In Search of Distant Cousins

Of all the sensory jolts southern Africa affords--and there are still enough to overwhelm the most jaded of travelers--the most unexpected may be the silences. Strange and magical, they sweep down on the veld each winter, giving pause to predator and prey alike. Game trackers say the animal calls that punctuate these lulls reveal the continent’s ancient, still-beating heart. The howls of an agitated troop of baboons traversing a leopard’s glade, the trumpets from a herd of elephants bound for a mud bath, the brisk steps of a lost impala doe desperate to find her mother before nightfall--these may seem like the soundtrack of a colonial game hunt, but they also are still a part of this massive land and the nomadic wanderings that once reigned supreme here.

Sadly, since the collapse of apartheid in 1994, South Africa has experienced soaring immigration pressures, and many question whether the country will be able to sustain its wild lands. Within the 16.3 million acres of protected game reserves and national parks, hundreds of different genuses of mammals, birds and reptiles--many hunted to the brink of extinction at the beginning of this century--still roam free. The dramatic silences that cover the winter veld often frame these animals’ songs of survival, much as they did for our distant ancestors millions of years ago.

Wanting to sample both of these uniquely African worlds--wild big- game splendor coupled with the search for humanity’s origins--I joined a UCLA Extension-sponsored three-week trip last April. Titled “Out of Africa,” the excursion was not named for that Meryl Streep three-hankie flick, but for the belief among the world’s finest paleontologists and archeologists that the earliest of our ape-man relatives took their first steps in southern Africa before eventually inhabiting the entire planet.

First, of course, I had to get from L.A. to South Africa, a 22-hour journey that was its own test of fortitude.

Jet-lagged to the extreme, I met up with my fellow archeo-adventurers at Johannesburg (rechristened Guateng, “gold” in the Sotho language) International Airport. There were 18 of us, all Americans, of age and occupation ranging from graduate student to retired physician.

After a brisk one-hour drive, our tour bus deposited us at the Mount Grace Country House Hotel, a lovely collection of thatch-roof rooms overlooking the sleepy village of Magaliesberg. In the elegant yet informal living room, back-lit by a tangerine sunset, we raised glasses of port and puffed on Cuban cigars.

Gazing around, I wondered what type of people plunk down almost $5,000 to track elephant spoor and calcified human remains. Adventurous. That was my first notion. Quirky tending to downright nutty was my appraisal three port- and brandy-filled weeks later.

My first notion was borne out, for example, in my introduction to Peppy Millican, a spry widow in her late 70s. Peppy was on her fifth tour of Africa, and she let everyone know how tough it would be to impress her.

“After you’ve walked with penguins on an Antarctica ice floe,” Peppy grumbled, “Africa seems a little tame.”

Happily, Peppy’s requirements for invigorating adventure were met, and exceeded, in no small part by the group’s leaders, Hilary Deacon and Grahame Thomson. Deacon, a professor of archeology at the University of Stellenbosch, is one of the most renowned paleoanthropologists in southern Africa, largely for his studies of the first anatomically modern humans, who lived near the mouth of the Klasies River. Thomson, the group’s captain and benevolent whipcracker, has spent the past 25 years in game reserve marketing and nature conservation.

In the morning, we were to set off for the nearby Sterkfontein Caves and our first brush with 2-million-year-old ancestors. This would require serious fortification, and the Mount Grace did not disappoint. We awoke to a five-course buffet breakfast, which included star fruit, sweet corn fritters and crumpets topped with maple syrup and fresh cream. This feast was a taste of things to come; meals out in the bush were equally lavish and tasty--and often exotic. (Tempting though they looked, the roasted ostrich and stewed impala served at a bush barbecue a week later looked too much like the day’s game-viewing for me to dig in with a clear conscience.)

Sterkfontein is the most important prehistoric excavation site in all of relic-rich southern Africa. It was here, in 1947, that Scottish anthropologist Robert Broom excavated the nearly complete skull of a female hominid, Australopithecus africanus (the term means southern ape), radiocarbon-dated at more than 2.5 million years, the oldest African find at the time.

