The World Without Us

“Cattle came down from heaven, and everyone said, ‘Look at that! Our god is so kind, he sent us such a beautiful beast. It has milk, beautiful horns, and different colors. Not like wildebeest or buffalo, with only one color.’”

At this point, the story gets sticky. The Maasai claim all the cattle are meant for them, and kick the bushmen out of their bomas. When the bushmen ask Ngai for their own cattle to feed themselves, He refuses, but offers them the bow and arrow. “That’s why they still hunt in the forests instead of herding like we Maasai.”

Koonyi grins, his wide eyes glowing red in afternoon sun that flashes off the pendulous, cone-shaped bronze earrings that stretch his lobes chin-ward. The Maasai, he explains, figured out how to burn trees to create savannas for their herds; the fires also smoked out malarial mosquitoes. Santian gets his drift: When humans were mere hunter-gatherers, we weren’t much different from any other animal. Then we were chosen by God to became pastoralists, with divine dominion over the best animals, and our blessings grew.

The trouble is, Santian also knows, the Maasai didn’t stop there.

Even after white colonials took so much grazing land, nomadic life had still worked. But Maasai men each took at least three wives, and as each wife bore five or six children, she needed about 100 cows to support them. Such numbers were bound to catch up with them. In Santian’s young lifetime, he has seen round bomas become keyhole-shaped as Maasai appended fields of wheat and corn and began to stay in one place to tend them. Once they became agriculturalists, everything began to change.

Partois ole Santian, who grew up in a modernizing Maasai generation with the option of studying, excelled in sciences, learned English and French, and became a naturalist. At 26, he became one of a handful of Africans to earn silver certification from the Kenya Professional Safari Guide Association—the highest level. He found work with an ecotourism lodge in the Kenyan extension of Tanzania’s Serengeti Plain, Maasai Mara, a park combining an animals-only reserve with mixed conservation areas where Maasai, their herds, and wildlife might coexist as they always have. The red oat-grass Maasai Mara plain, dotted with desert date and flat-topped acacias, is still as splendid a savanna as any in Africa. Except that the most predominant animal grazing here is now the cow.

Often, Santian ties leather shoes on his long legs and climbs Kileleoni Hill, the highest point in the Mara. It is still wild enough to find impala carcasses hanging from tree limbs where leopards have stored them. From the top, Santian can look 60 miles south into Tanzania and the immense green-grass sea of the Serengeti. There, honking wildebeest mill in huge June flocks that will soon merge like floodwaters and burst across the border, bounding through rivers that boil with crocodiles awaiting their annual northward migration, with lions and leopards dozing above in the tortilis trees, needing only to roll over to make a kill.

The Serengeti has long been an object of Maasai bitterness: half a million square kilometers from which they were swept away in 1951, for a theme park cleansed of a keystone species, Homo sapiens, to humor Hollywood-bred tourist delusions of Africa as wilderness primeval. But Maasai naturalists like Santian are now grateful for it: the Serengeti, blessed with perfect volcanic soils for grassland, is gene bank to the richest concentration of mammals on Earth, a source from which species might one day radiate and repopulate the rest of the planet, if it comes to that. Huge as it is, however, naturalists worry about how the Serengeti will maintain all those uncountable gazelles, let alone elephants, if everything surrounding it turns into farms and fences.

There isn’t enough rain to change all the savanna into arable farmland. But that hasn’t stopped the Maasai from multiplying. So far married to only one woman, Partois ole Santian decided to stop right there. But Noonkokwa, the childhood girlfriend he wed upon completing his traditional warrior training, was horrified to learn that she might be in this marriage alone, with no female companions.

“I’m a naturalist,” he explained to her. “If all the wildlife habitat disappeared, I’d have to farm.” Before subdividing began, Maasai considered farming beneath the dignity of men chosen by God to pastor cattle. They wouldn’t even break sod to bury someone.

Noonkokwa understood. But she was still a Maasai woman. They compromised at two wives. But she still wanted six children. He was hoping to hold it to four; the second wife, of course, would want some, too.

