land is good for livestock, it’s good for farming. But a long time ago people didn’t come here because of the flies. They didn’t settle because of the tsetse. So these little insects helped this place. They protected it. They became soldiers of the Serengeti. Things have value that we don’t know and cannot see,” he says. “Nature serves as a reminder of how we fit into all this. We think we’re smarter than animals. We think we can see things coming. We talk about globalization, but we cannot know the big picture.”

But we do know a little, and it isn’t good. Climate change has badly affected Ivan’s family’s farm, where generations have grown coffee and bananas. Droughts, nearly unanimously accepted in the scientific community as the result of human-caused climate change, have pushed him to work here. “We protect this area, but other areas also get benefit,” he says of the Serengeti. The same goes for degradation. When one thing is destroyed, everything—and everyone—suffers. “It is all connected,” he says, putting his hands out, palms up to represent scales.

His right hand goes down, “Somebody will value the animals.”

His left hand goes down. “Somebody else will value the minerals. It is always like this.”

Not long ago, the Tanzanian government came close to building thirty-three miles of commercial highway across the northern section of the Serengeti. The highway would have linked isolated villages outside park boundaries with larger cities and central African nations, and it would have severed habitat. “The animals are used to the dirt roads, but they have never seen a tarmac,” Ivan says. “They might not have crossed it. What would have happened then?”

Likely, scientists predicted, an eventual collapse of the wildebeest population. The road would present a barrier between forage and water, as well as increase poaching and traffic accidents. “They stopped that road, but there are always those forces at work,” Ivan says. “It’s a few people who have power. They don’t think about benefit to the whole community.”

Ivan points to a guest who is waving away tsetse flies. I recognize him as someone who complained about the insects at dinner last night. Ivan says, “If they kill all the tsetse flies, they might destroy something else, too. The outcome, nobody really knows.”

Next week, this camp is scheduled to move. The very tent I sleep in will be folded up and driven north, to be set up in anticipation of the migration. Ivan’s life, like those of all the men working here, consists of minimigrations of their own. Monthly, these men support their families by traveling with the herds in their seasonal search for food. And—in the process—they make smaller circles, traveling to and from their own home places. Ivan, like Osman, is here for six weeks, then he goes home for two.

Ivan misses his children, but he brings his wild lessons back to them. “I become a better parent by being out here,” he says. “You watch the hyena with the baby. You see the lion, the wildebeest. You see them teach: You have not positioned yourself. You need cover. You need this or that. The survival starts like training sessions, hunting and survival skills. Out here, if you have one mistake, it is all over.”

I accompany Ivan to the camp’s office tent. A laptop is set up on a folding table. I can see his bunk peeking out from an inner canvas wall in the back. He takes a seat on a military-style wooden trunk. “When I first get home,” he says, “I watch my children. I’ve been away for a long time. The first week is training. I make sure they’re becoming good citizens. I watch them like I’ve been watching the lions and elephants. Am I raising this kid the right way? Then, in time, we become friends. Every parent wants their kid to be successful, and to be successful, you need to watch in order to understand. If you are hunted, or hunting, you have to see out of the sides of your eyes, open your ears. It is like this for humans, too.”

Especially in places like this.

By the time I make my way back down to the hearth fire—senses on alert for four-legged camp intruders—the sky has darkened. Tonight’s fire is hearty, whole logs have bent the metallic band meant to hold flames in. I take a seat next to a tall guide with a kindly smile. He’s wearing khaki. Like me. Like everyone around us. The stereotypical colors of safari are not for style; they’re intended to keep the tsetse at bay.

When I ask Antony Kivuyo—a Maasai ranger with broad shoulders and a cleanly shaven head—how he ended up working at the camp, he tells me, like a wildebeest incarnate: “I was seeking greener pastures.”

Antony is fluent in English, Swahili, and local dialects. As a trained Maasai warrior, he is also versed in the language of the wind, the stars. He speaks nature, which he believes holds the wisdom of god—by all of god’s names. Antony says: “Where someone else may use the word God, I prefer the word Nature.”