Our guest speaker at Sterkfontein, Ron Clarke of the University of the Witwatersrand, holds the honor of having discovered the oldest hominid remains in southern Africa.

Clarke’s 1994 find was a marvel of forensic detection, as is most of modern anthropology. Clarke found the tiny ankle bones tucked away in a field lab where they’d been cooling, in error, for 14 years. He instantly recognized them as belonging to a creature part ape and part man. “Little Foot,” as it was dubbed by the media, had a human-type ankle adapted to upright movement and an ape-like big toe, which could flex and climb trees (for sleeping in safety at night). These endowments were particularly useful in the hostile landscape of 3.5 million years ago, where saber-toothed cats, hyenas and giant monkeys ran wild.

(An even more astounding find was to come from Sterkfontein last month, when Clarke and his research team announced they’d dug out the first complete skeletal hominid remains, perhaps as much as 2 million years older than any skeleton found before.)

After Sterkfontein, we were back on the tour bus prepping for our next destination, the Lapalala Wilderness Area preserve, a private game conservancy in South Africa’s Northern Province.

Lapalala’s main lodge boasts a filtered swimming pool, tennis court and conference facilities. But plush as these digs are, when you’re in the rugged north, far off the usual game-tour track, you stay in the bush. You just do.

Matt Meyer, a photographer who was in grad school, was one of the handful of our group who volunteered to leave the comforts of base camp and throw down in the bush. Matt and I and the others were guided to Lapalala’s isolated rhino camp a few miles from the lodge by the preserve’s crack rhino-spotter, Hamish Rodgers.

That night, Matt and I settled into our small A-frame tent at the river’s edge, the darkness broken only by our feeble oil candles, and took some comfort in knowing that the Mozambique spitting cobra, which had visited our tent a few hours earlier, hadn’t lingered much past sundown.

“At least you’ve got some time with a cobra bite,” Hamish had explained to us, straining for a morbid bright side, as bush-guides are prone to do. “If you get nailed by a black mamba [the most feared snake in all Africa] you’ve got less than an hour to start life support measures before the central nervous system shuts down. Not a pretty sight.”

On the evolution front, Lapalala is home to some notable Iron Age sites. People from what is now Zimbabwe, who were capable of smelting iron and copper, gradually made their way down across the Limpopo River around AD 1500. Seeing the remnants of their handiwork would have made an interesting side trip, but Prof. Deacon had bigger things planned.

Hiking our khakis well above our knees, we forded the Palala River, which bisects the reserve. Ahead of us was a rare specimen of rock art by the ancient San people (whose descendants the Europeans dubbed Bushmen). All that stood in our way was a rocky cliff-face. It was a treacherous hike at best, and a few of the men lifted Peppy to their shoulders. She was indignant, not least for not being consulted.

The San drawings, typically executed under the outcroppings of small cliffs or caves, consisted of delicate ochre figures unique to southern Africa. Drawn by shamanistic artists in the throes of a self-induced trance, the artifacts had deeply religious significance and were used to help solve problems vexing the community.

Although modest in scale compared to the rock art I would see on my own after the tour ended (in the legendary caves of Bushmen’s Kloof in the Northwest Cape region), the San sketches were compelling all the same. Standing in the warm, diffuse twilight, with the Palala cresting a bright aquamarine below, I felt a tangible link to a human culture dating back thousands of years.

Deeply touched as I was, the emotional (and visual) peak was yet to come. The next day, we rode via suspended cable car across the Limpopo and into Botswana for what Grahame Thomson promised would be the peak experience.

We now were in the Mashatu Game Reserve, separated in smaller groups. Ours was in the hands of Joseph Mazebedi, an expert elephant tracker, in search of the legendary Tuli herd. (Elephants generally stay in small groups; the Tuli, perhaps spooked by an innate memory of the massive hunting that almost eliminated them early this century, travel in huge numbers, up to 300 at times.)

