WHO ARE OUR ELDERS?

In the Serengeti, as the full moon rises, I watch a giraffe savor an acacia branch, relishing its long, sturdy thorns the size of toothpicks, and the tiny, tender leaves they protected. Gingerly holding the branch in his lips, the giraffe curls his tongue around the thorns and gently strips them into his mouth. After a few minutes, he turns away from the tree and ambles towards a shallow ravine. The trees have released their tannins, carried by the wind to other trees and giraffes nearby: Time to move on. No more feasting here. After about fifteen minutes of feeding, the trees know to do this so as not to be consumed. I imagine the giraffe’s nostrils and the leaves themselves tingling in the afternoon air. In the Serengeti, the air itself has texture, lent by the sun, limned with gold as if inside a luminous golden bubble that floats on the washed out blue of the sky.

The clouds begin to gather, imperceptible at first, just a wisp here and there, growing denser and a deeper gray as the heat abates and shadows come to life. After the torpor of midday, there is a quickening as dusk approaches. Gold spills down the tree trunks. The underside of the clouds swells and glows, as if they have formed just then, when we momentarily looked away. Vultures circle but we can’t find the kill.

In the streambed, a dozing jackal suddenly pricks up his ears, sits up, then stands, rigid and listening, and trots upstream towards the sound he has heard. David, our guide, carefully follows the jackal, inching our vehicle forward until we come upon a pride of lions devouring an impala. The jackal and David had heard the lions’ triumphant roar after the kill, a sound that has eluded those of us with untrained ears. We drive close – no more than five feet from a lioness gnawing on the rib cage, and sit in the fading light listening to the wind and the cracking of bones. Soon the hyenas will come, the vultures and marabou storks. Hyena scat is chalk white because of all the bones they eat, finishing the skeleton after the lions are through. Giraffes and other ungulates eat hyena feces for the calcium. David tells us that lions do not hunt unless they are hungry. They don’t stockpile food. No scarcity. No waste. 

I ask David what are the most amazing things he’s seen in his years of guiding. He says there are two moments he will never forget. Both times he was alone. The first was seeing two pythons mating then lying together, exhausted and intertwined. The second was seeing an elephant give birth, surrounded by a group of females, who then buried the placenta.

David is an initiated Maasai warrior. Except for the gaping empty holes in his earlobes, you wouldn’t know it to look at him, in his T-shirt and khakis. He believes the Maasai are descended from the twelve tribes of Israel. In five years he is to be initiated as an elder in a ceremony that happens only once every fifteen years. But what will he teach the new young initiates? He has left the village and does not know the ways of the elders he is to join who will initiate him. They are the last of their generation. In just fifteen years, maybe less, an ancient, collective memory has been wiped clean.

It’s a familiar story: as a young child he was sent to the Catholic mission to get a Western education. He has been a guide for seven years. Now he wants to go back to school to get a Western education and become a journalist. What will he write about, I wonder? I ask him about village life, about the elders, especially the diviners and healers. I ask whether they foresaw who he would be before he was born, choosing a name that would remind him of his life purpose, as they do in parts of West Africa. He says vehemently, “I hate those people!” (meaning the shamans and medicine people). He repeats it again, and then again. He hates them, hates what they say and hates what they do. He hates that some of them take advantage of people or use their power to do harm. 

His breath hisses and lingers on the word: hate. He speaks for a long time. I do not interrupt. The story pours out of him as we bounce along looking for wildebeest. After a time, he falls silent, then turns and asks me what I think. I pick my way carefully through the sharp edges of his story and the path of my response, saying first that I agree that there are those who use their power to do harm, and that this is not good, but that this doesn’t apply only to corrupt shamans. There are many people with power who do this. I say that I think his hate is the church talking, not his own heart, and ask how he can be a warrior and an elder if he hates his people and his culture. I say that the church, and governments, the media, and big corporations are threatened by people who have natural power derived from a relationship with the earth and the ancestors, and power sustained by being in dialogue with the Great Mystery, because people who understand this kind of power cannot be controlled. I ask, Are there are any elders or diviners whom he likes and trusts? There is one. David’s face softens into a fond smile as he tells of this special man whose predictions invariably come true. The man can look at you and tell you your future in a glance, and he is always right. He has 16 wives and 42 children, and people come to see him from all over. He is kind and smiling and keeps nothing for himself, giving everything away to his community. I ask whether David has ever talked to this man. He has not. He is afraid. I ask when he is going back to his village for a visit and whether, just out of curiosity, maybe as a journalist, it would be interesting to hear what the old man says. David grins and says, “But I am going at the end of September! I can go see him!”