He asks about my daily wildlife sightings, and when I bring up huge herds of wildebeest, Antony says: “Nature gives the wildebeest an offer. When the lion is born its eyes are closed for one week. In three months, maybe, it starts to walk. But a baby wildebeest can stand fifteen minutes after it is born. Nature gives it what is needed. And it needs to be able to run. Nature offers you the way, and you follow it to survive.”

And this doesn’t just apply to wildebeest.

The origins of the Great Migration are a mystery, but it’s generally believed that it began around the same time modern humans began to evolve here. East Africa, often called the Cradle of Humankind, is widely believed to be our species’s evolutionary birthplace. It is from this very point on earth that modern humans likely emerged, evolving into who we are today.

Early on, our African ancestors were probably stationary. But, over time, maybe after learning of the abundance of food connected to the Great Migration, humans evolved bipedal ability. This allowed them to do something other predators could not: pick up their offspring to follow herds. The Out of Africa theory—considered the most likely creation story by many scientists, archeologists, and anthropologists—maintains that all
Homo sapiens
on earth come from a small group that trekked out of the African continent to populate the world after marrying visceral skill with a newly developed ability to think abstractly.

“The Maasai are allowed to go with their cattle across the borders of Kenya and Tanzania because Nature favors them to be pastoralists and grazers,” Antony says. “I live to be Maasai, but life is changing. First of all is this global warming. We have short rains. You can’t plant and harvest, you need to migrate, following precious weather. Now, because of the climate, a lot of Maasai send their children to school.” His father was one of them.

Antony became a warrior at nineteen. When he was initiated into the Maasai warrior class, his attitudes toward school changed. He says, “I was like:
I am special.
I thought
, I am a warrior and nothing else matters
. In a traditional way, we treat other people like they are not warriors. No one could tell me what to do, not even the principal of my school.”

One day, Antony’s attitude got him suspended. When he went home, his father saw that his son was at a loss for direction. He said to Antony, “Do you want to continue with school? Or do you want to live in the village and be a warrior, matting your hair and drinking milk from everyone else’s house?” It was not an easy question to answer. Antony had grown up dreaming of being a warrior, idolizing them and their characteristic hair, slicked back with rust-colored iron ore and cow fat.

As a boy, he had been given a stick to help his father herd cattle. Now, his stick had become a spear. But he wasn’t sure of what to do with it. Africa was changing. He would have to change, too.

“When I finally decided to go back to school,” Antony says, “when I first left my village, my father told me: ‘You are a warrior forever, but school can make your life better.’”

“I think I’m here because I’ve had too much schooling and not enough bush,” I say. Antony nods in understanding. For the next generation, here too, abstract forms of knowledge might become overbearing.

“To learn from Nature, it is amazing!” he says. “When you become a warrior, you get a spirit in your heart. That’s why Maasai can cross in front of a lion. You don’t worry about what the lion is going to do because you are a warrior. The elders tell you some words when you become a warrior. They tell you:
No one will be special like you. Never fear anything in your life.
This becomes your way of living.”

Like all warriors, Antony was circumcised when he was initiated. This came after he had already learned how to walk in the bush, after he’d learned the traditions of his forefathers, who constructed a culture that reveres cattle and does not kill them often for meat—choosing instead to subsist off of their milk and draws of their blood. “We do circumcision
without pain killers
,” Antony tells me, slowing his speech to emphasize the bravery this takes. “Becoming a warrior is like a wall you are crossing. You have to be ready.”

He’s looking at me gravely, but all I can think of are the women in his village—women all over the world—who give birth, under the threat of death, without even the mention of an epidural. As if he can tell what I’m thinking, Antony says: “After I went back to school, I realized, I am a warrior on my side. But maybe you are a warrior on your side. Maybe you are a warrior in your tradition.”

Now, I’m not sure about that, but I would say parents are a certain sort of warrior class, regardless of gender or culture. No one I’ve ever met has felt smart enough, diligent enough, ready to fully accept the tasks of parenting without fear—but still, they move forward. Unfortunately, where I come from, there are not many elders putting the don’t-be-afraid-of-anything spirit into the hearts of wayfaring warrior-parents. Parenting advice, where I come from—really, advice about nearly everything—seems to fall more along the lines of:
Dr. Phil says you
shouldn’t do it like that.