On our second morning, after three hours of searching for the Tuli in a Land Rover, we were tempted to urge Joe back to camp. But then he raised his hand for silence, the better to listen for the sound of many elephants chewing. And there they were.

Perhaps it was the way the sun broke across their long, sloping tusks, or the smile of a young bull as he gave a little mock charge to our Land Rover, ears extended and trunk raised as if to impress his parents, that resonated so fondly, like memories of childhood. Later, as we reunited with the others at a riverside lunch, the entire safari, guests and trackers alike, couldn’t stop talking about the Tuli herd.

Thomson, whose heart is firmly fixed in elephant conservation, suggested that pachyderms amaze and delight more than any other African creature, because they “are a lot like us--similar life spans and birth cycle, and a family unit ruled by the mother, with a father who runs off to carouse with his mates.”

Glorious though they were, even the Tuli herd couldn’t measure up to our last stop in Botswana a few days later: the high plateau of the Motloutse Ruins. It was here that 9th century Khoi/San people surveyed the unbroken 360-degree view of the Limpopo Valley below for signs of warring Negroid groups invading from the north.

As the professor pontificated about shards of millennium-old pottery still lying free in the Motloutse red dirt, I decided that the Khoi/San would have been movie location scouts in their next lives. Below me, a troop of zebras was mixing with some blue wildebeests. Beyond, a black-backed jackal gazed deeply into my binocular lens. Nearby, a newborn giraffe, umbilical cord still fixed to his mother, rose groggily to survey his new home. The spot was blindingly epic. David Lean times 10.

We had been warned that the remainder of the trip after Mashatu would be a letdown. Sure enough, the next day’s game viewing in the over-hyped Kruger National Park yielded a dead python and little else. With only a few days left on the tour, we shot through the Drakenberg Mountains, pausing to see Silver Leaves, a privately owned farm that holds South Africa’s earliest known Iron Age dig site. Here, farmer Menno Klapwijk has made a life’s work of his amateur passion for archeology. A Dutch immigrant, Klapwijk has excavated many fine examples of flaked-stone tools on his farm, and was eager to show off his finds in the small barn he had converted to an anthropological field lab.

In an abrupt shift of focus and mood, we left Klapwijk’s roost and plunged into the country’s internationally renowned wine region outside Cape Town.

Stellenbosch, Lanzerac, Constantia, Zeverfontein--in one rainy morning we visited four wineries, sipping from several vintages at each. For the most part, the wines did not disappoint. Of course, by then we had been together for nearly three weeks, and almost any kind of spirits would have been welcome. We were eager to celebrate our last night together with a rich banquet at the Constantia Uistig hotel, part of a restored 18th century farm estate just outside Cape Town.

From the hotel’s superb kitchen came rack of lamb, steaming heaps of bobotie (an Afrikaner staple of minced beef, raisins and brown sugar) sauteed kingklip (like cod only sweeter) and sticky-toffee pudding, a rich sponge cake baked in butterscotch sauce. Raising our glasses with a lush Pinotage vintage, a unique local blend of Pinot Noir and Hermitage grapes, we toasted our newfound friends and shared experiences, and the many glorious sights we’d seen.

After the toast was complete, the private banquet room fell into a silence much like those moments out on the winter veld. When the waiter walked in to check on us, we raised our fingers to our lips. Outside, the chattering of baboons settling in for the night was echoing from not all that far away.

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GUIDEBOOK

Into Africa

UCLA Extension, telephone (310) 825-2272, is offering a similar study tour of southern Africa Aug. 20-Sept. 6, arranged by Explore Inc. The tour will focus on rock art and prehistoric life along with big game. Ground costs are $5,295 per person; Extension registration ($260) and air fare (currently $2,150) are extra.

Explore, tel. (970) 871- 0065, is arranging eight other education-based trips in Africa this year, including those for the Harvard Museum of Natural History, March 9-25 and Sept. 12-25, $7,770 plus air fare; the Institute of Human Origins, April 2-21, $13,880; and Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, April 9-29, $7,500.