Tracking humanity in Africa

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

By Brooke Williams

We’re just back from three weeks in Africa. A friend asked me to describe an image from the trip, and the one that immediately came to me was of shoes – mine, walking. We walked a lot in Africa and I’m sure I looked down at my feet many times.

One image I have is looking down at my feet while walking across a hard, red desert in northwestern Namibia. We were there to learn more about the work Round River Conservation Studies (www.roundriver.org) is doing with local government to create protected conservation areas.

We had risen early to meet the trackers whose job it is to keep track of black rhinos living in the Palmwag Preserve – that vast area between the Skeleton Coast and Etosha National Park. We saw numerous zebra, oryx (like an elk dressed up for Mardi Gras), the tiny dukier, steenbok and a dozen species of birds including a group of ostriches and many different larks.

This particular morning might have gone down as one of the best of my life even if we’d missed that huge grey figure of the agitated black rhino feeding in the dry wash. The trackers immediately recognized Takamisu (meaning “Be Careful”) by his size and the length of his horn. They insisted we sit quietly and wait for the rhino to relax and cease feeling threatened.

The trackers gather information for Save the Rhino Trust, a 20-year old nonprofit formed by people who had watched poaching devastate the black rhino population. During the 1980s tens of thousands of black rhinos were killed and the species was on the brink of extinction. Save the Rhino Trust, using modern conservation strategies, helped bring the black rhino back to a population of over three thousand in the area, today.

These trackers have spent their lives in this desert, herding goats from the time they could walk. Nothing escapes them. After waiting fifteen minutes, we started walking. We got to the rhino’s last seen point in the wash. Beyond, the reddish desert spilled in every direction interrupted by low hills. Six oryx grazed in the distance.

The trackers immediately found signs indicating the rhino’s direction and we were instructed to stay quiet and behind them in a line. The goal was to find the rhino and note its behavior without it picking up our scent, hearing or noticing us.

We followed the rhino for five miles seeing it from time to time as it ambled across the landscape, appearing to be more interested in exploration than in its main food source, the euphorbia plants, a succulent that grows in large, hut-like clumps across the landscape.

Before my trip to Africa, a friend of mine who had been there told me I might experience an unusual feeling of being connected to the landscape because, after all, it is where our earliest ancestors were born. The feeling I had was nothing like I’d expected.

Flooded by a sea of time, I looked up at my group ahead of me and sensed thousands of generations of humans, right there, as if walking with us across the same desert, slowly, quietly following animals.

On the plane flying back, I read about recent findings based on analysis of human skulls found in Europe, Asia and South Africa. These skulls have been carbon dated and DNA tested and found to be similar in age and genetics. This analysis means that these far-flung people all had common origins. It is the most definitive data yet proving that “we’re all Africans.”

Yes, it is good that the scientists have proven this beyond the shadow of most doubt, but to me, it doesn’t matter. What I felt cannot be measured in years or cells. I am part of a life older and deeper than I’d ever been able to imagine. Although nuclear weapons, over-population, and climate change complicate the question, I ask it anyway: What can I do to see this life continue forward over the same distance I see looking back?
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Tracking humanity in Africa | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

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