Only one thing, too terrible to contemplate, might slow all this proliferating before all the animals go extinct. The old man, Koonyi, had said it himself. “The end of the Earth,” he called it. “In time, AIDS will wipe out humans. The animals will take it all back.”

AIDS isn’t yet the nightmare for the Maasai that it has become for sedentary tribes, but Santian saw how it could be soon. Once, Maasai only traveled on foot through savannas with their cows, spear in hand. Now some go to towns, sleep with whores, and spread AIDS on their return. Even worse are the lorry drivers who now show up twice a week, bringing gasoline for the pickups, motor scooters, and tractors that Maasai farmers purchase. Even young uncircumcised girls are getting infected.

In non-Maasai areas, such as up at Lake Victoria, where the Serengeti animals migrate each year, coffee growers too sick with AIDS to groom their plants have turned to growing easy staples like bananas, or cutting trees to make charcoal. Coffee bushes, now feral, are 15 feet high, beyond rehabilitation. Santian has heard people say they don’t care anymore, there’s no cure, so they won’t stop having children. So orphans now live with a virus instead of with parents, in villages where the adults have been all but wiped out.

Houses with no one left alive are collapsing. Mud-stick huts with dung roofs have melted away, leaving only half-finished houses of brick and cement begun by traders with money made from driving their lorries. Then they got sick, and gave their money to herbalists to cure them and their girlfriends. Nobody got well, and construction never resumed. The herbalists got all the money, then got sick themselves. In the end, the traders died, the girlfriends died, the medicine men died, and the money vanished; all that remains are roofless houses with acacias growing in the middle, and infected children who sell themselves to survive until they die early.

“It’s wiping out a generation of future leaders,” Santian had replied to Koonyi that afternoon, but the old Maasai figured that future leaders wouldn’t matter much with animals back in charge.

The sun rolls along the Serengeti Plain, filling the sky with iridescence. As it falls over the edge, blue twilight settles on the savanna. The day’s remaining warmth floats up the side of Kileleoni Hill and dissolves into the dusk. The chilly updraft that follows carries the screech of baboons. Santian pulls his red-and-yellow tartan shuka tighter.

Could AIDS be the animals’ final revenge? If so, Pan troglodytes, our chimpanzee siblings in central Africa’s womb, are accessories to our undoing. The human immunodeficiency virus that infects most people is closely related to a simian strain that chimps carry without getting sick. (The less-common HIV-II is similar to a form carried by rare mangabey monkeys found in Tanzania.) Infection probably spread to humans through bush meat. On encountering the 4 percent of our genes that differ from the genes of our closest primate relations, the virus mutated lethally.

Had moving to the savanna somehow made us biochemically more vulnerable? Santian can identify every mammal, bird, reptile, tree, and spider, and most flowers, visible insects, and medicinal plants in this ecosystem, but some subtle genetic differences escape him—and everyone searching for an AIDS vaccine as well. The answer may be in our brain, since brain size is where humans differ significantly from chimps and bonobos.

Another burst of yakking from the baboon troop drifts up from below. Probably they’re harassing the leopard who hung the impala meat. Interesting how male baboons vying for alpha status have learned to maintain a truce long enough to cooperate in discouraging leopards. Baboons also have the largest brain of any primate after Homo sapiens, and are the only other primate that adapted to living in savannas as forest habitats shrank.

If the dominant ungulates of the savanna—cattle—disappear, wildebeest will expand to take their place. If humans vanish, will baboons move into ours? Has their cranial capacity lay suppressed during the Holocene because we got the jump on them, being first out of the trees? With us no longer in their way, will their mental potential surge to the occasion and push them into a sudden, punctuated evolutionary scramble into every cranny of our vacant niche?

Santian rises and stretches. A new moon rocks toward the equatorial horizon, its points curving upward like a bowl for silvery Venus to settle inside. The Southern Cross and Milky Way assume their places. The air smells like violets. Up here, Santian hears wood owls, like those he knew in his boyhood until the forests around their bomas turned to wheat fields. If human crops revert to a mosaic of woods and grassland, and if baboons fill our keystone slot, would they be satisfied to dwell in pure natural beauty?